Special issue of the peer-reviewed multilingual online journal Forum Qualitative Research/Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung (FQS)

Visibilities. Multiple Orders and Practices through Visual Discourse Analysis and Beyond

In contemporary societies, visual media and related visual practices are ubiquitous. Digitalisation has enabled new communicative and aesthetic practices of ‘vernacular image’ production. Knowledge about symbolic and iconic techniques is refined in professional as well as amateur contexts. Technologies of storage, computation and distribution have rendered image, sound and text mobile and drawing them into what has become known as ‘big data’. This ubiquity, accessibility and speed of information creation and sharing via polymedia channels means, the visible, along with the audible and the touchable, becomes an increasingly important interface between meanings, milieus, organisations and technologies. At this stage fields such as visual studies and visual sociology have seen that hermeneutic and ethnographic approaches have been of somewhat limited value in understanding these new mediations, institutions and economic formations. Many scholars have noted that the situation has challenged the analytical and methodological frames they have used in the past. Continue reading →