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QIXXXX10.1177/1077800418792946Qualitative InquiryTraue et al.

Introduction
Qualitative Inquiry

Visibilities and Visual Discourses: Rethinking

2019, Vol. 25(4) 327­–337
© The Author(s) 2018

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DOI: 10.1177/1077800418792946
https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800418792946
journals.sagepub.com/home/qix

Boris Traue1 , Mathias Blanc2, and Carolina Cambre3

Abstract
With this special issue, we aim to address visibility not just as a representation of the social, but as an aspect and
element of social and cultural orders and actions sui generis. The texts in this volume are dedicated to understanding
the practices, power relations and the technological infrastructures in which (audio)-visual practices unfold. To make
our proposition clear, we lay out a methodological strategy that we—drawing from French, German and Anglo-Saxon
debate—call sociology with the image. Then we provide an overview of the articles in this special issue and point to
some ongoing tensions within qualitative inquiry more broadly.

Keywords
visual, visual discourse analysis, qualitative methods, multimodal, sensory analysis

This special issue was proposed to Qualitative Inquiry
partly in response to the German/European context, where
intense competition and debate between interpretive and
analytical methodologies has erupted recently. The inten-
sity of the argument resulted in alarm and defensiveness
within parts of the qualitative community and its journals.
We were aware of similar tensions in the United States
(Denzin, Lincoln, & Giardina, 2006), and observed that
journals such as—especially—Qualitative Inquiry were
actively confronting the issue: this meant there would be a
good fit between our special issue and QI. The papers of
this issue delineate the scope of the methodological prob-
lem of visibility and contribute perspectives from Danish,
French, German, Polish, Russian and UK contexts. We
hope that in this way we can bring together and raise
awareness of some of the strands of a conversation that
spans nations and continents where researchers are expe-
riencing similar tensions in terms of the scientistic tight-
ening of the bounds of empirical, especially qualitative
work.
The social sciences have never been without the image:
In their history, the visual has figured as one dimension of
meaning among others. Too often however, visual informa-
tion has been relegated to illustrative status, as an example,
or as a support for an explanation or description rather than
as an important source of knowledge construction. When
we consider the methodology of visual discourse analysis,
the images are the argument. This move is not a facile divi-
sion of knowledge into esthetic and cognitive categories;
rather it is a way to recognize the inbrication of the esthetic
and the cognitive. Following Patti Lather (1994), this is an
effort to “anticipate a generative methodology that regis-
ters a possibility and marks a provisional space in which a
different science might take form” (p. 36). Relevant here
are Marcus and Fischer’s, 1986 observations that “In peri-
ods when fields are without secure foundations, practices
become the engine of innovation” (p. 166, in Lather, 1994,
p. 37). In other words, our analytical task is not a matter of
looking harder or more closely, but of seeing what
frames our seeing—spaces of constructed visibility
and incitements to see which constitute power/
knowledge” (1994, p. 38).
With this special issue, we aim to address visibility not
just as a representation of the social, but as an aspect and
element of social and cultural orders and practices sui
generis. The texts in this volume are dedicated to under-
standing the practices, the types of power relations and the
technological infrastructures in which (audio)-visual prac-
tices unfold and which they in turn coconstitute and trans-
form. The collection will bring together and into dialogue
authors from German, French, Eastern European, Scandinavian,
and Anglo-Saxon academia.1 We aim to create an analytical
1
Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
2
CNRS, Lille, France
3
Concordia University, Montreal, Québec, Canada
Corresponding Author:
Carolina Cambre, Faculty of Arts and Science, Concordia University,
1610 Saint-Catherines Street, Montreal, Québec, Canada H4B 1R6.
Email: carolina.cambre@concordia.ca
328
and methodological space for understanding our image sat-
urated environment as far as it can be observed through its
interpretation and analysis and to provide a starting point
for a better perspective of the significance of visual dis-
courses socially, politically, and in view of their cultural
resonance. Images have a multivalent character and a ten-
dency to encourage multiple and sometimes contradictory
interpretations. By their very nature, images challenge
authoritative interpretations as elements one overlooks may
be noted by another. Thus, the collection of papers we have
assembled here, through its flexibility and scope, is uniquely
positioned to provide the much needed traction for a coun-
ter-discourse of legitimation and resistance to the “domi-
nant, foundational, formulaic and readily available codes of
validity” (Lather, 1994, p. 39) beyond logocentrism and
iconocentrism. In this way we avoid what Mieke Bal cor-
rectly refers to as a highly problematic visual essentialism
“that either proclaims the visual ‘difference’—read
‘purity’—of images, or expresses a desire to stake out the
turf of visuality against other media or semiotic systems”
(Bal, 2003, p. 6). To make our proposition clear, we lay out
a methodological strategy that we—in drawing from the
French, German and Anglo-Saxon debate—call sociology
with the image. Then we provide an overview of the articles
in this special issue and point to some ongoing tensions
within qualitative inquiry more broadly.
Remaining Challenges for Visual
Studies
The last 20 years have seen a surge in scholarly interest
beyond text into seeing and hearing as well as the artifacts
and infrastructures which support and enable them across
the humanities and the social sciences, establishing what is
today called visual sociology. Anthropology long relied on
the visual approach as evidence through its engagement
with ethnographic film, but until the 1980s, it did not find
much resonance in the wider social sciences. The renewed
interest could be explained by the ubiquity of images
brought on by the recent media transformation, but it is also
driven by a recognition that much of social reality is not
only normative, textual, or juridical, but visual and tactile,
that it smells (Classen, Howes, & Synnott, 1994; Raab,
2001), tastes (Bourdieu, 1979; Hennion, 2007), and sounds
(Pinch & Bijsterveld, 2011). Also, images are intimately
involved in the generation of evidence, a task growing in
importance in analyses of contemporary societies (cf.
