our society, that is embodied in real-living bodies. In visual methodology we are confronted with concrete embodiments of social life as it is experienced by different people who are implicated in the different structures of violence in society. In visual methodology the politics of social life is made real. Confronted with this realness, we are also confronted with the implications of working with affective data—both from within ourselves and those of our participants. Understanding how such data can be galvanized for sociopolitical change—as opposed to sense of hopelessness—is necessary.
Reference Gordon, A. (2008). Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis.
Representing and exploring social suffering for its own sake is not the goal. Visual methodologies help us to engage the world in its materiality as well as symbolic violence. Most importantly, it reclaims the role of the individual as central to how the story is told, according the authority of representation to the person who lives the experience. This is its promise, politics and ethics—to hold space for affective representations of social life in a way that recalls us to the true purpose of social research. 85
HOLDING SPACE THROUGH HAUNTING