Sociology of the Visual Sphere (co-edited with Dennis Zuev)

Sociology of the Visual Sphere Edited by Regev Nathansohn, Dennis Zuev This collection of original articles deals with two intertwined general questions: what is the visual sphere, and what are the means by which we can study it sociologically? These questions serve as the logic for dividing the book into two sections. The first (“Visualizing the Social, Sociologizing the Visual”) focuses on the meanings of the visual sphere, and the second (“New Methodologies for Sociological Investigations of the Visual”) explores various sociological research methods to getting a better understanding of the visual sphere. We approach the visual sphere sociologically because we regard it as one of the layers of the social world. It is where humans produce, use, and engage with the visual in their creation and interpretation of meanings. Under the two large inquiries into the “what” and the “how” of the sociology of the visual sphere, a subset of more focused questions is posed: what social processes and hierarchies make up the visual sphere? How are various domains of visual politics and visuality related (and how are they presented in such a way)? What are the relations between sites and sights in the visual research? What techniques help visual researchers to increase sensorial awareness of the research site? How do imaginaries of competing political agents interact in different global contexts and create unique, locally-specific visual spheres? What constitutes competing interpretations of visual signs? The dwelling on these questions brings here eleven scholars from eight countries to share their research experience from a variety of contexts and sites, utilizing a range of sociological theories, from semiotics to poststructuralism. December 2012: 192pp Hb: 978-0-415-80700-5: $125. $100. Dennis Zuev is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (CIES-ISCTE-IUL) in Lisbon, Portugal. Regev Nathansohn is the president (2010-2014) of the Visual Sociology Thematic Group working under the International Sociological Association, and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann-Arbor. Selected Contents: 1. Sociology of the Visual Sphere Part I: Visualizing the Social, Sociologizing the Visual 2. The Limits of the Visual in the “War Without Witness” 3. From a Slight Smile to Scathing Sarcasm 4. Sociology of Iconoclasm 5. Picturing “Gender” Part II: New Methodologies for Sociological Investigations of the Visual 6. Production of Solidarities in YouTube 7. On the Visual Semiotics of Collective Identity in Urban Vernacular Spaces 8. Representing Perception 9. Operations of Recognition For more information on Sociology of the Visual Sphere, please visit: http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415807005/ ERJ67 sociology@routledge.com www.routledge.com/sociology sociology@routledge.com 

ROUTLEDGE ADVANCES IN SOCIOLOGY Sociology of the Visual Sphere Edited by Regev Nathansohn and Dennis Zuev Sociology of the Visual Sphere This collection of original articles deals with two intertwined general questions: what is the visual sphere, and what are the means by which we can study it sociologically? These questions serve as the logic for dividing the book into two sections, the fi rst (“Visualizing the Social, Sociologizing the Visual”) focuses on the meanings of the visual sphere, and the second (“New Methodologies for Sociological Investigations of the Visual”) explores various sociological research methods to getting a better understanding of the visual sphere. We approach the visual sphere sociologically because we regard it as one of the layers of the social world. It is where humans produce, use, and engage with the visual in their creation and interpretation of meanings. Under the two large inquiries into the “what” and the “how” of the sociology of the visual sphere, a subset of more focused questions is being posed: what social processes and hierarchies make up the visual sphere? How various domains of visual politics and visuality are being related (or being presented as such)? What are the relations between sites and sights in the visual research? What techniques help visual researcher to increase sensorial awareness of the research site? How do imaginaries of competing political agents interact in diferent global contexts and create unique, locally-specific visual spheres? What constitutes competing interpretations of visual signs? The dwelling on these questions brings here eleven scholars from eight countries to share their research experience from variety of contexts and sites, utilizing a range of sociological theories, from semiotics to post-structuralism. Dennis Zuev is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (CIES-ISCTE-IUL) in Lisbon, Portugal. 