[Commlist] RC57 Visual Sociology Call for Abstracts

*RC57 Visual Sociology Call for Abstracts*

*The call for abstracts is now live!*

Please navigate to the ISA conference webpage and submit your abstract 
HERE: https://isaconf.confex.com/isaconf/wc2027/cfp.cgi 
<https://isaconf.confex.com/isaconf/wc2027/cfp.cgi>to for one of our 
thematic sessions.The XXI ISA World Congress of Sociology will be an 
*on-site event only*, and we look forward to seeing you in Gwangju! The 
ISA site also provides key points for submission and rules for all 
presenters.**

**

*IMPORTANT Deadlines*

  * *Abstracts Submission Closes:**October 14, 2026 - No deadline
    extensions.*
  * *Abstracts Selection Closes:*November 10, 2026
  * *Abstract Relocation Closes:*November 30, 2026
  * *Notification of Acceptance:*December 4, 2026
  * *Registration Deadline:*23^rd March, 2027

*THEMATIC SESSIONSlisted below...*

*1.AI, Visual Sociology, and the Crisis of Truth *

*Joint Session*with WG10 Digital Sociology (host committee).

The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence is transforming the 
production, circulation, and interpretation of visual culture. From 
generative image systems and synthetic video to algorithmic surveillance 
and platform moderation, AI technologies are reshaping how social 
reality is represented, contested, and authenticated. At the same time, 
these developments intensify a wider “crisis of truth” in public life, 
where distinctions between evidence, fabrication, documentation, and 
simulation are increasingly unstable.

As Fred Ritchin (2025) argues, in this emerging /synthetic/ age visual 
practitioners must become even more vigilant and expansive in explaining 
their images. This session takes that challenge as a starting point for 
reconsidering the responsibilities of visual sociology. How do visual 
sociologists respond to the proliferation of deepfakes, synthetic 
imagery, automated image analysis, and algorithmically curated 
visibility? What happens to the evidentiary status of photographs and 
video when images are generated without referents? How are trust, 
witnessing, and credibility negotiated within digital visual cultures 
increasingly shaped by corporate technological power?

We welcome theoretical, methodological, and empirical papers addressing 
the opportunities and risks posed by AI within visual research, 
pedagogy, activism, and public sociology. Possible topics include AI and 
visual disinformation; platform governance; surveillance and inequality; 
the politics of visibility and invisibility; decolonial and feminist 
critiques of AI imaging systems; ethics of synthetic visual data; and 
the use of AI tools within participatory and creative methodologies.

The session aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on how visual 
sociology can critically engage emerging technologies while defending 
democratic forms of knowledge, accountability, and visual truth.

*2. Digital Genderscapes: Performing and Negotiating Gender in Visual 
Culture *

The appropriation, reproduction, and transformation of gender roles are 
grounded in their performative enactment (Butler 1990). Gender is not a 
stable attribute but must be continuously performed, displayed, and 
rendered socially intelligible (Butler 1990, 1993, Goffman 1988, 
Garfinkel 1967). The persistence of gender roles rests on normative 
frameworks that prescribe and regulate legitimate forms of gender 
performance (Butler 1990, Foucault 1978). At the same time, it is 
precisely the necessity of repetition that creates the possibility for 
change. Even subtle shifts can parody, subvert, or transform established 
gender norms, thereby making alternative forms of gendered existence 
visible (Butler 1990, 1993).

Visual media play a crucial role in the production and circulation of 
these discursive representational practices. This includes the body 
itself as a medium of gendered self-fashioning and display. In 
interaction with digital media environments and virtual spaces, new 
forms of embodied and mediated gender performance emerge, expanding the 
ways in which gender is represented, negotiated, and contested.

This session invites contributions that examine contemporary 
representations of gender from empirical and/or theoretical 
perspectives. We particularly welcome studies that investigate 
contemporary gendered practices of embodiment in everyday life, visual 
culture, digital media, and online environments.

*3. Visual Culture As a Form of Collective Resistance: Methods, Memory, 
and Mobilization *

In this epoch of turbulent times, where crises continue to intersect, 
visual culture serves as a critical point of convergence where 
narratives are continuously contested. This roundtable session explores 
how visual practices function as active modes of resistance under the 
conditions of climate change, war, settler colonialism, 
authoritarianism, and deepening inequities vis-à-vis technology and 
media power. Digressing from passive image analysis, this session 
examines how visual practices form resistance across two approaches: (1) 
grassroots mobilization and (2) long-term memory-making.

