[ecrea] CFP Special Issue of FQS: Visibilities. Multiple Orders and Practices through Visual Discourse Analysis and Beyond

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CALL FOR PAPERS FQS SPECIAL ISSUE  Visibilities. Multiple Orders and
Practices through Visual Discourse Analysis and Beyond
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[FQS is a peer-reviewed multilingual online journal for qualitative
research established in 1999]



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 challen
 ged the analytical and methodological frames they have used in the past.
In the special issue, we welcome papers that address visibilities in
relation to social, cultural and material orderings and their
principles. Methodological approaches might reflexively provide keys to
understanding the social, technological and economic flows of our time.
Contemporary visibilities draw together, space, time, things, and the
social. They produce and make intelligible differences and similarities.
They sensitize and desensitize people to other people, animals and
things. The binary opposition between the discursive and non-discursive
has thus not become obsolete, but lost much of its explanatory force.
Just as cultural text in a broader sense is not only produced by
language, visibility can be produced through, images, texts, sounds, or
other materialities and non-materialities.
The texts in this volume will be dedicated to understanding the
practices, the types of power relations and the technological
infrastructures in which practices of visualising and orders of
visibilities unfold. While most discourse analyses rely on the notion
that everything which is said is dependent on what is sayable, we invite
contributors to imagine how we might analyze visual practices in
relation to the visible.

In visual research, the relation between the social and the visual has
been generally studied from two perspectives: either the image merely
indicates a state of the social and becomes reduced to it, or it uses
optical instruments as tools for registering the social and thus
confounds the visual with the social itself, granting direct access to
its reality. We believe it is might be more appropriate to speak of
studying social and cultural realities with the image. With in the sense
of entering into dialogue and argument with the image, all the while not
attempting to understand the image on its own, but how image, sound and
materiality are deployed reflexively in social arenas - with their own
specific power or potential to render visible or invisible.
Doing research with the image as we propose for this special issue
supposes that social reality thickens through the emergence of
visibilities, which manifest in images, texts, infrastructures etc. We
would like to invite contributions that acknowledge representation is
increasingly replaced by recursivity. Papers are also welcome that take
the position that neither language nor the visual nor the spatial nor
the temporal registers are any longer privileged modes of world-making,
but that visibilities, or even sensualities (as sensibilities of bodies
to others bodies) can materialize in all of these domains.  Thinking
with the image (and the sensible) and the study of visibilities
in these ways will allow researchers to address a number of important
issues of contemporary social, political and economic life. Following
this critical perspective, we invite contributions that consider but are
not limited to the following related themes:

1. How are boundaries drawn (or erased) visually between nature and
culture, between the social and the non-social, the human and non-human
and between different categories of people: Which individuals and
associations become included as subjects worth interpreting and
understanding?
2. What is the nature of the relationship between the development of
visual practices, cultures, and technologies and certain knowledge
regimes or economic regimes? Which forms of subjectivation are advanced
in regimes of the visible and sayable, do they inform individualisation
or dividualisation or other?
3. In which ways might the distribution of knowledge be formed or
informed differently within the context of a general aesthetization and
informatization of -networked' societies? What might the roles of
experts and amateurs and their relationships be in the development of
cultural skills such as visualization and illustration?
4. How far do visibilities and legibilities have the capacity to
influence social and cultural orders through technologies, practices,
and activism. Which kinds of competences and agencies are afforded by
visual practices and visual discourse and what kind of limitations might
be found?
5. How can methodological considerations also evolve to reflect our
reflexive positions in a visually saturated world? What part can images
be said to play in research phases such as data collection, analysis and
rendering of results? Are these still appropriate or do we need new ways
of thinking with visualities?

The collection of papers in this special issue will bring together and
into dialogue authors from German, French and English speaking academia.
For the sake of accessibility, we kindly ask for contributions to be
submitted in English.

Please submit abstracts of not more than 800 words by January 30th 2015 to:
Mathias Blanc: mathias.blanc [at] univ-lille3.fr
Maria-Carolina Cambre: mcambre [at] ualberta.ca
Boris Traue: boris.traue [at] posteo.de



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