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London 84 Innovation in Socio-Cultural Context Edited by Frane Adam and Hans Westlund 85 Youth, Arts and Education Reassembling Subjectivity through Affect Anna Hickey-Moody 86 The Capitalist Personality Face-to-Face Sociality and Economic Change in the PostCommunist World Christopher S. Swader 87 The Culture of Enterprise in Neoliberalism Specters of Entrepreneurship Tomas Marttila 88 Islamophobia in the West Measuring and Explaining Individual Attitudes Marc Helbling 89 The Challenges of Being a Rural Gay Man Coping with Stigma Deborah Bray Preston and Anthony R. D’Augelli 90 Global Justice Activism and Policy Reform in Europe Understanding When Change Happens Edited by Peter Utting, Mario Pianta and Anne Ellersiek 91 Sociology of the Visual Sphere Edited by Regev Nathansohn and Dennis Zuev Sociology of the Visual Sphere Edited by Regev Nathansohn and Dennis Zuev NEW YORK LONDON First published 2013 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Taylor & Francis The right of Regev Nathansohn and Dennis Zuev to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sociology of the visual sphere / edited by Regev Nathansohn and Dennis Zuev. p. cm. — (Routledge advances in sociology ; 91) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Visual sociology. I. Nathansohn, Regev. II. Zuev, Dennis. HM500.S63 2013 301—dc23 2012032647 ISBN13: 978-0-415-80700-5 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-06665-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by IBT Global. Contents List of Figures List of Tables and Graphs 1 Sociology of the Visual Sphere: Introduction ix xi 1 REGEV NATHANSOHN AND DENNIS ZUEV PART I Visualizing the Social, Sociologizing the Visual 2 The Limits of the Visual in the “War without Witness” 13 PAVITHRA TANTRIGODA 3 From a Slight Smile to Scathing Sarcasm: Shades of Humor in Israeli Photojournalism 25 AYELET KOHN 4 Sociology of Iconoclasm: Distrust of Visuality in the Digital Age 42 ŁUKASZ ROGOWSKI 5 Picturing “Gender”: Iconic Figuration, Popularization, and the Contestation of a Key Discourse in the New Europe 57 ANNA SCHOBER PART II New Methodologies for Sociological Investigations of the Visual 6 Production of Solidarities in YouTube: A Visual Study of Uyghur Nationalism MATTEO VERGANI AND DENNIS ZUEV 83 viii 7 Contents On the Visual Semiotics of Collective Identity in Urban Vernacular Spaces 108 TIMOTHY SHORTELL AND JEROME KRASE 8 Representing Perception: Integrating Photo Elicitation and Mental Maps in the Study of Urban Landscape 129 VALENTINA ANZOISE AND CRISTIANO MUTTI 9 Operations of Recognition: Seeing Urbanizing Landscapes with the Feet 160 CHRISTIAN VON WISSEL Contributors Index 183 187 Figures 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 7.1 7.2 7.3 8.1 8.2 8.3 Elections, Tess Scheflan, 2009. Tel-Aviv Beach, Alex Levac, 2005. Ariel Sharon, Micha Kirshner, 1983. Tufah village, Pavel Wolberg (printed in Wolberg, 2006). Daniela Comani, from the series “EINE GLÜCKLICHE EHE” (A HAPPY MARRIAGE): #2, 2003, © Daniela Comani. Jenny Saville, “Passage” (2005), © Jenny Saville. “Jake the Rapper,” Gender Bender Festival catalogue (2007), © Harald Popp and Jake the Rapper. Graiti, Berlin, Friedrichshain, 2009, © Henning Onken. Language used in YouTube videos about Uyghurs. Clash of Chinese and Uyghur symbols in nationalist ideological code. Map symbolism in nationalist (pan-Turkist) ideological code. The iconic clash of Turkic and Chinese civilizations. Images of purity and nature in human rights ideological code. Militants from Islamic Party of East Turkestan issue a warning to the Chinese authorities. Phatic signs of collective identity. Expressive signs of collective identity. Conative and poetic signs of collective identity. Mental map overlapping with the geographical map extracted from GoogleEarth. The interface of the Flash application that generates hybridization between the mental map and the geographical map showing the correspondences between the elements present in the two maps. Top: research area and interviews’ localization; bottom: photo elicitation set. 31 32 33 37 65 67 71 73 89 93 94 95 97 98 117 120 122 139 140 142 x Figures 8.4 Top: mental map with high correspondence. Bottom: mental map with north and south completely reversed made by interviewee GR3-Int05-B. 8.5 The two sets of photos (A and B) used for the photo elicitation. 9.1 The Pylon and the Bank Account Monuments. 9.2 The Manhole Monument and Monumental Line. 9.3 The Tyre and Pyramid Monuments. 147 150 173 174 175 Tables and Graphs TABLES 8.1 Photos’ Recognition 8.2 Photos’ Positioning on the Mental Map 144 144 GRAPHS 8.1 Degree of correspondence and number of places marked on the mental maps. 148 1 Sociology of the Visual Sphere Introduction Regev Nathansohn and Dennis Zuev This collection of original articles deals with two intertwined general questions: what is the visual sphere, and what are the means by which we can study it sociologically?1 These questions serve as the logic for dividing the book into two sections: the fi rst (“Visualizing the Social, Sociologizing the Visual”) focuses on the meanings of the visual sphere, and the second (“New Methodologies for Sociological Investigations of the Visual”) explores various sociological research methods to getting a better understanding of the visual sphere. We approach the visual sphere sociologically because we regard it as one of the layers of the social world. It is where humans produce, use, and engage with the visual in their creation and interpretation of meanings. 