Video, audio, photography, and other media are increasingly used in both applied and academic research as methods for inquiry, even as they are ever more prevalent in everyday life. Yet social scientific methods for utilizing audio and visual material and techniques remain dispersed across disciplines and ill-defined in terms of their theoretical value. This is particularly problematic for political science when we consider the way real-world aesthetics and audiovisual technologies are ushering in new forms of power and politics centered on performance, presentation, and affective response. Such a reality denotes an urgent need to develop skills that enable us to capture and understand these phenomena. This course offers a theoretical and practical introduction to audiovisual qualitative methods. It begins with epistemological discussions that situate audiovisual approaches within extant disciplinary paradigms before moving to hands-on exercises that develop skills and experience with data collection, argumentation and narrative. The final project presents an opportunity to think through the analytical crafting of research. We read across disciplines, drawing from political science and IR, visual anthropology, and sociology, bringing each of these into discussions that center on key concerns for the study of politics. The practice-oriented sections of the course rely on commonly accessible tools to produce a range of audiovisual research products. This class is recommended to be taken in combination with RI-SP135, “Ethnography for Political Science,” although there are no formal prerequisites. The course will be valuable for students seeking to employ visual and audial methods in their research and fieldwork, as well as any student seeking to better understand the evolving place of aesthetics in the discipline.
- Teacher: Alice Audrey Daquin
- Teacher: Michelle Weitzel