Bredekamp, 2007; Daston & Galison, 2007). When we
speak of the visual in the following paragraphs, we include
sound, tactility, and other sensibilities, which go along with
the image.
What are still emerging, though, in this field are per-
spectives on visual sociology that address questions of
power and discursivity in the relation to publics and
Qualitative Inquiry 25(4)
democracy. These tentative developments point to the
need for a concept of visibility as a structural layer of
sociality or, in other words, an interpretive explanation of
visibility as an element of social structure. This under-
standing of visibility would require the clarification of two
issues: First, a clearer understanding of visual practices
and the visibility of practices must be achieved. It does not
suffice to study practices in fields explicitly defined by
esthetic norms and modes of production. This social a
priori of visuality in certain institutionalized or occupa-
tional fields—as interesting and relevant their findings
might be—does not provide much in the way of a deeper
understanding of the role of visualities across social prac-
tices. This is why the treatment of visuality in art history and
the german-called “Image Sciences” (“Bildwissenschaft”)
does not exhaust the issue for the social sciences. The ques-
tion should be how the visual and requirements of visual-
izations become an aspect and a materiality within
everyday, and more specialized forms of action not pri-
marily oriented toward the production of pictures or visu-
alizations. A second issue pertains to visibility as a mode
of social ordering or in more traditional terms: structure.
This would neither be a mode of ordering restricted to the
visual representation of social stratification, nor to the
habitus of image producers. Instead, the intersection of the
visual with interactional, spatial, temporal types of orders
should become clearer.
In contemporary knowledge societies, visualities, and
other sensibilities are ubiquitous, and it is such global and
local apparatuses of distribution of image and sound,
which have in recent years become computable and are
thus drawn into what is known in media studies as the “big
data” phenomenon: the semi-automatic formation of data
collections and and their effects on the formation of
knowledge. At the same time, digitalization has enabled
new esthetic practices driven by amateurs, from desktop
publishing, blogging to web video, and has increased the
visibility and reach of most visual practices. The amateur
practices challenge the world view projected by govern-
ments and corporations (Traue & Schünzel, 2014), as
could be seen in the velvet revolution (ending four decades
of single party rule in the former Czechoslovakia), and in
much earlier revolutionary movements working with pho-
tography and murals. This conflictual and situational con-
text is by no means conclusive, and it is an empirical task
to follow its traces and dialectics. As mentioned earlier,
we propose that visibility must be treated as a social order
sui generis. The agentic properties of visibility become
apparent in the contemporary ubiquity of visual technolo-
gies and artifacts and more importantly, the relevance of
visual “objectivations” (Knoblauch, 2017, p. 155ff.) in a
diverse range of communicative processes. Ironically, the
virtual, or non-visible but real, qualities of the visual are
what enable visible artifacts to become agentic, and even
Traue et al.
these are dependent on the “viewer’s recognition”
(Cambre, 2012) of these “congealed residues of perfor-
mance and agency in object-form” (Gell, 1998). Today,
the capacity to enact and judge visual displays has become
a taken-for-granted factor in the structuration of social
action: it has become a new “social category” (Heinich,
2012, p. 53ff.). It is not a coincidence that visual sociology
has experienced a (modest) boom after the rise of digital
technologies and the weakening of the traditional modern
system of institutions. So how are we to grasp the social
category of visibility?
Visual Discourses Beyond Foucault
Valuable methodological propositions can be gained from
the work of Michel Foucault who, after beginning his career
as an unorthodox historian of science, later moves closer to
the Durkheimian position in analyzing the parallelism of
social constraints and affordances through a Nietzschean
reformulation of the concept of power. His methodological
monograph, the archeology of discourse (Foucault, 1969)
has inspired the body of research that is today discourse
analysis. His well-known distinction between énonciation
(engl. enunciation) and enoncé (engl. statement) can be
applied to the analysis of visual phenomena. Enunciation
denotes the practice of uttering something in a context
(Benveniste, 1974), while the enoncé is—in the Foucault-
Benvenistian tradition—the basic unit of discourse. The
discourse as a totality of enoncés has its own symbolic and
thingified materiality—terminology, epistemic objects,
ways of speaking, and strategies in Foucault’s classic for-
mulation (Foucault, 1969). To this would need to be added
(at least) communication technologies, infrastructures,
body techniques, and visualization techniques such as those
presented in this special issue. This variable totality of the
enoncé is the precondition for enunciations, which we
understand as communicative actions. These generally
reproduce, and in some (rarer) cases interrupt the discursive
order. The reciprocal character of enoncé and communica-
tive practices (énonciations) is very much present in
Foucault’s work theoretically, but is not explored empiri-
cally in the ways usually expected in the social sciences.
The lacking treatment of communicative practice has been
addressed in recent theoretical and methodological publica-
tions which aim to reconcile Foucauldian discourse analysis
with the tradition of Schutzian action theory (Schütz, 1932)
and the sociology of knowledge (Berger & Luckmann,
1966), resulting in the SKAD approach (Sociology of
Knowledge Approach to Discourse) approach (Keller,
2005, 2011).
