Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials

The Third Edition of An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, a bestselling critical introduction to the study and analysis of visual culture, has been fully revised and updated. Each chapter retains its rigorous examination and demonstration of an individual methodology, while continuing to be clear in structure and lucid in style. Reflecting changes in the way society consumes and creates its visual content, new features include:

• A Companion Website featuring additional examples of digital and social media, and moving images
• Pedagogical enhancements including full color images, extended further reading, and updated case studies and visual examples
• An additional chapter and expanded coverage on social and new media, and more information on mass media in general (TV, Print, Broadcasting)
• An expanded focus on how each method can be used in relation to a range of different visual materials
• An additional chapter on how to use visual materials for research and the presentation of research findings

A now classic text, the book appeals to undergraduates, graduates, researchers and academics in all subjects looking to understand and clearly grasp the complex debates and ideas in visual analysis and interpretation.

My research interests lie broadly within the field of visual culture. I′m interested in visuality as a kind of practice, done by human subjects in collaboration with different kinds of objects and technologies.

One long-term project, which resulted in a book from Ashgate Press in 2010, looked at family photos. I approached family snaps by thinking of them as objects embedded in a wide range of practices. I interviewed women with young children about their photos, and also looked at the politics and ethics of family snaps moving into more public arenas of display when the people they picture are the victims of violence. The book explores the different ′politics of sentiment′ in which family snaps participate in both their domestic spaces in the public space of the contemporary mass media.

Other work is extending my interest in subjectivities, space and visual practices by exploring experiences of designed urban spaces. I completed an ESRC-funded project on this theme with Dr Monica Degen at Brunel University in 2009, in which we compared how people experienced two rather different town centres: Milton Keynes and Bedford. Monica Degen, Clare Melhuish and I started a new ESRC-funded project in the autumn of 2011. ′Architectural atmospheres, branding and the social: the role of digital visualizing technologies in contemporary architectural practice′ was a two-year ethnographic study of how digital visualizing technologies are being used by architects in a number of architects′ studio in London.

I′m also interested in more innovative ways to produce social science research, especially using visual materials. I was involved in organising the ESRC Seminar Series ′Visual Dialogues: New Agendas in Inequalities Research′ (2010-2012). Please visit the ′Visual Dialogues: New Agendas in Inequalities Research′ for more details. I′m also a member of the OpenSpace Research Centre.