We invite contributions that explore the methods, ethics, and practices 
of /visual alter-narratives/. This includes on-the-ground documentation 
via smartphone photography, street art, memes, and other media 
circulated in the alternative space, as well as the enduring work of 
counter-archiving and fieldwork data gathering. How do marginalized 
communities capture /(in)visible realities /in their journey of 
reclaiming representation and broadcasting dissent? How do researchers 
ethically navigate visual data in crisis zones?

The final portion of this English-language session is a *collaborative 
mapping exercise* in which participants synthesize insights, 
methodological challenges, and ethical tensions from their diverse 
contexts and geopolitical realities to foster generative global 
dialogue. The goal is to co-design a working conceptual/theoretical 
framework that maps how visual resistance moves from the active screen 
into the archives of history. We welcome innovative proposals from 
scholars and practitioners at all career stages committed to bridging 
theory, method, and advocacy. Ultimately, this session aims to foster 
solidarity that transcends time, space, and mediums, that is, foremost, 
the heart of visual culture.

*4. Found Footage Filmmaking As Visual Sociology *

While filmmaking as an ethnographic practice has been relatively well 
discussed within visual sociology, other forms of filmmaking— especially 
those understood as non-empirical, non-observational, or experimental 
—have remained less visible, if not marginalised. This session examines 
one such visual sociological approach through moving images: found 
footage filmmaking. Found footage, drawn from traditional film and 
photographic archives as well as from the internet as a “waste dump” or 
an “archive” (J.D. Peters, 2015), has supported a range of visual 
sociological practices, including video-elicitation interviews, 
longitudinal observation, and even positivist historical sociology 
through images. Found footage filmmaking is a form of arts-based 
research that mobilises the researcher’s creative and artistic insights 
to reconstruct, or challenge, the linear narratives of constructed 
social life through montages of found images. Its pursuit of 
contingency, dialectical unfolding, and open-endedness stands in stark 
contrast to certain social-scientific epistemologies, yet it also 
promises other possibilities. This session invites both theoretical and 
practical approaches to found footage filmmaking in order to explore the 
method’s applicability to visual sociology.

*5. Mediating Rurality and Cultural Memory: Public Broadcasting, Local 
Communities, and Folk Performance In Postwar East Asia *

*Joint Session*with RC40 Sociology of Agriculture and Food RC14 
Sociology of Communication, Knowledge and Culture (host committee)

How have mass media produced, circulated, and contested images of the 
rural, the local, and “home” in modern societies? This session invites 
papers that examine the mediation of rurality and cultural memory 
through broadcasting, film, sound media, digital platforms, exhibitions, 
festivals, and other cultural forms. We are especially interested in the 
ways media institutions, state agencies, experts, artists, local 
communities, and audiences have collaborated and negotiated in making 
“rural” people, places, practices, and traditions publicly visible.
The session welcomes historical and contemporary studies of agricultural 
programming, development communication, folk and popular music, local 
festivals, heritage performances, tourism media, community media, and 
audiovisual archives. Possible questions include: How do media translate 
local knowledge and everyday practices into national or transnational 
imaginaries? How are authenticity, nostalgia, modernization, and 
regional identity produced and contested? What kinds of power relations 
emerge between producers, experts, performers, residents, and publics? 
How can sociologists use broadcast archives, visual materials, sound 
recordings, and production documents to analyze the social construction 
of place and belonging?
By bringing together media sociology, sociology of knowledge and 
culture, rural sociology, sociology of the arts, and visual sociology, 
the session aims to develop comparative perspectives on the cultural 
politics of mediated rurality in turbulent times.


*6. Looking Back to Move Forward: Photography, Memory and Antiracist 
Futures *

*Joint Session*with RC05 Racism, Nationalism, Indigeneity and Ethnicity

This panel aims to explore the importance of documentary photography, 
memorial, creative and prefigurative practices in recovering the 
knowledge that emerged from the struggles of the past and the knowledge 
rooted in experiences and legacies of engagement and activism. Diverse 
hopes, desires and dreams can take shape when looking back to collective 
struggles over the meaning of liberation in our turbulent times of 
resurgent authoritarianism, racism and xenophobia, colonial nostalgia 
and global fascism. This session also recognises that temporal linearity 
and notions of progress are neither neutral nor universal and encourages 
engagement with decolonial critiques of the coloniality of time.