The totality of enoncés in a given milieu or society can
be understood as a system of sayability (ger. Sagbarkeit):
329
what is said within the bounds of this historically variable
sayability is intelligible and legitimate. Other enuncia-
tions—or gestures for that matter—can be performed, but
they easily appear out of bounds and are qualified within
different discursive regimes as untrue (not within the
bounds of permissible truth-values), i.e. as illegitimate,
crazy, ineffective, dangerous, or delusional. Transferring
this model of sayability onto the sensibility of the visual
allows us to point to visibility (ger. Sichtbarkeit; Traue,
2013). The everyday term visibility has taken on a theo-
retical and methodological meaning, lending itself to a
“visual discourse analysis” (Holert, 2008; Maasen,
Mayerhauser, & Renggli, 2006; Meier, 2008; Renggli,
2007; Traue, 2013). With Foucault, we understand visibil-
ity to be a material condition that is not outside society
(representation) and not inside the subject (competence,
habitus), but which exerts its agency through working
itself deeply into the fabric of social action.
Some authors refer to SKAD or similar approaches in
their conceptualization of visual discourse analysis to
emphasize the relevance of communicative practices for the
transformation of regimes of visibility (Traue, 2013). The
adoption of practice-oriented and phenomenological
approaches points to the perception that the French model of
discourse analyses cannot simply be extended to accommo-
date visuality. Foucault’s (1975) analysis of the panopticon,
elaborated in contemporary surveillance studies, was a foray
into the structural power of visibility, but it does not suffi-
ciently cover the mutuality of the gaze (Simmel, 1908/2008),
the varieties of visual self-presentation (Goffman, 1956),
and the new visual technologies such as amateur video and
presentation software (Knoblauch, 2013). But it is also the
image itself, broadly understood, which rejects a parallelism
with linguistic discourse, “there is a constant oscillation
between the material and virtual of the image” understand-
ing it “along the lines of the topological—as more knot-like,
in that its surface both reveals and conceals itself . . . it oscil-
lates ontologically (Cambre, 2016, pp. 85, 185). Thus, if we
subscribe to a “complex and oscillating notion of the image
as picture, metaphor, and imagination” (Engel, in this issue),
the image can at the same time be a (material) picture, a
metaphor connecting texts and places, and an imagination
relating bodies and knowledge. It cannot be managed as eas-
ily as verbal enunciations can be regulated within the order
of discourse. What needs to be taken into account, then, is
the singularity and seriality of the image. Its double capacity
to overdetermine cultural orders as well as to pierce the
boundaries between surveilled systems of knowledge calls
for a methodological double placement of the image: That is,
both as an instance of discourse, and at the same time as a
transgression of discourse.
330
Toward a Sociology “With the Image”
What does this theoretical proposition imply for method-
ology? In what terms of methods which promise to realize
this desiderata? In French visual sociology, a distinction
has become common which we find useful as a point of
departure for this problem: that the visual can be addressed
in either of two fashions, either as the study of the social
through the image (“sociologie par l‘image”; Harper,
2000; Naville, 1966; Terrenoire, 1985; Van der Gucht,
2012) or as a sociology of the image (“sociologie de
l‘image”; Goldmann, 1974; Moliner, 2008). The former
originates either from a naturalistic approach of the visual
or, at the opposite, from visual anthropology, but in both
ways the image made by the researchers is seen as a
medium of research, as a way of revealing the social by
using optical instruments as tools for registering the
social. The study of social practices, in this vein, requires
and allows the researcher to approach its subject on a pre-
discursive level. This sociological image is then an appro-
priate means of gaining access to the workings and
meanings of otherwise opaque social worlds. This under-
standing is closely tied to ethnographic approaches. The
latter—sociology of the image—conceives images as
wether a result or a witness of visual practices in social
fields and subscribes to the study of the relation between
the social and the way it is represented in the visual. In
this branch of research, the visual is essentially seen as a
symptom of sociality.
This bifurcation, however, limits the ability of the
social sciences to address issues of the (audio)-visuality of
knowledge, experience, and reality. The distinction can be
expanded: looking closely at the second approach, it actu-
ally entails two ways of thinking the image: sociology of
the image conceives of the image as a product and docu-
ment of sociality. The latter understanding is often tied to
the Panofskyan Tradition, in the German context in com-
bination with Karl Mannheim’s “documentary method”
(Bohnsack, 2008). The image is taken as a document, an
indicator of a historical reality, which can come to be
understood through an interpretation of the image. In a
move often inspired by Bourdieu, social structurations
such as habitus can be accessed methodically by means of
distinguishing visual patterns, for example, in photogra-
phy (Bourdieu, 1965). In the context of the study of visual
culture, with its links to the British Cultural Studies School
(cf. Mirzoeff, 1999) with Stuart Hall and in the Latin
American vein, Nestor García Canclini, the study of the
image pursues the image not simply as document, but as
product of, and productive of, conflicting visualities and
the trajectory of their conflict.
From each point of view, sociology through and of the
image, the two perspectives are often criticized by one
another for various shortcomings. It should be taken into
Qualitative Inquiry 25(4)
account, however, that the spread of imaging technologies
and competences make it necessary to turn toward the
everyday practices of imaging, imagining and communi-
cating through cameras, camera-phones, digital video,
public screens, image archives, image platforms such as
Instagram, Tumblr, Flickr, and YouTube, and the popular-
ity of urban and rural amateur arts. A difference to these
aforementioned approaches becomes apparent if we take
into account a sociology with the image and its related
sensualities.