2 Under the two large inquiries into the “what” and the “how” of the sociology of the visual sphere, a subset of more focused questions is being posed: What social processes and hierarchies make up the visual sphere? How are various domains of visual politics and visuality being related (or being presented as such)? What are the relations between sites and sights in the visual research? What techniques help visual researcher to increase sensorial awareness of the research site? How do imaginaries of competing political agents interact in diferent global contexts and create unique, locally specific visual spheres? What constitutes competing interpretations of visual signs? The dwelling on these questions brings here eleven scholars from eight countries to share their research experience from variety of contexts and sites, utilizing a range of sociological theories, from semiotics to post-structuralism. This book joins a growing literature on visual sociology and anthropology.3 In this introduction, it is our intention to highlight what we see as the contribution of this book to the larger body of scholarly literature on the topic. Ultimately, it is our intention here to “normalize” visual sociology as an integral component of sociological study. What this collection proposes is that the visual is everywhere, no matter where you “look.” Indeed, and much like every other field of sociological inquiry, there are unique characteristics also to the visuals. These are well expressed in every research context of the chapters in this book. However, these characteristics always—although to changing degrees—interact with other sociological 2 Regev Nathansohn and Dennis Zuev factors such as class, gender, ethno-racial power relations, and institutionalization, to name a few. This is the reason we suggest to normalize the visual within the sociological research. Suggesting to normalize the visual within sociology does not assume that sociologists have yet discovered the visual. In fact, visuality and the visual sense has since long time been discussed as sociologically relevant and significant, for example, to our understanding of mobilities (Urry 2000) and of social existence (Sztompka 2008). Moreover, the theory of iconic consciousness, proposed by Jefrey Alexander (see, e.g., Alexander 2010, Alexander et al. 2012), intends to recover the invisible strands of meaning in the aesthetic of mundane materiality of everyday life arguing that everyday experience is iconic. However, despite what is widely conceived as the totality of the visual in the modern world, the verbal register in mainstream sociology still maintains its ascendancy over the visual one. Nevertheless, at the same time we are exposed to new communities of visual practices, such as social networking sites and YouTube, which emerge alongside the more classic social practices of visual interaction (and visual practices of social interaction). This constantly shifting field of enquiry requires continuous reflexivity and an ongoing development of research and observation tools. The authors in this book all problematize diferent aspects of the visual sphere, from production and circulation of images, to their various framings by diferent actors for their individual and political purposes. In each of the chapters of this book there is an interplay between the general and the specific, where various theoretical and methodological aspects of the visual analysis are being contextualized in individual case studies. The conjunction of all researches shared here teaches us on the necessity to conceive the visual sphere as a multitude of relations between the images, their agency, and politics, whereby meanings are created and negotiated. The image, we learn, has an agency which extricates it from the confi ning status of a mere representation to-be-interpreted. It is also an active force directed both at the audience and at the producer, but also at institutions which are involved in circulating it. Overall, the chapters in this book establish the notion that the visual sphere—where images are produced, circulated, interpreted, reproduced, and re-imagined—is an active social force in both regulating human relationships as well as in subverting it. In the analysis of the visual sphere it is therefore paramount to put to scrutiny the location of the visual in the interactions between human agency and institutional constraints. The authors in this collection examine such interactions in various empirical settings, from urban landscapes to collective identities, and from