More than Words: Some Reflections on Working Visually

1.1 These papers are drawn from the International Visual Sociology conferences of 2004 (Southampton) and 2005 (San Francisco). They have been collected together here because of the possibilities offered by Sociological Research Online to pursue the visual beyond the usual limits of the printed academic journal. On-line publishing allows us to show more images, without losing text: enabling a more sustained and iterative engagement between pictures and text than is normally permitted. More than this, the on-line format of SRO allows us to pursue the visual beyond the flat surface of the page and the, often beautiful but motionless, pictures produced in quality journals devoted to Visual Studies with video forays into movement and sound. The authors published here exploit these opportunities, working visually to transcend the dissonance between the lived theatres of social research on everyday life and the dull and inanimate surfaces on which sociological work is usually rendered. Working visually is not just about methodology although it is mostly seen in these terms it is more broadly about how we 'do' sociology.