Therefore, visual sociology entails a third possibility
besides the two earlier mentioned. It consists of not only
analyzing the image as a social product, but in studying
the acts of producing the image that simultaneously pro-
duce society, as it is engaged in the image designed to
reflect it. In this regard, it might be more appropriate to
speak of a sociology 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 and senses and contexts are
deployed reflexively in social arenas with their own spe-
cific microphysics of power (Blanc, 2012, 2013;
Cambre, 2014; Knoblauch, 2013; Mirzoeff, 1999;
Pequignot, 2008; Traue, 2013). Doing research with the
image supposes that social reality thickens through vari-
ous materialities, practices, and visibilities. In film and
media studies, the study of the mediatic infrastructures
has a long tradition, but is not very well connected to
discussions in the social sciences and often eclectic in
its theoretical orientation. Research in the tradition of
discourse analysis has drawn from media and culture
studies but has also made seminal contributions to this
area of studies. Foucault studies inform this research
through his proposition that everything that is said is
dependent on what is sayable, and that the social pro-
cesses in which the sayable shifts intersect with shifts in
power relations (Foucault, 1975). Empirical research as
well as methodological contributions has been con-
ducted in the field of social media (Meier, 2008;
Reichert, 2008; Traue & Schünzel, 2014), public rela-
tions (Maasen et al., 2006), advertising (Engel, 2009),
colonialism (Mirzoeff, 2011), political activism
(Cambre, 2014), and the use of imaging techniques in
science and business communication (Knoblauch, 2013;
Tuma, 2017). W.J.T. Mitchell operates in a similar fash-
ion, without explicit references to French analyses of
power (Mitchell, 2011). Thinking with the image opens
our inquiry toward important questions central in cur-
rent debates in the social and cultural sciences.
Of course, the image and the imaginary is only one
way of world-making, of creating meaning, alongside
with languages, classifications, mathematics, poetry, and
others. As such, ways of “worlding,” visualities can
become instruments of domination (Mirzoeff, 2011). The
Traue et al.
image is always already allied with—or one might say
part of a network with—other forms of knowledge. This
idea, however, that philosophy and the social sciences are
competing with other producers of images and their inter-
pretations is of interesting and important consequence.
If the image is part of an interdiscursive world of
meaning, the idea of isolating the image from other
modalities of meaning, its subtitles, its metadata, its
introductions, the strategies it is part of—as it is often in
fact practiced in empirical research—is a deeply flawed
notion. Creating a specialized social study of images, we
want to argue, easily leads to a methodological iconocen-
trism. This iconocentrism, often proudly announced as a
rehabilitation of visuality and visual knowledge, is sub-
ject to similar essentialist limitations as the more logo-
centristic specializations. Just as conversation analysis
insists on a limiting logocentrism in its exclusive focus-
ing on “conversation” as a main mirror and source of
social reality, a purely “visual sociology” locked into its
specialized method protocols runs danger of entrenching
itself in an equally limiting iconocentricity. The anti-the-
oretical bias of some visual research is another indicator
of tendencies of epistemic closure.
The sociological twist in the consideration of what can be
seen is less about the visual, hence about the eye and the
exploitation of its evidence-spending capacities, but about
visibility, hence the actions and materialities through which
attention can be shared and focused onto something visible,
just as language is not the problem of sociology, but rather
the “sayable” (Foucault, 1969). A more visual sociology
would in fact not deal with the visual, but with visibilities.
Visibility consists of acts and technologies of showing, or
pointing out, and their effects. The study of such visibilities
will allow researchers to address a number of important
issues of contemporary social, political, and economic life.
To complicate matters further, we propose that visibilities
alone will not suffice, rather we would also highlight the
conditions “of becoming visible” (Shields, 2004) or the
diverse visual processes by which the relationship between
the visible and invisible situated within operations of power
and governance take place, which Shields conceptualizes as
visualicity.
Theoretical, Methodological and
Empirical Issues
In the context of these considerations of visibility, a
number of theoretical and methodological issues arise,
which are addressed in the collection of papers: How
does the distribution of knowledge change in the context
of a general aesthetization (cf. Reckwitz, 2017) and
informatization of “networked” societies? How do experts
and amateurs compete or cooperate in the development
331
of cultural skills such as visualization and illustration?
This issue is above all an empirical question which calls
for appropriate methods suited to the study of the men-
tioned shifts of communicative authority afforded by
technologies of visualization. In the articles of this spe-
cial issue, methodologies and applied methods that
address these problems of approaching visibility are
presented.
A second, and deeper question relates to the drawing of
borders between nature and culture, between the social and
the non-social, the human and non-human: Which individ-
uals become included as subjects worth interpreting and
understanding through the systematicity and singularity of
visibility regimes? How are different dimensions of such
borderings, such as social relations, time, space, and sign-
systems drawn together in video-symbolic practices, estab-
lishing, reinforcing, or destabilizing such orderings?
Several articles in this issue treat empirical fields exem-
plary for such boundary-making through visibility—such
as in medicine, disability and communication, political
activism, and science communication.
A third issue that needs to be raised is that of agency, the
capacity to create such orderings through creating visibili-
ties and legibilities: Is the power to visualize a site of agency
itself, and what agencies are afforded by visual discourses?