modes of production of images to the means by which they become visible through various media. Our main argument in this book, therefore, is that in order to better understand the social world we cannot overlook the visual sphere. The first part of the book teaches us both on what we can fi nd in the visual sphere, Sociology of the Visual Sphere 3 as well as what social mechanisms are at work in creating, maintaining, and subverting it. The second part exposes us to methodologies of learning and analyzing the visual data we collect and produce. In both parts of the book, although the authors highlight the visual aspects of social life, they also remind us—whether implicitly or explicitly—that the visual cannot stand alone in the desire to understand the social. Therefore, we wish to emphasize here how in some observations shared in this book the visual signifies other social mechanisms, whereas in other cases the visual is regarded as a trigger for social transformations. The fi rst part of the book opens with Tantrigoda’s research (Chapter 2) which brings to the fore a discussion on the truth value of visual representations. Building on the case of media representations of the conflict between the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Tantrigoda highlights the overarching assumption among the various actors in this conflict that there is a reality out there, but that this reality is also easy to be manipulated once subjected to visual representation by political actors. In the examples analyzed by Tantrigoda we see how in some cases the politics of representation and the controversy over the reliability of images can overshadow the discussion on the represented conflict to the degree that it becomes an integral part of the confl ict itself. Much like other social spheres, the visual sphere, therefore, should be understood in context, and it is our responsibility as critical viewers to learn as much as we can about the political conditions which enable specific mechanisms of production and dissemination of images in order to develop a careful reading of the visual. The notion of “manipulation” is problematized in the following chapter, where Kohn (Chapter 3) focuses on how manipulations are in fact embedded within the modes of production of visual representations. Particularly, she shows us how a photographer’s gaze can frame a certain situation to be seen in the photograph as a humorous scene. Analyzing photographs taken by Israeli photojournalists, Kohn focuses on the gap between the “reality” and its representations by means of creative intervention of the photographer who signals incongruousness in the scene. The absurdities such photographs present may then allow the viewers to develop critical observation and to rethink scenes they may be familiar with. This is how the act of production of the visual—by means of looking, framing, and presenting—may change the ways we look at our surrounding, interpret it, and react to it politically. This, however, could be achieved only when the photographer and the viewers share similar social conventions. According to Kohn, the perceived synchronicity of everything that is captured within the photographic frame precludes the common mechanism in humor—that of gradually arriving to the punch. Thus, to be successful it must be compensated by building on previous and shared knowledge of the photographer with the viewers. In her examination of the various gazes juxtaposed in some of the images—the gaze of the photographer, the 4 Regev Nathansohn and Dennis Zuev gaze of the photographed, and the gaze of the viewers—Kohn suggests, for example, that what she calls “the contemptuous gaze” can serve as another mechanism that not only compensates on the synchronic interpretation of the image but also opens the possibility for critical self-examination. This is the moment when an image may serve as a trigger for reexamination of other social elements, which—depending on other social factors—can lead to social transformations. An examination of the relations between social transformations and the visual sphere is shared by Rogowski (Chapter 4), who analyzes contemporary formations of iconoclasm (transformation iconoclasm, digital iconoclasm, and everyday iconoclasm) and situates their practices within the history of distrust and destruction of visual images. Rogowski’s analysis suggests considering iconoclasm as a prism through which we can examine the changes of functioning of the visual sphere, the changing ontological status of the visual, and the changing relations between sites, sight, and other senses. Rogowski’s defi nition of certain contemporary digital manipulations of images as iconoclasm is a thought-provoking exercise which assumes that images still retain powers beyond their materiality and that destroying them can have an efect in the world. In a way, Rogowski’s analysis paints the visual sphere as a battlefield where images are both the targets and the means