Visual Methods In Social Research

There has been an explosion of interest in visual culture coming largely fromwork in sociology anthropology and cultural studies and while there are anumber of... » 

There has been an explosion of interest in visual culture coming largely fromwork in sociology anthropology and cultural studies and while there are anumber of practical and technical manuals available for film photographic andother visual media there is a dearth of writing that combines both thepractical and the technical. This book redresses this with a balanced approachthat is written primarily for students in the social sciences who wish to usevisual materials in the course of empirical qualitative field research. Itshould also be of interest to experienced researchers who wish to expand theirmethodological approaches.Visual methods provides empirical approaches to both image creation and imageanalysis drawing on a wide range of examples from research conducted onEgyptian television soap opera to the sale of ethnographic photographs inLondon auction houses to pornographic images on the Web. New technologies arealso included with image digitization and computerbased multimediaextensively covered. There are sections on using film and photographicarchives and useful practical advice on publishing and presenting the resultsof visual research.Marcus Banks stresses the material nature of visual media as objects that areentangled in social relations and argues for a humanistic engaged andreflexive approach to social research.This book will be an indispensable guide for the use and study of socialimages. «