This theme runs through the contributions of the special
issue and is discussed in depth in two dedicated method-
ological contributions.
A fourth group of problems addresses the issue of tech-
nological, cultural, and societal codevelopment: When do
technologies, visual practices and cultures evolve con-
jointly, and when are they dominated by certain knowledge
regimes or economic regimes? Which forms of subjectiva-
tion are advanced in regimes of the visible and sayable?
This is a complex problem explicitly or implicitly discussed
in this special issue, and also the area where most future
research is needed.
A discourse analytical perspective on methods which com-
prehends the image as part and parcel of communicative action
and technological construction (“sociology with the image”)
allows the further exploration of these and other issues. We
have collected papers in this special issue that address the ques-
tion from different disciplinary perspectives and through differ-
ent methodological approaches, which encompass visual
discourse analysis, videography, visual ethnography, multi-
modal analysis, the analysis of artifacts and cultural analysis.
We do not claim to present a single method of visual discourse
analyses, but rather seek to approach the question of the discur-
sivity of visibility from different methodological and disciplin-
ary angles, as well as different cultural, and geographical locales
and contexts.
The nine papers in this issue illustrate the diverse possi-
bilities for analyzing this discursivity of images and of visu-
ality as visibilities.
332
They address four areas of interest: The relation of mate-
riality, visibility, and interpretive practice; the challenge
visibility poses to scientific knowledge itself; the relations
between mediality and visibility; and the transformation of
politics through visual arguments and layering of visibility.
Methodological issues are addressed in two papers: In
her piece “Queer Reading as Power Play,” Antke Engel
engages the classical problem of ideology without falling
into the common traps of seeking higher ground or totaliz-
ing it as a virtually inescapable condition. The approach for
a discourse analysis of visual material she proposes, a
“power-sensitive method of” reading images, seeks to “ren-
der methodologically productive relations of desiring
implied or performed by the image.” Without assuming a
privileged hermeneutic position for the interpreter, she pro-
poses to engage in experimental practices with the image,
teasing out its intended purposes, its conventional meanings
as well as its unrealized potentials. This “interventionist
reading of images” attends to visibility as a mode of repro-
ducing and transforming social relations, which the
researcher inevitably becomes engaged in. Engel’s approach
provides suggestions how to confront and navigate these
critical issues.
York Kautt addresses an unclarified problem in visual
methodologies: how does visuality mediate materiality and
meaning? He consequently identifies the “social complex-
ity of visual design” as the central reference problem for a
sociology of visual communication. To elaborate this prob-
lem, he draws together theories of materiality, visuality,
design, systems theory, and the structure-agency debate.
This impressive range of references serves to argue that
visual phenomena are embedded in a number of social
structures that condition forms of practice, and that these
practices work back onto structural environments, albeit
with certain “limitations for practices,” which he proposes
to study more deeply. In his conclusion, an analytical model
is proposed which relates artifacts, practices, and structural
environments to each other. Also, the empirical complica-
tions this model may help clarify are explored. It is defi-
nitely a strength of this conceptual piece that the author
remains theoretically parsimonious and thus leaves it up to
the reader which methodical strategies to employ in consid-
ering the methodological considerations and propositions
advanced in this article.
From Engel’s and Kautt’s deliberations, it becomes clear
that the social sciences and humanities cannot simply incor-
porate “visual methods” into their methodological canon:
they are part of the scientific field, which, as a whole, is
drawn into an increasingly visualized world. This self-
implication of scholarly thought is addressed in the three
following papers.
Communicating scientific findings and communicating
within the field of science are certainly two different mat-
ters. It is all the more convincing that in their comparative
Qualitative Inquiry 25(4)
analysis, Rene Wilke and Miira Hill show that despite the
fundamental practical differences between communication
among scientists and recent public displays of sciences,
there is a common thread: a deep epistemological commit-
ment to visualization of scientific knowledge which bears a
relation to the embodied practices of presentation. In their
study of communicative actions in interdisciplinary “group
talk” on one hand and the “science slams” addressing fel-
low scientists on the other, it becomes clear that both forms
of scientific talk increasingly rely on presentation technolo-
gies. Methodologically, this observation presents a chal-
lenge, since they are actually confronted not only with talk,
but also with embodied practices of presenting knowledge,
with the visual material deployed to aid and support these
presentations, and with the contextual norms in these differ-
ent contexts. Through a videographic methodology triangu-
lated with focused ethnography, they are able to unravel the
interplay of visuality, performance, and argument, which
condense into a novel visibility of science, as a result of
presentational dispositifs and as a precondition for success-
ful science communication.
Science Journalism is another discursive formation,
which contributes to the visibilization of science through
shaping the general public’s understanding of its proceed-
ings and interests. Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska turns to
the popularization of scientific knowledge from the per-
spective of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). In her arti-
cle, she presents a methodology of multimodal analysis for
examining the textual and visual features of popular science
publications—exemplified by a case study portraying the
presentation of biomedical research in the online science
journal newscientist.com. This strategy allows her to deter-
mine which scientific topics and findings are displayed as
newsworthy, and how this newsworthiness is constructed
through the interplay of textuality and visuality. The domi-
nant discursive strategies of science journalism are suc-
cinctly traced as movements toward “humanization,”
“domestication,” and/or “anesthetization.” Molek-
Kozakowska interprets them as ideological investments and
discusses the effects such “strategically enhanced visibil-
ity” can have on the (re)presentation of knowledge.