We welcome presentations (concerning theoretical reflections, empirical 
research, case studies, creative and artistic research practices) that 
investigate how visual sociology explores the following question:

·How can documentary photography serve as a portal for collective 
reflexivity contesting linear temporality, colonial nostalgia and 
persistent coloniality?

·How can memorial and creative practices be used as tools for resisting 
and contesting imposed representations of identities and experiences of 
the global majority?

This session adopts an approach that looks at past struggles and current 
racial discrimination through the lens of global and visual sociology 
that open pathways towards critical and radical imaginations of the 
future. It provides an opportunity to explore how visual sociology can 
address seemingly disparate historical and geographical events while 
revealing their commonality, and invites reflections on how visual 
practices can unsettle dominant temporal and epistemic regimes that have 
historically marginalised groups, indigenous peoples and global majority 
ways of knowing.

*7. Walking As Method: Smell-Walks, Sensory Ethnography, and the 
Reimagining of Method In Visual Sociology *

This session takes the walk as a site for reimagining method in visual 
sociology and beyond. When walking, smelling, and listening become ways 
of doing research rather than its objects, the moving body becomes an 
instrument that registers the olfactory, sonic, haptic, and atmospheric 
dimensions of urban life that a sight-led method leaves out. We take the 
smell-walk as a concrete opening onto this multisensory, synaesthetic 
ethnography (Pink 2015; Springgay & Truman 2018).

We are especially interested in what walking can do for 
historical-sociological questions. As a quotidian mobility, walking 
opens spatial semiotics, interaction, and place-making to inquiry (Krase 
& Shortell 2021), while its multisensory texture gives historical 
sociologists of urban landscapes and ethnic places the situated, 
embodied context that documents cannot supply—material for the 
constructive argumentation that historical sociology and ethnography 
share (Pacewicz 2022).

Reimagining method means denaturalising walking rather than 
romanticising it. The flâneur's leisured anonymity was a privilege; 
walking is always differentiated by gender, race, class, sexuality, and 
ability—from stigmatised wandering to walking as labour or migration 
under duress. We therefore treat method as something to be remade 
reflexively and ask what it means to rework it from the standpoint of 
Korean and other non-Western visual scholarship rather than importing an 
Anglophone canon wholesale.

We welcome empirical, theoretical, and practice-based papers that 
experiment with walking and sensory methods, reorder the sensory 
hierarchy beyond the visual, and translate movement into visual and 
audiovisual form.

*8. Computational Methodologies and Methods for Visual Research *

Computational tools, machine learning, and computer vision are rapidly 
entering the visual researcher's toolkit. These methods can analyse 
images at scales and speeds previously unimaginable, surfacing patterns 
across vast and varied visual collections. At the same time, newer 
models open possibilities for interpretive and qualitative work, 
assisting with annotation, coding, comparison, and the close reading of 
images. This session asks how such tools can be integrated into visual 
research without surrendering the field's critical, reflexive, and 
theoretically grounded commitments.

We invite contributions that develop, apply, or critically interrogate 
computational methodologies and methods for visual research, whether as 
broad methodological approaches or as more specialised techniques, 
across the qualitative and quantitative spectrum. These might include 
large-scale image classification and clustering, automated content 
analysis, machine learning for interpretive coding and hermeneutic 
analysis, or mixed-methods designs that combine computational scale with 
situated reading. We also welcome reflections on validity, 
reproducibility, and inference in machine-assisted visual work. Equally 
welcome are papers that examine the assumptions built into these 
methods, including how models work as interpretive instruments, what 
their outputs obscure or distort, the influence of training data, and 
the questions of bias and research ethics they raise.

This session works toward a critical methodological agenda for visual 
research where both images and the means of analysing them are 
increasingly computational. We welcome contributions from across 
disciplines, including data science, computational social science, and 
the digital humanities, and especially work that connects methodological 
innovation to substantive research questions.