of achieving the targets. While Rogowski invites us to think about digital iconoclasm as a contemporary image-based mechanism for intervention in the social sphere, Schober (Chapter 5) ofers an analysis which shares similar assumptions with regards to the power of images in the social sphere, but ofers diferent practices for achieving it. In the examples she analyzes, it is not iconoclasm that the social actors (visual artists, in her case) choose as their course of action, but the creative forms of visual innovations. Schober is particularly interested in the ways whereby the concept of “gender” appears in the public sphere, in the struggles around it, and in the options the visual sphere can ofer in generating a social change. Schober investigates a variety of popular and artistic adoptions of concepts of gender in diverse European cultural contexts, and focuses on the visually based attempts to rearrange the public discourse from focusing on “women” to the problematization of gender. Images of gender, Schober argues, perform a double-edged role: on the one hand, they increase the public profile of gender; on the other, these images show how sociological concepts and interpretations can be put to crisis. The cases examined by Schober may lead to distrust mainstream visualizations of gender where the concept is presented as a seamless and non-conflicting reality. Such iconic images of gender may clash with the empirical reality of multiple gender configurations. Schober thus shows how the visual sphere can serve as a platform for testing, exposing, and playing with new—and old—social concepts. It allows for the imagination to be public, to be displayed, and to be discussed and negotiated by means of verbal and visual languages. The visual sphere Sociology of the Visual Sphere 5 can thus serve as a playground for ideas yet to be institutionalized. Once the image is being “freed” from the constraints of the social norms, she argues, what might seem familiar—such as concepts of masculinity, femininity, androgyny, sexuality, family, and genealogy—could be challenged and confronted with the much more chaotic experiences that the social order aspires to suppress. What these approaches assume is that the visual is more than a medium. Indeed, it can serve as a medium for maintaining the normative social order, or for challenging it. The chapters in this section show that the visual is also an integral part of the wider social sphere, and has its own version of chaos and order. The visual is perceived as being more than a medium because it not only conveys messages; it also acts and is acted upon. But the visual is not alone, as the chapters in the second section of this collection show so well. While Schober discusses several visually-based attempts to change the way we think about “gender,” such a focus on the visual (how gender looks) hinders experiences related to other sensual or to non-sensual aspects of gender, which are not necessarily visual (or not always visual, or not in causal relations with the visual). Turning from the sociology of the visual sphere to the sociology of “visualism,” we may ask: if we assume that what is material is also visualizeable, then what is the visual status of that which is ideal? In the examples that Schober discusses, we see that what is imagined can be visualized, and thus materialized. Therefore, it is possible to argue that visualizing the imagined (or idealized) must be materially mediated. This argument, however, is being further problematized in each of the chapters in this collection, with every doubt they expose (e.g., in the debate over the veracity of images in Tantrigoda’s chapter), and with every gap they point at (such as the temporal gap between a political revolution and the following iconoclastic events described in Rogowski’s chapter, or the gap between people’s perceptions of their environment and the maps they draw, as described in Anzoise and Mutti’s chapter). Instead of ofering a solution to the paradoxical position of the visual within the matrixes of the material/ideal and imagined/real, what the sociology of the visual sphere can ofer is an elaboration on the human creative experiences in acting with and against the visual not only despite these paradoxes but also by utilizing them. Some of the means by which such sociological investigation can be carried out are exemplified in the second part of the book, where the authors discuss contemporary research methods ranging from analysis based on photos taken by the researchers (and elaborating on how to take them, and how to store and organize them), through analyzing visuals (photographs, drawings, video clips) created by the research subjects, to analyzing the interaction with and interpretations of the visual world which surrounds us. The second section opens with Vergani and Zuev’s research (Chapter 6) which ofers tools for visual analysis in the Web 2.0 age, thereby defi ning YouTube as a social space. They