While the previous two articles focus on the communica-
tive acts of live science presentation and the multimodal
forms of plausibilization of science for laypeople, Monika
Urban proposes an analysis of interdiscursive strategies and
their powers of subjectivation. She expands classic interdis-
course theory by following the assumption that the determi-
nation of meaning is discourse immanent, that is “discursively
created through fragile and reciprocally influencing societal
formations” and enacted in “conflicts or tensions surround-
ing hegemonic negotiations” which lead to the legitimation
of interventions and technologies. These tension-ridden and
often conflictual meaning-making processes are examined
through an analytic vocabulary adapted from interdiscourse
Traue et al.
theory and informed by the recent advances of
Bildwissenschaften. The research questions derived from
these theoretical and methodological interests—“What
knowledge is made plausible through the digital visualiza-
tion? Which forms of subjectivation are related to this
knowledge?”—are applied to a case study on medical wear-
ables and the interpretation of their digitalization of body
data by users. The exemplary analysis shows that despite
efforts to fix the meaning of health data, the horizon of inter-
pretation of such data “remains at least partially open.”
While the visualized practices of the natural and human
sciences may be assessed through interpretive and critical
methodologies, there is an underlying issue that is more
unsettling: the ongoing mediatization of our access to the
world. The next two papers address this issue from two dif-
ferent angles: a discussion of cultural epistemology and of
the mediatization of communication in the context of
disabilities.
Focusing on the invisible aspects of wireless communi-
cation so essential to the functional aspects of two famous
towers, the Eiffel Tower and the One World Trade Center,
read together, Henriette Steiner and Kristin Veel delve ana-
lytically into the works of French philosophers Roland
Barthes (1915-1980) and Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-
1998) to develop a semiotic phenomenological framework
to analyze the cultural, political, and greater social ambigui-
ties regarding these symbols upholding an idea of moder-
nity that seems to be crumbling around them. Beginning
with Barthes’ provocative and unique method of observa-
tion, the authors then turn to Lyotard’s three-part typology:
figure-image, figure-form, and figure-matrix, as method-
ological points of reference on which to layer different
aspects of analysis for a more complex and context sensi-
tive result. Their approach opens the possibility of allowing
the objects to inform the models, and the models to then
define the terminology as it is used.
Responding to the vital urgency of addressing questions
of analysis and understanding across the fields of anthro-
pology, human-computer interaction, and the humanities in
a broad sense, Rebekah Cupitt, Per-Anders Forstorp and
Ann Lantz directly take on the challenge of logocentric
modes of thinking by producing a fine-grained analysis of a
cross-cultural empirical case. By producing a thickly
described analytic of an audio-visual interaction with deaf
and hearing participants in a technologically mediated
meeting, this paper explores the limits of methods in study-
ing visual practices when situated in organizational and
bilingual settings. The authors unequivocally prove that
“there is no absolute visual form that accurately represents
the phenomenon under investigation” and that embodied
materiality absolutely must be taken into account for the
meaningfulness of concepts in analysis to be productive.
A politics of visibility comes into view as a cause as well
as an effect of these technological, epistemological, and
333
methodological transformations related to the ongoing visi-
bilization of everything. The last two papers in the issue
directly address the problem of the political.
Anna Sanina carefully situates her analysis in current
Russian contexts in “Who Are You Kidding?” to develop a
visual discursive analysis centered on the key figure of
irony as operationalized through online images published
on weblogs and social media by a public that has rapidly
developed its own vernacular iconographic conventions to
display and comment on political culture. Using data from
56 interviews, she outlines how tracing the use of one trope
through a multitude of representations, one can measure the
political temperature of a given public. She indicates that
what many might assume to be “slacktivism” (=slacker +
activism, an allegedly ineffective form of low-intensity
online activism) might also be the early stages of a later
activism that is nurtured through finding like-minded indi-
viduals semi-covertly through online dialogue and humor.
Here, deconstructing and contesting the realities of ironic
signs can reveal which meanings are privileged and which
are suppressed.
Finally, Maxime Boidy’s article aims to maintain the
tension between the different dimensions of visibility.
Whatever epistemic, ethical, or social action context, visi-
bility deals with political issues. In this perspective, visual
practices and knowledges appear bound to historical
accounts of power. Moving between different regimes of
visibilities in Foucault’s, Debord’s and Honneth’s theories,
the author investigates how these struggles for visibilities
are expressed in activist testimonies and visual tactics such
as those used during the G8 summit of July 2001 in Genoa.
The contribution of Maxime Boidy’s analysis consists pre-
cisely in putting these multiple dimensions of visibility into
dialogue and tension to better understand their mutual
implications.
The papers in this collection do not shy away from the
complexity of the task, rather they engage fully, and care-
fully, in the nuanced, messy, and often contradictory details
of working sociologically with the image. They refuse to
relegate visuals to illustrative, or supporting roles in the
larger social context and exemplify ways by which this
might be achieved. By attending to both the material and
virtual, the concrete and the ephemeral, and the shifting
movements in between, this collection makes a contribu-
tion to visual methods that claims its place among canoni-
cal social scientific approaches.2 Despite a steady, if
sometimes trickling stream of works, the visual dimensions
of the social had remained undertheorized in the academic
social sciences until the 1990s, with certain notable excep-
tions (Bourdieu 1965, 1995; Denzin, 1995; Goffman, 1979;
Kracauer, 1947; Morin, 1956) and notably the work of
scholars in the International Visual Sociology Association
(IVSA) founded in 1982. However, through the rise of
structuralism and the linguistic turn, the Western interest in
334
texts and the linguistic semiotic dimension, already strong
through sociology’s enlightenment heritage, became pre-
dominant. And yet it was over a 100 years ago, in 1900,
that one of the earliest scholarly visions of the social
through and by images methodologically had already been
powerfully presented. At the world’s fair in Paris, W. E. B.