*9. Diversifying Sociological Outputs *

Can sociologists speak in diverse ways through diverse mediums? While 
the world becomes more visual, much of academic social science remains 
welded to “traditional” ways of communicating and disseminating 
research. Universities and academic departments, especially those held 
in the neoliberal thrall of global rankings, demand metricised outputs 
and quantified bodies, optimised in the form of journal articles and 
indexable documents. Creative and arts-based approaches in Sociology are 
often segregated and funnelled towards “knowledge-exchange” and 
“public-engagement” categories. Despite the best efforts of visual 
sociologists to offer new ways of showing, arguing and theorising, such 
attitudes and structures remain stubborn and inert.

This session seeks to challenge such stubbornness. Building on increased 
interest in “Diverse Output Types” championed by the 2029 Research 
Excellence Framework in the United Kingdom, we seek presentations that 
show how Sociological data, findings and theories can be expressed, 
communicated, published and/or circulated through mediums beyond 
traditional monographs, articles and chapters. These may include but are 
not limited to – exhibitions (and catalogues), zines, visual essays, 
websites and more. Presenters can offer case studies of work already 
done, or conceptual possibilities that demonstrate the strengths and 
affordances of visual sociology, or frameworks for diverse outputs 
within the social sciences.

*10. Sociological Imagination, Research Findings and Filmmaking. 
Documentaries As Creative Public Interventions. *

Engaging with wider audiences is a central challenge for sociological 
research. When sharing research questions and findings, the written 
texts remain dominant. How can we visually intervene in the public arena 
beyond our academic communities? Of course, this question is not new. 
However, it remains crucial in scenarios of public distrust of 
scientific knowledge and authority. Anthropology has dealt with this 
issue since its inception. Sociology at large still needs to grapple 
with the complexity of producing images (whether still or in movement) 
as tools for knowledge production and as means to challenge common 
sense. This session aims to focus on the making of documentaries dealing 
with sociological issues.

They could be short or long films. They could be observational, 
participative, reflexive, performative, and poetic (among others). We 
welcome filmmakers addressing different topics. This session encourages 
textual and visual papers where authors could reflect on aspects of the 
process of making a documentary based on socio-anthropological research. 
For instance, they could address theoretical, methodological and ethical 
issues; explore challenges of its production and circulation; examine 
strategies to learn how to do a documentary; examine dilemmas involved 
in the translation of a research study into a film; and inquire 
technical difficulties of such an endeavour. This session aims at 
sharing experiences, affordances and dilemmas of doing a documentary 
while mobilising sociological imagination. This is an urgent task in 
times marked by a worsening of working conditions of academics, attacks 
on social sciences, and (paradoxically) growing technical opportunities 
to produce films.

*11. The Visibility of Suffering: War Images, Emotion, and Public 
Sensibility *

*Joint Session*with TG12 Social Love and Solidarity

Contemporary warfare is increasingly mediated through digital images 
circulating across global communication networks. Beyond their 
informational and strategic functions, war images raise a fundamental 
question: how is human suffering made visible, perceived, and understood 
through visual representation? Images of violence, destruction, 
displacement, and death have long shaped public perceptions of war. In 
the digital age, however, social media, mobile technologies, drones, and 
user-generated content have transformed the ways suffering is witnessed, 
shared, and interpreted. War images can generate empathy, solidarity, 
and political engagement, but their constant circulation may also 
produce desensitization, emotional fatigue, or indifference. Moreover, 
not all suffering becomes equally visible. The production, selection, 
circulation, and suppression of images influence whose pain is publicly 
recognized and which conflicts remain at the margins of global 
attention. Images are therefore not simply records of war; they actively 
shape how violence is understood and experienced. This panel invites 
contributions that explore the visual politics of suffering in 
contemporary conflicts and examine the role of images in shaping 
ethical, emotional, and political responses to war. Contributions may 
address, among others, the following questions: How do images shape the 
visibility and perception of suffering in contemporary conflicts? What 
ethical challenges emerge in the representation of pain, death, and 
human vulnerability? Does increased visibility of suffering necessarily 
produce greater empathy and solidarity, or can visual saturation 
paradoxically lead to emotional detachment, compassion fatigue, and 
indifference? What role do manipulation, disinformation, and propaganda 
play in the production and circulation of war images?

