Editorial

This double issue of Visual Studies builds on our last issue of 2021. Writing in the Editorial for 36.4–5, John Grady reflected upon how Visual Studies as a journal had, over the past 18 months, forged new projects and formats whilst revitalizing older incentives including an ‘updated policy for choosing Covers, New Media Reviews, Visual Essays, Roundtables, Picture/Talks, and Galleries’ (Grady et al. 2021, 285). In this inaugural double issue for 2022, we are pleased to present two additional new endeavors.

First, our cover showcases the most recent winner of the Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize for Visual Sociology, a bi-annual award supported by the Rachal Tanur family, the International Sociological Association’s (ISA) Visual Sociology Research Committee (RC57), and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). This award is designed specifically for postgraduate students. Thus far, there have been seven award winners since the prize was inaugurated in 2008. Candidates for the award are expected to submit an original photo and commentary, in addition to responding to one of Rachel’s own photos from the awards online gallery. Recognizing the Rachel Tanur award winners on the cover of Visual Studies is the first formal collaboration between the IVSA and the ISA RC57, which we view as a wonderful opportunity to build professional relations and intellectual dialogue while spotlighting work from researchers at the beginnings of their careers. Each cover feature will be supported by a complimentary Picture/Talk feature by republishing the short commentary that is required as part of the Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize as a way of providing each image the sociological context that would enrich its viewing.

Our cover in this double-issue is by Henry Moncrieff Zabaleta, a social anthropologist, documentary photographer and recent PhD graduate from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Entitled ‘Warao Queen: Challenging beauty in Venezuela’, Zabaleta’s picture addresses what Douglas Harper refers to as the ‘wider symbolic universe’ within an image (Harper 2012, 251). In this picture, we are presented with a portrait framed by a sociological enquiry that foregrounds gender, performativity, indigenous social structures and the organization of labor. Zabaleta’ s comments for the prize were originally written in both English and Spanish, and so we have reproduced them in both languages accordingly as part of our growing engagement toward linguistic diversity in the journal.

Henry Moncrieff Zabaleta, 2018.

In addition, this double issue includes a New Media Review by Abhilasha Gusain, entitled ‘”The Urge to Know About the Roots is Just Human, I Guess”: Vietnamese Memories and Clément Baloup’. Taking the format of an interview, Gusain speaks with graphic novelist, Baloup, about the varied aspects of his two graphic narratives, Vietnamese Memories: Leaving Saigon and Vietnamese Memories: Little Saigon (originally written in French, published at Life Drawn), with emphasis on his choice of the medium, translation of his works to English and Baloup’s role in it, as well as Vietnamese history and diaspora.

The second new initiative that we are introducing in 2022 is the inclusion of Special Sections. Most simply, a special section is a smaller version of Special Issues that we have often featured in the past, where an entire issue is organised by one-time editors dedicated to exploring a particular theme. Typically, a special section consists of 3 to 4 manuscripts on a specific topic, and a contextualizing, stand-alone introduction by the guest editors. They will invariably be published as part of an issue devoted to more general concerns. The aim is to allow Visual Studies to pivot more quickly to themes and impactful research in burgeoning fields and discourses that may not yet be ready for a full issue or that may otherwise take too long to formulate and organize.

Our first special section is conceived by Casey Burkholder, Funké Aladejeb and Joshua Schwab-Cartas and focuses on facilitation as an important yet underreported component of visual sociological research. As visually driven social science researchers who often work in collaborative and participatory contexts, how, within a reflexive framework, do we consider the way we facilitate the work we do with or on behalf of individuals, groups or communities? How do our decisions shape moments, outcomes, and relationships, and in what way do we use or think about visual artifacts or visual production methods in these often-sensitive contexts?

Framed within a Canadian context, the three articles that make up this special section address facilitation from varied methodological perspectives — including auto-ethnography photovoice and virtual space as well as examining strategies of co-creation in the classroom. First, Alicia Noreiga’s autoethnography and self-reflexivity project, ‘Facilitating Black Identity and Advocacy: Creating Cellphilms for Reflection on Issues Affecting Black Students’, examines how cellphilm production with Black students on a majority White campus in Eastern Canada can offer a space for critical self-reflection while facilitating a space for Black participants to express their feelings through discussion and media production.

Article two, by Zehra Melike Polat entitled, “Facilitating a ‘Virtual Space’ for Social Change During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Working with High-risk Populations Using Arts-based Methods”, looks at how virtual space comes to the fore during the COVID-19 pandemic as an alternative environment to explore post-migration experiences of young adult Turkish and Kurdish asylum seekers arriving from Turkey to Canada. By highlighting the experiences of adapting photovoice research design for pandemic safety measures, Melike Polat also reflects on the alternate issues raised when going virtual including the legal, social, and psychological complexities associated with participatory vulnerability, the privacy of participants, language barriers, and power struggles among the participants in the virtual discussions.

The final article in the special section, by Casey Burkholder, Amelia Thorpe and Pride/Swell, unpacks the opportunities and challenges to facilitating two projects with LGBTQ+ youth, with an emphasis on New Brunswick, Canada’s Social Studies curricula and classrooms and co-creating media to interrupt these erasures with youth. The article also describes the ways in which the experiences of facilitating ‘Where Are Our Histories’ has shaped the co-facilitation strategies employed in a distance-based participatory visual research project, amidst COVID-19.

In order to complement the topics addressed in the special section, we chose seven articles that also emphasize collaboration and ethics, especially collaboration between researchers, practitioners and informants — when a distinction among these roles is possible or considered relevant — via multiple forms of participatory research. The articles we have selected concentrate on issues raised by elicitation and photovoice. For all of these authors, photography in the field is a powerful educational practice able to develop not only platforms that encourage new voices, but also developing empowering capabilities, whatever the age, living conditions and social origins of the participants. Therefore, six of these articles are case studies emphasizing a plurality of fields (school children’s learning processes, an aged care setting, ethnic or religious diversity) as well as discussing various uses of photography and drawing (e.g. self-portraiture, photography as an artifact, visual documentation). The seventh article, rightly titled ‘Breaking the frame’, by S. C. Dam, usefully reflects on the evolution of practices among first-generation photo-elicitation researchers, discussing the emergence of photo-elicitation as a rigorous visual method and unveiling the disciplinary traditions, expectations, and practices involved in these scholars’ work and heritage. As Dam concludes, research practices (and furthermore visual methods) are continuously transformed and create new meanings, sometimes in very unexpected ways.

Lastly, and because our Editorial team seeks to curate increasingly coherent issues, we have compiled a selection of book reviews echoing some of the methodological and theoretical considerations developed in this issue’s articles — from digital media (its uses, poetics and esthetics) to general considerations about cultural history of vision, if not of other senses.