Du Bois created a masterful exhibit3 to refute a widely held
belief: that Blacks were inferior to Whites. As the
Exposition Report noted, “It is impossible to do justice to
this exhibit in a few lines of descriptive matter. The mate-
rial presented was not only of high scientific value, but was
shown in the most graphic way” (volume 2, pp. 408-409).
We hope, in this volume, to renew and reengage Du Bois’
visionary legacy.
Before you turn to the individual papers, we would like
to briefly situate the prospects for visual methodologies,
and especially the study of visibility, in the social sciences
and humanities. Let us first turn to some of the obstacles
we are facing.
As in the United States, “critical qualitative research is
under assault” (Denzin, 2017) in Europe. Proponents of
science-based research (SBR) are openly attempting to
limit the ways sociality, culture, and technology should be
studied (Saiani, 2018). One stark manifestation of this strat-
egy in Germany is the rise of new professional associations
which suggest that only a science-based view of the social
and corresponding “analytical” methodologies which rely
on the identification of causal mechanisms (Hedström/
Bearman 2009) should be accepted as social science proper,
and sometimes even suggest that appropriating big data
analysis techniques is the major frontier for social research.
One irony of this proposal is that big data analyses are inex-
tricably linked to strategies of visualization (Reichert,
2018). One major misconception fuelling such methodolog-
ical disputes, and that bears repeating here, is the failure to
appreciate the extent to which statistical and quantitative
approaches themselves rely on interpretation, (Baur, 2018).
Academic trends that deny the interpretativity of quanti-
tative research set up a situation where approaches that can-
not be reduced to numerical values are given lower value on
a false hierarchy that prioritizes social “science” (as opposed
to “social” science). We find it rather obvious that this point
of view fails the epistemological standards of the social sci-
ences established more than a 100 years ago. It participates
in the latest series of Method Disputes (“Methodenstreit”)
originating in the middle of the 19th century, when Johann
Gustav Droysen and Wilhelm Dilthey proposed that the
humanities (“Geisteswissenschaften”) have a distinct sub-
ject matter which sets them apart from the sciences
(“Naturwissenschaften”): the meaningful and normative
relation of living beings to their world and to themselves.
This relation needs to be understood (“verstehen”), not
explained (“erklären”). Max Weber proposed a combina-
tory resolution of the controversy for the methodology of
Qualitative Inquiry 25(4)
the social sciences which has become an almost unanimous
gold standard in methodological debates: they should
explain history (and society) by creating understandings of
those who suffer and make it. The Method Dispute has
since then gone through a number of iterations (cf. Apel,
1990 for an overview) and culminated in the (mixed-meth-
ods) alliance of flexible postpositivists and constructivists
against positivism (1970-1990) and the conflict between
competing mixed-method, constructivist, and critical the-
ory paradigms (1990-2005) as Teddlie and Tashakkori
(2003) point out in their history of the Method Disputes
since the 1970s.
Since 2005, this Dispute has been revived by conflicts
between evidence-based methodologists, and the mixed-
methods, interpretive, and critical theory schools (Denzin,
2017, p. 10). Visual methods – due to the hardly quantifiable
nature of their data –clearly lean toward the interpretive side
of Weber’s verstehen-erklären combination. Yet, develop-
ments in the sciences, in politics, culture, economics and a
range of other fields cannot be explained without taking into
account the visuality of communication and the visibilities
of the social. This conflict is not neatly waged between
quantitative and qualitative methodologies. For example,
there is also a divisive tendency within qualitative research,
which may be comprehended as preemptive self-defense
within more established qualitative approaches against those
seeking to expand the range of interpretation and explana-
tion, a tendency that the editors of this special issue have
been confronted with in the past. We believe such efforts to
contain the current method dispute are not useful for the
inter-paradigmatic criticism that a multiplicity of scholar-
ship thrives on. In other words, neither should new
approaches prosper by discarding established approaches
that prove their worth, nor should established approaches
attempt to shut down efforts to expand. However, an ongo-
ing mutual critique is needed.
Another consideration involves the question of how cur-
rent postpositivist quantitative scientism—which aspires to
relegate visual analysis to art history or submit it to Big Data
analysis—fail methodological standards? As we have argued
with reference to Weber, social research aims to combine
“verstehen” (interpretation) and “erklären” (explaining). The
extensions of social science research to the visual and the
question of visibility emphasize strategies of interpretation
(“verstehen”), and engage researcher affect within the social
worlds they inhabit. Images and the visibilities they institute
are decisive in everyday meaning-making as well as in strate-
gies and structures of power and domination.