show how a study on Uyghur nationalism 6 Regev Nathansohn and Dennis Zuev can benefit enormously from analyzing the various aspects of YouTube clips on the topic: the content and form of the clips; their modes and contexts of production, circulation, and reception; and the interactions between the clips’ viewers and the network of YouTube users. Their chapter thus presents an innovative inquiry into current day’s means by which political mobilization is taking place in a context of ethno-national confl ict. Like other contributors to this book, Vergani and Zuev also show how the visual cannot stand alone. Thus, besides exploring the various ramifications of the topic under investigations (in their case, the technical means of producing YouTube videos and the competing ideological codes expressed in them, to name a few), they also show how these could be integrated with other elements related to the topic (such as the linguistic aspects of the YouTube videos). Additionally, and much like Anzoise and Mutti (Chapter 8), they also ofer a mixed methods approach and demonstrate how quantitative and qualitative analyses feed one another and contribute to the fi ne tuning of the research protocol, as well as to the crystallization of the main sociological argument. It is this research method that leads them, for example, to uncover the optimism of Uyghur nationalists to engender change and internationalize the confl ict between Han Chinese and Uyghurs via YouTube. Shortell and Krase (Chapter 7) also utilize the Internet, although for a diferent purpose. Throughout the recent years they have created an online public visual database which contains thousands of images available for everyone to explore and analyze. This database contains images Shortell and Krase keep producing for their study of glocalization in urban settings. Based on these researcher-produced images, Shortell and Krase study the various visual expressions of glocalization. Traveling between several global cities throughout the world (sometimes visiting the same city more than once) they took thousands of pictures of urban neighborhoods that serve as their raw data to be analyzed. In their contribution for this book they share part of their larger project, and focus on images they took in seven global cities. To show how urban vernacular neighborhoods in these cities change as a result of globalization they extend Jakobson’s semiotics to be useful for an analysis of visual signs in the urban setting and couple it with symbolic interactionism. Both of these methods are being used here under the framework of the grounded theory, which allows them to reveal the manner in which local groups and individuals assert agency in a multitude of ways and intervene in the vernacular space by performing visible signs of their collective identity. These signs, once documented by visual researchers, create what Shortell and Krase call “the photographic survey,” which allows researchers to conduct various kinds of analyses to enrich our knowledge of the social sphere. Much like Vergani and Zuev, Shortell and Krase suggest paying close attention to visual signs which they perceive as being at the heart of social interaction to the degree that human intersubjective experience is dependent upon them. Focusing on photographs as a source for rich visual data Sociology of the Visual Sphere 7 (which remains in a fi xed form) has in itself a lot of advantages. Nevertheless, the spatial-temporal boundaries of the photograph also limit the ability to learn more about what is beyond it, and what preceded it. For example, these limitations make it diicult to directly infer from the visuals an argument about causality, about agents’ intentionality and motivation, and about collective identities other than pointing at their visual expressions and at the ways these expressions may vary in diferent times and places. Whether there is a fi xed and stable relationship between an identity and its visual expression, or whether identities themselves transform over time, and how, or whether a certain identity is stable or fluid in the manner people attribute it to themselves—are questions the answers to which cannot be based on visual evidence alone. Rather, such visual analysis can certainly teach on changes in visual signs and their interconnectedness in time and space, thereby stimulate more nuanced sociological questions. Thus, Shortell and Krases’s useful elaboration on their method could be regarded as a call for a utilization of mixed methods in the sociological analysis, the visual being one of them. Besides Vergani and Zuev’s example, another innovative example for mixed methods approach is shared by Anzoise and Mutti (Chapter 8). They adopt a more reflexive methodological account based on their experience in conducting research on people’s perceptions of their environment. In their account they discuss what could be presented as a methodology of multilayering the visual. They describe in