*12. Interpreting (Post)Colonial Imagery *

The session invites papers and studies dedicated to interrogation of the 
impacts of the use of visual histories in the context of and 
postcolonial nationalist narratives. In particular the session invites 
papers of scholars who work with visual data originating from visual 
(colonial) archives and maps. Qualitative, quantitative and theoretical 
studies are welcome.

Some key questions addressed in this session:

1. How do we interpret colonial imagery in different visual media( 
photographs, paintings, and maps)?
2. How do we analyze colonial orders of things as seen through archival 
productions?
3. To what extent postcoloniality is different from other media and 
knowledge terrains when it comes to matters of visualizing history?
4. How do situated ways of engaging with images influence the narratives 
produced?


*13. The End of (artificial) Intelligence *

The present panel attracts scholars with a vested interested in the 
resistance to the growing use of AI in the context of visual 
scholarship. With AI-imaging progressively becoming a popular tool 
available to an ever growing amount of people we are progressively 
witnessing the incorporation and normaliziation of AI tools in matters 
of visual communication at large. But how are scholars interested in the 
meaning of images in human life responding to this? How will it 
progressively affect our conventional research practices? AI plays 
already a key role in our science communication in modalities ranging 
from different forms of post-production to more drastic interventions at 
the level of content (removing items that cannot be shown, adding 
elements of context etc.). Yet, the use of AI has been already accepted 
in the context of text and writing visual research can still provide a 
valuable terrain for re-discussing our approach to this terrain.

Positioning ourselves against the banalization of AI tools and 
technologies in the context of research we aim to attract scholars who 
enquire into the consequences of this shift addressing some of these 
possible questions:

What are the accepted forms of engagement with AI for visual scholars? 
What is completely to be banned?

What are the key differences with regards to how AI can be used in 
visual VS written scholarship?

What are the ethically acceptable uses of AI?

Does AI constitute a simple prolongation of automated image tools such 
as for instance HDR or is is something entirely new?

*14. The Visual Culture of Care *

The present panels invites submissions on the role of images and visual 
communication in the context of care. Addressing care as a critical way 
of engaging with the world that foregrounds matters of ethics and 
respect, the panel aims to attract scholars active in areas such as: 
aging, disability, cultural and natural heritage, marginality.

Aiming to attract contributions that are both theoretical and 
methodological in nature and from the vastest number of terrains 
possible we pursue the following questions:

What role can visual methods play in contexts where the engagement 
between researcher and participant requires specific attention to power 
relations?

Are participatory methods always able to bridge communication gaps?

What is the role of visual in this? Are today’s digital technologies 
providing us with inspiration for new practices?

How can care be reconsidered on the basis of visual research?

*15. Creative Inquiry: Qualitative Analysis In Visual Research*

One encounters an image and experiences a qualitative intensity that 
cannot immediately be articulated. In art-based research, this awareness 
is not simply a formal property of images; it has methodological 
implications. Research-creation approaches have similarly argued that 
creative practices should not be understood as secondary forms of 
dissemination but as sites where knowledge itself is generated, 
negotiated, and mobilized (Rather, 2024).

If semiotic abduction is understood as the introduction of a mediating 
hypothesis in response to perceptual disturbance, then it cannot remain 
confined to the interiority of the individual observer. Hypotheses do 
not arise in a vacuum. They emerge within socially structured regimes of 
perception, interpretation, and legitimacy. The irritation of doubt that 
Peirce describes is always already situated within habits that are 
themselves collective (Peirce, 1931-1935). For example, montage and 
collage preserve an openness across images, fragments, and contexts. 
They maintain the productive tension between what is seen, what resists 
interpretation, and what might connect otherwise disconnected elements. 
Hypotheses are not simply formulated; they are arranged, tested, 
displaced, and reconfigured through visual relations.