Visual methodologies thus underscore the interdepen-
dence of explanation and interpretation. To reject such
methodological innovations in a world in which power,
domination, legitimacy, the distribution of life chances, and
the forms of identities are shaped not only by words and
numbers, but also—and increasingly so—by images would
Traue et al.
reinforce a scientistic impoverishment of research: An
impoverishment that consists of an unjustifiable reliance on
causal or correlative explanation (erklären) rendered insen-
sitive to the ethical, affective, political, and moral aspects of
societies. But emphasizing “verstehen” does not imply a
neglect of explanation. We consider visibilities to be more
than localized, contextual, and tied to subjective sense and
taste. Visibilities also work on the level of the structural,
historical, societal, and technological. Positioning, as we
and the collection of authors in this special issue do, visibil-
ities as social structures sui generis (cf. also Denzin, 1995;
Heinich, 2012) helps us explore how they intersect with
other structurating layers of societies. Thus, methods for the
study of visibility must continue to be expanded and inte-
grated into the social science lexicon. This is certainly not a
new claim, but it must be renewed and expanded in a situa-
tion where media technologies, techniques of power, and
the image have both melted into new dispositifs of domina-
tion, and have also opened new avenues for contention,
reflexivity, and critique. The future of theorizing our object
of inquiry—visibility—is challenged by the abovemen-
tioned scientistic polemics and critiques, but it can respond
by expanding on the issues at hand. We identify the follow-
ing further directions research can take:
We may seek to further our understandings of how
everyday and scientific ways of knowing, being and acting
are shaped by visibilities and, how the visible engages con-
ceptual arguments on one level and social ontologies on
another. This challenge entails more detailed studies of
‘visualizing technologies’ and forms of domination and
resistance with and through the image. The visual is no lon-
ger only a physiological, sensual, and cultural mode of
relating to the world; an algorithmic dimension has added
to it through machine learning and the capacity of machines
to process pictures. Digital visuality not only deals with
pictures, but as a regime of visibility it also sustains images
and thus informs social worlds and subjectivity. Big Data
research techniques explain such technologies, but they
provide little in the way of understanding their effects for
feeling and meaning-making beings. This assumption
should not preclude an interest in digital research methods
(cf. Marres, 2017), which seek to trace the effects and
workings of action and perception in the digital domain
through analyzing digital data. New figurations of techno-
logical and material causality on one hand and interpreta-
tive processes on the other should spur our interest. One
major challenge is the study of the intersections of visibil-
ity with other structures of the social: inequality, institu-
tions, mobility, boundaries. This approach can be very
useful in intersectional research and research inspired by it:
while race, gender, and class intersect, they do so through
different modalities of communication, practice, and repre-
sentation. These research directions require researcher
agility in moving beyond the lines defined by any
335
postpositivist attitude and call upon the transgressive
capacities of critical approaches. We hope the methodolog-
ical and thematic plurality of the papers gathered in this
special issue becomes a visibility in its own right and
actively contributes to supporting the vigorous generative
energy of a multiplicity of perspectives.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect
to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
1. Mathias Blanc thanks the French National Research Agency
for supporting his research on visual methods. Boris Traue
would like to thank the German Research Foundation for
supporting the research leading up to this article. After
coorganizing the workshop “Visual Analysis and Discourse
Analyses” at the Technische Universität Berlin in 2013,
Mathias Blanc and Boris Traue developed the concept for
this special issue in a long string of conversations, which
Carolina Cambre joined in 2014, after a meeting at the
International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA) conference
at Goldsmiths College in London. One difficulty in writing,
which proved productive in the end, was the difference in
meaning of a number of terms and concepts between the
German, the French, and the Anglo-American discussion
we are joining together here.
2. In a current representative handbook of interpretative methods
(Akremi et al. 2018), 5 out of 18 contributions (introducing
specific methodologies) focus on visual methods.
3. In his article “The American Negro at Paris” Du Bois (1900)
wrote: The bulk of the exhibit, is natural, an attempt to picture
present conditions. Thirty-two charts, 500 photographs, and
numerous maps and plans form the basis of this exhibit. . . .
(p. 576)
ORCID iD
Boris Traue https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2984-6280
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Author Biographies
Boris Traue is associate professor of sociology at the
Technische Universität Berlin. He was principal investigator
of the research project “Audiovisual Cultures of the Self”
(2011-2014), funded by the German Research Foundation. He
is co-editor of the “Handbuch Interpretativ Forschen/Handbook
Interpretative Research”, a comprehensive collection adressing
contemporary methodological issues in qualitative as well as
quantitative research in the social sciences and introducing a
number of innovative methods (2018, Weinheim, Germany:
Beltz Juventa).
Mathias Blanc is researcher at the French National Center for
Scientific Research (CNRS). He led the research project VISUALL
(2013-2017), funded by the French National Research Agency
(ANR), questioning the links between visual sociology and the
german “image sciences” (Bildwissenschaften). This research has
led him to design digital visual annotation methods, that enhance
the plasticity of the image, the techniques of collage and drawing,
in order to study the social distribution of knowledge with images
(https://visuall.hypotheses.org/).
Carolina Cambre’s interests include the politics of communica-
tion, representation, critical visual sociology and anthropology, all
with an eye to social justice issues as well as community and iden-
tity broadly speaking. She looks at representation mainly through
semiotics, anthropological and sociological theory, in connection
to the literature in visual cultural studies, communication and dis-
course analysis through various critical frameworks. Her award-
winning thesis, now a book, The Semiotics of Che Guevara:
Affective gateways (2015), presents a series of encounters with the
photograph, Guerrillero Heroico (1960) by Alberto Korda