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ABSTRACT
This essay explores four different versions of visual sociology – and a fifth that centers on their relatedness – that scholar-practitioners frequently have to navigate, acknowledge or otherwise attend to in their own research and teaching. Over the past five decades, the first four became familiar to me through my own engagement in visual sociology, and the fifth emerged while writing this essay. Taken together, these different versions of visual sociology can be perplexing. Passing through them over the course of a somewhat atypical academic career, however, led me recently to rediscover visual sociology once again, not only as a mode of sociological inquiry, but also as a form of recursive praxis that can enrich understanding of culture and social life for both academic and folk communities.
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Jon Wagner
Jon Wagner is Professor Emeritus in Education at the University of California, Davis. His current research and teaching interests include the phenomenology of Alzheimer's and dementia care; visual communication for public and private audiences; and the visual commons of residential landscapes. Past interests include children's material culture, qualitative and visual research methods, school change, and the social and philosophical foundations of education. He is a past President of the International Visual Sociology Association and was founding Image Editor of Contexts magazine (American Sociological Association, 2001-2004).