visual research methods
I had the opportunity last week to attend a brilliant course called An Introduction to Visual Methods.
“The aim of this workshop is to provide participants with a step-change career enhancing skills in visual methods; and to provide an ongoing and integrated visual methods resource for researchers with experience in visual methods at intermediate level that is stimulating, challenging and grounded in ‘best practice’.”
Dr Jon Prosser and friends are running an ESRC funded initiative to “build visual method capacity across the social sciences. Part of the initiative was these dirt cheap training courses, aimed at academic and non-academic researchers alike.
The two days involved three hands-on activities and a number of presentations covering:
- Katherine Davies : photo elicitation and family tree drawing to explore family resemblances and sibling relationships
- Stuart Muir: video diaries to explore contemporary rituals
- Rob Walker on children’s photo diaries
- Andrew Clark on map making and walkabouts to understand urban social geography
- Tessa Muncey on auto-ethnography through writing and photos
- David Gauntlett: making documentaries with kids, drawings of celebrities, identity models made of Lego
- Steve Higgins: using cartoon templates to find out childrens views
- Ruth Holliday: using video diaries to explore gender identity
- Jon Prosser on the ethics of visual methods.
There’s a Visual Methods Symposium in July that will explore some of these themes in more depth.