This session invites papers that explore the questions of:

1. The role of researcher and the ethics of visual research

2. The relevance of qualitative analysis in/as social and political process

3. Creative and abductive processes as shared and participatory

4. Epistemological and ontological positions and processes in creative 
research

5. Other questions of analysis in creative research

*16. Visual Social Science Expanded: Scopic, Spatio-Temporal, and 
Algorithmic Turns *

Visual social science has undergone successive scopic, spatial, and 
algorithmic turns, driven by GIS and GPS tracking, wearable media, drone 
imaging, and AI-based tools of generation and interpretation. These 
technologies have expanded the spaces and scales available to visual 
inquiry while reshaping how visual culture is created, represented, and 
valued. This session invites papers that critically and constructively 
interrogate these developments — their specific methodological 
advantages and limitations, their redefinition of the relationship 
between researcher and researched, and the ethical and legal questions 
they raise. We welcome theoretical, methodological, and empirical 
contributions that move beyond cataloguing new tools to ask what is 
genuinely at stake as visual social science continues to expand.

**

*17. Critical Sociology of Prompting: Connecting Verbal Inputs and 
Visual Outputs *

We are witnessing a new era of creativity where prompt-based learning 
leads to creation of unique but also fictitious(?) digital/visual 
content. Prompting is the skill (and set of practices) for writing 
inputs for generative models, including visual generative models. *These 
inputs are increasingly multimodal: not only written text but also 
source images, sketches, and reference materials that condition the 
output (image-to-image, in painting, style and reference conditioning).* 
Prompting is a repetitive process of interaction between humans and 
machines, where humans aiming for a perfect/desired visual product 
polish their prompts.

The aim of this session is to interrogate the process of prompting 
Imagination, where verbal *and visual* inputs are intricately connected 
with the visual outputs.

This session invites papers that interrogate various questions related 
to prompting: how do users write prompts, how do they increase the 
quality of prompts, how do they deal with machines to write better 
prompts, what are the actual practices of verbal input (modifying the 
prompt), prompt "polishing"*, and how do they combine verbal and visual 
inputs in hybrid workflows*? Interrogating the constituents of the 
process of prompting is crucial to understanding the "backstage" of how 
visuals are generated with visual generative media.

Broader conceptual papers addressing and critiquing the concept of 
imagination are welcome to interrogate the impact of prompting on the 
imaginative processes in professions of graphic design, photography, 
advertising, architecture.

This session invites cross-disciplinary approaches between IT and Visual 
Communication.

*18. Methodological Challenges In the Collection, Production, and 
Presentation of Visual Data *

This session aims to create a platform for a thorough discussion of 
various critical elements related to the methodological foundations of 
visual research in the social sciences. The presentations should 
concentrate on methodological, typological, or technological aspects in 
a broader context. While papers with an 'applied' focus are welcome, the 
emphasis should be on the presentation and discussion of visual 
methodology and associated issues, as well as their potential 
applications across different themes and fields. The goal of this 
session is to help establish a more robust and clearer theoretical and 
methodological framework for utilizing visuals in social scientific 
research. These initiatives may strengthen visual research as a credible 
and viable alternative or complement to other forms of social and 
cultural research.

/Topics may include: /

·Refined typologies or taxonomies of visual research.

·Presentation/discussion of new modes of conducting and presenting 
visual research.

·Visual sampling and shooting strategies.

·Discussion of 'best practices' within a particular visual approach.

·Issues, dilemmas, and opportunities in the collection/production, 
processing, or presentation and use of visual data.

·The impact of new technologies on visual research.

*19. Making Visible What We Live from: How Visual Arts, Museums, and 
Cultural Events Represent Contemporary Agri-Food Systems *

*Joint Session*with RC40 Sociology of Agriculture and Food

This session aims to critically examine how visual arts and public 
curation initiatives can enhance sociological understanding of 
contemporary agri-food systems. It seeks to foster an international and 
interdisciplinary dialogue on the transformative potential of visual 
culture for the sociology of agriculture and food. By bringing together 
diverse sociological and visual cultural perspectives, we aim to advance 
our understanding of how creative practices can democratise knowledge, 
stimulate public discourse, and inspire progressive change within 
contemporary agri-food systems.

The sociology of agriculture and food critically foregrounds the 
structural contradictions inherent in contemporary agri-food systems. 
Central to this inquiry are asymmetric power relations, threats to 
ecological sustainability, the survival strategies of precarious primary 
producers, and emerging ethical consumerism.