detail the gradual and interactive process of creating the corpus of visual data to be analyzed. This process is then followed by the actual analysis wherein additional visual data is being used as a point of reference that the previous data is to be compared against. According to their methodological approach, in order to get closer to people’s perceptions (on their environment, as in their case studies, or on any other topic) it is imperative to use several methodologies, the juxtaposition of which may overcome some of the limitations of each of these methodologies when used alone. Thus, a combination of maps drawn by research subjects, with photoelicitation interviews using both researcher-generated photographs and found images, as well as with the visual surrounding at the location where interviews are being held—all serve as equally significant data to be integrated into the analysis. By utilizing such a mixed methods approach, and once conducted in a reflexive manner which accounts for all participants’ positions in the process of co-production of data, not only are the researchers able to achieve a more fine-tuned analysis, but they also gain the ability to dwell on cases which may have otherwise be marginalized or neglected. These, for example, are the cases of interviewees who do not submit themselves to the researchers’ request to draw a map of their surroundings. Only by also conducting an interview with them could the researchers understand that this, in fact, is an act of refusal derived from a regime of representation which assumes that drawing something—making it visible—confirms its existence to the degree that it might even legitimize it. Not drawing it, therefore, is 8 Regev Nathansohn and Dennis Zuev a subversive act not directed against the research procedure but against an element in the researched phenomenon. Anzoise and Mutti’s mixed methods approach convincingly shows how such cases should receive no less of researchers’ attention than any other case. The last chapter of the book elaborates on a diferent visually based subversive practice. In his inspiring essay, von Wissel (Chapter 9) diverts from the other chapters of this section in the sense that he focuses on the researcher’s own intervention in the visual sphere. In that regard, von Wissel’s approach, particularly because it is being examined in an urban setting, is antithetic to Shortell and Krase’s approach which is utterly non-interventionist. The authors of both chapters argue to be doing “grounded work”. However, whereas Shortell and Krase adopt the inductive grounded theory approach in collecting their data, von Wissel claims to be adopting a grounded perspective which is also embodied, in the sense that “you see with your feet,” to get a better feeling of your surroundings and the various means of interaction with it. Because von Wissel’s approach is not limited to conventional ways of seeing, rather to imagination-based seeing whereby the unremarkable turns monumental, it could be argued that his approach is a deductive one: seeing the familiar in the unfamiliar. Von Wissel’s thought-provoking suggestion is based on his utilization of Robert Smithson’s artistic “operations of recognitions” in 1967’s New Jersey. Von Wissel takes this method to his own personal experiential-poetic enquiry in the urbanizing landscape of the municipality of Tecámac, Mexico. His experience then leads him to an intriguing discussion on the relevance of this approach to sociologists who are interested in non-traditional tools for seeing the urban, and for accessing the means by which the urban is being seen. The chapters in this section therefore demonstrate diferent sociological techniques of making sense of the urban life by visual means. For the various authors in this section, urban landscapes not only provide a site for developing practices of seeing; they also provide assemblage of sights, which triggers sharpened observations of competing relations between dwellers and systems of signification, ideological codes, and signs of collective identity. Shortell and Krase, for example, employ photographic survey to record visual information at a particular (urban) place and time. They promote an approach according to which the researchers travel to create a systematic visual record of the physical and social sides of streetscapes. Von Wissel, on the other hand, employs Smithson’s practice of “seeing with the feet,” and Anzoise and Mutti not only travel themselves through Milan’s urban space but also make an attempt to analyze the relations between the parts of Milan and its dwellers of diferent social origin. As Anzoise and Mutti argue, the imaginaries of the urban dwellers represented by the maps they draw (or refused to draw) show that identity of a place is always contested and multiple. This relationality of the identity of a place is further emphasized by von Wissel in his exploration of a (sub)urban site located thousands of miles away from Milan.