V

Summary

Visual methods

Visual methods and visual analysis refer to tools and technologies used for generating and analysing data about the social world. Typically, visual methods make use of non-verbal modes of representation and/communication in order to supplement or compensate for traditional verbal or text-based approaches to data generation and sense making. Visual methods make use of a wide range of digital and non-digital artefacts to generate data about the social world, including maps, diagrams, photographs, video footage, collage and drawings (Radley and Taylor, 2003; Copeland and Agosto, 2012; Wilkins, 2012). Visual methods such as photo elicitation, auto-photography and participatory mapping are therefore particularly useful in creative and arts-based research and learning but also when working with research participants who, for whatever reason, cannot engage in conventional forms of data generation which rely on speech or written forms of communication. Through enabling people to communicate their perspectives and experiences through visual forms of representation, visual methods help to generate new knowledge and forms of meaning making, especially among ‘hard to reach’ groups (Delgado, 2015). In some instances, visual methods have been used to great effect as a supplement to interviews as a way to prompt memory and reduce misunderstandings between interviewer and interviewee (Harper, 2002). Central to visual methods, however, is an appreciation for the context in which visual artefacts of any description (maps, photographs, drawings) are produced, with the implication that visual artefacts cannot be read as neutral or unmediated reflections of ‘objective truth’ but rather emerge through an interpretive framework made possible by the producer and viewer.

In the 20th century, visual anthropologists primarily used documentary photography and film as supplementary artefacts for supporting empirical claims about the nature of the social world (Edwards, 1992), in what can be described as ‘realist ethnography’. In the 1970s and 1980s, these documentary and realist traditions of early visual methods came to be displaced by postmodernist, critical theory and cultural studies perspectives and concerns about the discursive composition and effects of the visual image, specifically its social and political function as a vehicle for affirming, contesting and concealing claims to power and ideology.