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Visual Studies

New Visual Technologies - Shifting Boundaries, Shared Moments

Guest Editors

Connor Graham, Eric Laurier, Vincent O'Brien and Mark Rouncefield

Synopsis

This special issue of Visual Studies explores the implications of the
wide range of contemporary and emerging visual technologies for social
groups, professions and institutions. Visual technology has been and is
being transformed in a number of areas: carriers (e.g. cellular
networks, the Internet), production technologies (e.g. digital
camcorders and cameras, mobile phones), display technologies (e.g.
public displays, mobile phone projectors) and services (e.g. Flickr,
MMS, blogs), Of particular interest for this special issue is the
dissolving boundaries of exchange and media mobilities (Urry, 2000) that
these transformations entail.

New visual technologies (e.g. the Internet) now support sharing of
visual media across geographical regions, temporal zones and cultural
conventions. This not only has implications for how boundaries between
individual (e.g. friends) and groups (e.g. different households) are
defined but also for how these boundaries are managed through the use of
different forms of media. Some examples of this are the visual
narratives portrayed in digital photographs on Flickr and snippets of
video on YouTube. Such visual technologies can be used to maintain
family through the remote, asynchronous sharing of digital photos or to
bring home the experience and impact of a particular event.

The ongoing transformation and exchange of visual media is our concern:
for example video taken opportunistically when on holiday, taken up by
an organization in a different time zone for later examination, that
then is acquired for posterity or is taken up by the a family for
remembering an event. This issue also targets how ordinary personal
visual media play a role in people's lives and the many forms of looking
they afford, one being the well known "gaze" (Urry, 2002; Foucault,
1976). Our concern is not only with the journalistic process of how
these media capturing moments are compiled and placed on display (e.g.
via digital sharing) but also with the role of particular visual media
in and through time in particular settings and how they participate in
and construct people's personal and collective material lives. The
global reach of new distributive technologies also raises questions
about cross and intercultural interpretations of visual materials and
how visual materials are used to construct, reconstruct and deconstruct
cultural identities. Thus our concern is both individual and intimate,
regarding these media in the trajectory of people's biographies
(Strauss, 1993) and social and community-driven, regarding these media
as part of the fabric of particular "social worlds" (Becker, 1982;
Strauss, 1978) and (virtual) communities (Mynatt et al., 1998;
Rheingold, 2000). We are also concerned with the "reciprocal impact"
(Strauss, 1993) of capturing and working with these media, the role they
perform in constructing the ways of seeing (Berger, 1982) and for whom.
In this focus we are interested in how new visual media are woven
together with more traditional written forms i.e. how people use
different media, the emotions involved with their use and their temporal
qualities. Thus we are not concerned with (new) visual media alone but
how these media can interlock and interface with text for example. Our
concerns also include the transformations which these media support and
undergo as time passes - e.g. through the explicit use of digital media
as visual activism (e.g. http://www.wsf.tv and
http://visualactivism.blogspot.com), - the importance of these media's
different levels of materiality as well as their content (Shove et al.,
2007) and the practical ethics inherent in sharing, exchanging and
viewing photographs, video and other images.

This special issue represents an exploration of both new visual
technologies material form and their content-carrying capabilities
across different settings as well as how these technologies interlock
and interweave with more traditional visual (e.g. paper photos) and
written technologies (e.g. text on paper) to achieve particular
purposes.

Submissions

We wish to gather articles on new visual technologies which represent
forays into visual research, explorations of the visual aspects of
culture, as well as new or adaptations to existing methods and
methodologies for investigating particular social worlds. Submissions
can include uses of digital photography and video and other new visual
media in domestic, community and leisure settings.

Appropriate longer submissions include:

- Extended reports from the field studies using visual and other
technologies;

- Critical literature reviews of uses of visual technologies in other
studies;

- Discursive pieces exploring themes in visual technology use and/or
their potential in particular settings;

- Developments of existing/proposal of new methods/methodologies.

Shorter submissions can include:

- Reflections on approaches and methods;

- Opinion pieces;

- Early reports on studies of technologies in situ;

- Design proposals addressing particular themes.

Given the topic of the special issue and the nature of the journal,
visual materials (e.g. photographs, screen shots, figures) are
encouraged as an integral part of submissions.

Papers should be submitted via email to Connor Graham at
[log in to unmask]

Deadlines

15th February 2010 Papers due

31st March 2010 Notification

31st May 2010 Revisions due

31st July 2010 Final notification

15th September 2010 Final papers due

late 2010/early 2011 Publication

Form

Submitting authors should conform with the journal's guidelines
including copyright guidelines available from:
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=1472-586X&linktype=44.

Papers can either be long submissions of between 7,000 and 8,000 words
or shorter papers of between to 2,000 and 3,000 words.

Information on the Visual Studies journal is available from:
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/rvst

Please contact Connor Graham ([log in to unmask]) if you have any
questions.

References

Becker, H. S. (1982). Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California
Press.

Berger, John (1972). Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting
Corporation and Penguin Books

Foucault, M. (1976). The Birth of the Clinic. London: Tavistock.

Mynatt, E.D., O'Day, V.L., Adler, A., Ito, M. (1998). Network
Communities: Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed....
Computer Supported Cooperative Work 7, 1-2, pp

123-156.

Rheingold, H. (2000). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the
Electronic Frontier. London: MIT Press.

Shove, E., Watson, M., Hand, M. and Ingram, J. (2007). The Design of
Everyday Life. Berg, Oxford.

Strauss, A. (1978). A Social World Perspective. Studies in Symbolic
Interaction, 1. 119-128.

Strauss, A. (1993). Continual Permutations of Action. New York: Aldine
de Gruyter.

Urry, J. (2000). Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the
Twenty-First Century, London: Routledge.

Urry, J. (2002). The Tourist Gaze. Sage Publications: London. Second
Edition.

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