Visual culture actively interrogates these socio-ecological complexities 
through diverse artistic and curatorial initiatives. Contemporary 
agri-food systems are critically examined through documentary and 
feature films, photojournalism, and historical archives, sometimes 
created by actors from the agri-food sector itself. These perspectives 
are complemented by contemporary interventions from museums, galleries, 
and visual artists, which curate exhibitions to deconstruct, challenge, 
and reframe the hidden mechanisms of the modern agri-food systems.

We welcome empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions that 
analyse how film, photography, fine arts, museums, and cultural events 
depict and critique the contemporary agri-food landscapes. The aim is to 
analyse how these visual and cultural practices actively reframe public 
perceptions, challenge dominant corporate narratives, and reshape 
consumer behaviours.

*20. Embodied Knowledge In the Age of AI: Visual and Participatory 
Approaches In Sociology of Education *

*Joint Session*with RC04 Sociology of Education

The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence and data-driven knowledge 
systems is reshaping educational practices, academic labour and the 
production of knowledge itself. While AI creates new possibilities for 
access, efficiency and communication, it also risks reinforcing 
disembodied, decontextualised and increasingly standardised forms of 
knowing. At the same time, contemporary educational realities are shaped 
by overlapping crises, including widening inequalities, democratic 
erosion, environmental uncertainty and growing distrust in science and 
expertise.

In this context, sociology of education is called to critically examine 
not only what knowledge is produced, but also how knowledge is 
experienced, embodied and socially situated. This session explores how 
visual, participatory and experience-based methodologies can contribute 
to more critical, situated and socially engaged forms of educational 
knowledge in turbulent times.

The session invites contributions examining how students, educators and 
researchers make sense of crisis, inequality, exclusion, resistance and 
collective life through visual, creative and participatory practices. 
Particular attention is given to approaches that challenge dominant 
epistemologies and foreground lived experience, affect, embodiment and 
everyday social realities. Inspired by global, decolonial and Southern 
perspectives, the session seeks to foster dialogue between diverse 
educational contexts and epistemic traditions.

Topics may include AI and educational knowledge; visual sociology and 
visual pedagogies; participatory and arts-based methodologies; student 
voice and critical pedagogy; embodied dimensions of learning; 
epistemologies of the South; education, crisis and social justice.

By foregrounding alternative ways of seeing and researching education, 
the session aims to contribute to a global sociology capable of 
responding critically and creatively to contemporary turbulent times.


*21. What Roles for Visual Memory In the Regulation of Social Tensions 
and Conflicts? and, How Can the Sociology of the Visual Promote Them?*

*Languages of this Session: *English, French

**

Quels rôles pour la mémoire visuelle dans la régulation dans les 
tensions et les conflits sociaux ? Et, comment la sociologie du visuel 
peut-elle les promouvoir ?
La mémoire visuelle joue un rôle paradoxal dans les conflits sociaux : 
elle peut exacerber les tensions, mais constitue aussi un levier 
fondamental pour déconstruire les « querelles d'images », favorisant la 
justice, la réconciliation intergroupe et l'apaisement mémoriel.
Dans des sociétés traversées par les fractures identitaires, les 
inégalités, les mémoires traumatiques ou les polarisations numériques, 
l’image n’est plus seulement un support esthétique : elle devient un 
espace de médiation, de reconnaissance et parfois de confrontation 
symbolique.
Elle est une archive des tensions sociales, comme elle peut participer à 
la régulation des conflits sociaux de plusieurs manières (reconnaissance 
des souffrances collectives, aide à la construction d’un imaginaire 
commun, prévention de la radicalisation et la haine ...) Cependant, elle 
n’est pas automatiquement pacificatrice. Elle peut aussi :
• Raviver les traumatismes ;
• Être instrumentalisée politiquement ;
• Produire des mémoires concurrentes ; etc.
Cette session est appelée à questionner la sociologie du visuel comment 
peut-elle promouvoir cette régulation ? Et, cela, à travers les niveaux 
suivants :
• Les représentations sociales ;
• Les imaginaires collectifs ;
• Les dispositifs médiatiques ; etc.
Le but étant de développer des méthodologies visuelles pensant cette 
mémoire comme une écologie sociale fragile qui devra être un outil de 
médiation entre mémoire, culture et citoyenneté et interrogeant les 
manières dont les sociétés se regardent elles-mêmes, reconnaissent leurs 
fractures ... et comment le chercheur aborde cela de manière partiale.

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