Transverse axis
"Images and social sciences

Images and social sciences: research through images

Study day on 14 May 2019 - MMSH

As part of the rapprochement between Cherpa and Lames, the aim of this day was to explore what the digital revolution is doing to the work of social science researchers concerned with empirical investigation and attention to social interactions, when it makes images much more easily exploitable (for recording-indexing, filming-framing-montage, hybridisation, etc.), and in different forms. The scattered initiatives we spotted among various researchers in the two laboratories made us want to take the census further and see whether coordinating these explorations in ways yet to be devised could give them a greater chance of success and more strength to work on our objects of investigation.

Beyond its illustrative uses, the image in the digital age offers new possibilities for writing about the social sciences, if we think of film writing, comic strip narration, web composition that not only articulates a number of themes, but is also a source of inspiration. media (including written text) but also opens up the possibilities of participatory science by making it possible to envisage new ways of collecting data and co-constructing interpretations with the people being studied. These practices of writing with images, which are still not very standardised in the social sciences, have the challenge of exploiting the specific appetite of reader-viewers for image-based media in our multi-media writing society. They also suggest ways of lightening the attention span usually demanded of readers of printed social sciences. Finally, they make room for infra-conscious ways of understanding social actions: using emotion, highlighting echoes and gaps with the biographical experience of the reader-spectator, establishing correspondences between the researcher's analyses and the spectator's reflection on his or her personal experience to produce an effect of understanding and conviction.

In addition to this approach to writing research using images, there are other approaches to research that are amplified by images. The first of these is the image as a means of gathering information about reality to facilitate the researcher's work. The digitisation and simplification of video recording enrich the still image of situations and the sound recording of interviews, as was the case with the camera and tape recorder, enabling the researcher to continue working at a distance from the field. They also make it easier to use group interviews, which are traditionally difficult to follow. Beyond that, when the researcher doesn't just put the camera down but takes it in hand, they open the way to capturing situations that are complex to ethnograph. This raises the question of the dual use of images: as objective information to be collected and, as such, a support for analysis, but also as evidence of reality for the social science public and, as such, a support for discussion. There are associated problems: a limit to the anonymity of the respondents, a reflection on the artefact effects linked to profiling or the possible instrumentalisation of the work of the social sciences by the players themselves when they see the researchers as megaphones/image-bearers.

Another area of research using images is the development of video-elicitation in social science research: not only from self-staged images (of family, work, etc.) or images produced by the researcher of the respondent's activity and discussed with him/her (filmic self-confrontation), but also from fictional images or images produced by social actors with their smartphones in their daily lives as exceptional-ordinary that deserves to be broadcast to their sociability to help them hold a (choice) place in it.

The image is also the product of a social activity, the expression of an operation of symbolisation and, as a social behaviour, it deserves to be the subject of social science research: we must therefore take seriously a search for images and a reflection on their conditions of production, distribution, reception, even hybridisation and rebroadcasting, of re-circulation with added value in the age of social networks. This requires a multi-dimensional reading of the image. This path quickly leads to research into images, i.e. how they are used (from production to formatting and hybridization before distribution and redistribution), and how they form part of strategies for self-presentation and collective mobilisation behind a cause, as a tool of power and defence.

In discussing these issues of research with-beyond-the-image, can we leave aside the question of disseminating research to as many people as possible, and that of training in research, in the sociological viewpoint, to use Hughes' phrase, and in thinking about graphic reason, to use Jack Goody's? Certainly not. Especially as the practice of teaching research using images is bound to lead to learning about image research and to reflection on research using images and on images.