Narrative Innovations, Prato 2012

Narrative Innovations Workshop 6Visual Narratives

Cigdem Esin and Corinne SquireCentre for Narrative Research, UEL

http://www.uel.ac.uk/cnr/

Visual narratives

Where do we encounter visual material and visual research in

social research?

Examples: graphs, charts, photographs, slides, videos, films, DVDs and websites.

These are found across disciplines — in psychology, sociology

and anthropology.

They occur within all forms of social research (academic and applied, community and policy research) with increasing frequency, due to the influence of fine art practice and technological changes.

The specific contributions of visual material and methods to social

research

•Identity work•Subverting producer/consumer divisions•Operating with narrative media and genres other than those in speech and writing•Becoming more responsive to technological changes •Becoming more aware of open and changing narrative meanings.

Visual materials and methods in narrative research

• Visual materials can be treated as narrative 'texts‘ (Barthes).

• Responses to visual materials may sometimes take a narrative form (Gill, McLean and Henwood).

• Narrative research may be conducted deliberately in relation to visual materials (Harrison).

• Visual narratives may be set up as the object of research when, for instance, participants are asked to make video diaries (Woollett

and Marshall) or photo-biographies (Chalfen).• An more participant-centred way of conducting such

visualresearch is to ask people to make photo-diaries (Radley)

or visual autobiographies (Esin and Squire)• The visual-narrative nature of psychic life and of

everyday realities and of popular media may be the focus of research (Walkerdine).

• Visual stories of remembering may be therapeutically• deployed and researched for their therapeutic value

(Spence).

RiessmanAfter

Where’s the Kinds of data Sites of visual Focus of analysisnarrative? inquiryStory made Archived/pub- Image; prod- eg: representation ofby researcher lished images uction and audienc- Japanese Americansfrom pictures ing (limited) during world war 2 (Creef)

Story in images Archived/pub- Image and words; eg: artist illness experienceand/or words of lished images production and (Bell); artist identitiesan artist/writer and/or words audiencing (limited) (Tamboukou)

Participant Research data Image and words; eg: functioning of familystory in words (images, words) production; photographs (Harrison)about an image/s audiencing

Participant story Research data Image; production; eg: adolescent girls’ identityin image/s (images) audiencing (limited) performances (Pini)

Story in making Research data Image (limited); prod- eg subjectivities of pregnant and audiencing (field records) uction and audiencing teenage girls (Luttrell)

A visual autobiography: Anwar (15)I just done it to, express myself. Well basically what

happens in, when you go to different areas and people

are like, how, how can you be safe...Yeah that’s the red

bullets it shows, as in, around London, wherever you go

people are getting killed, stuff like that, so yeah...I drew

the stars to show black eyes, so yeah, it’s like you’re

knocked out, have you seen some animations/oh yeah/

when you get knocked out, you start getting stars...it’s

to show how people can be more careful...basically it’s

(tags of) all my friends you know...20, 25 of us, there’s

more, I didn’t include them, where I live, the street,

area, postcode, stuff like that yeah…I think when I just

look at this yeah, it feels like, there’s other stuff in life

you could do instead of hanging around with a group

of people, it ain’t gonna get you through anything in a

way, as in, everyone needs education to become some-

one...it might be fun to do, but like yeah, if I stay with them, if I’ll stay with them some times, say once every two, three days.

Workshop questions

•Does the image tell us anything different from the words?

•Are the meanings of the image more context-dependent and/or more open than those of the words?

•Could the research report work without the image?

•Would Harrison’s and/or Riessman’s framework be useful for understanding this research?

•Does this kind of study suggest that narrative research should restrict, or expand, its work across different media?

•Is the image a narrative?