Books by maria-carolina cambre
Towards a sociology of selfies: The Filtered Face, 2023
This book examines selfies as a relational and processual networked social practice, performed be... more This book examines selfies as a relational and processual networked social practice, performed between people within digital contexts and that involve online/ offline intersections and tensions. It offers an analysis of selfies through a rich and interdisciplinary framework that explores the ritualized and affective engagements selfies provoke from others. Given that selfies by definition are shared and posted through networked platforms, they complicate notions of traditional photographic selfportraiture. As such, this book explores how selfies invoke broader, stratified patterns of looking that are occluded in discourses of "empowerment" and "visibility," as well as the subjectivities these networked practices work to produce. Drawing on extensive qualitative research conducted over a period of three years, this book questions not only what selfies are but what they do, the worlds they create, the imaginaries that organize them, and the flows of desire, affect, and normativity that underpin them, questions that can only be addressed through research that closely attends to the experience of selfie-takers. It will be of interest to those working in the fields of Sociology, Cultural studies, Communications, Visual studies, Social Media studies, Feminist research, and Affect Theory.
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Brill/Sense, 2022
This international collection presents theoretical, empirical and practiceled
considerations of w... more This international collection presents theoretical, empirical and practiceled
considerations of what can be envisioned as visual pedagogies, ofering
classic, creative, and contemporary re-workings of these paradigms. In
complementary yet overlapping parts, this book explores understandings
of visual pedagogies as learning with, through and/or about images, visual
and digital environments, embodied performances and immersive
experiences. As visual practices in academia gain momentum, the need to
navigate visuality in ways that enhance sensibility and awareness of
how/what we observe, analyze, criticize and reect on in any given
moment continues to grow. We understand visual pedagogies as nomadic
in the sense that the how and the what of image centered learning is not
separable. What does this mean? First it means recognizing pedagogical
practices as always already implicated. In other words, the form itself
carries its own message. Visual pedagogies respond to, and are actualized
within, the cultural contexts in which they are working. At the same time,
they carry the possibilities of being taken up in diverse ways beyond one
particular context. As living morphing practices, visual pedagogies expand
on contextual afordances, while at the same time providing the means of
exceeding them. Thus there are folk-literacies in perpetual movement that
are producing visual pedagogies where points of traction for theorizing
and research can form. These then can be mobilized as springboards for
analysis and examination of how visual pedagogies become apparent. This
book takes up multiple diverse contexts through an international selection
of authors. The parts work to address conceptual, empirical and practical
considerations through diferent emphases, yet in conversation with each
other.
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This book is about the way an image—the most reproduced image in the history of photography—has b... more This book is about the way an image—the most reproduced image in the history of photography—has been and is worked and reworked. The central image, from which the multitude of “spin-offs” have been produced, is known as Guerrillero Heroico,1 and was taken by in March 1960 by Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez (familiarly known as Korda).
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In press by maria-carolina cambre
The Nomadology of Visual Pedagogies, 2023
Pre-press introduction to collected edition "Visual Pedagogies: Concepts, Cases and Practices"
2n... more Pre-press introduction to collected edition "Visual Pedagogies: Concepts, Cases and Practices"
2nd Volume: Visual Pedagogies, Methodologies & Educational Research Series
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The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, 2021
The history of visual sociology is intimately entwined with the evolution of sociology and has di... more The history of visual sociology is intimately entwined with the evolution of sociology and has dispersed and episodic trajectories across various geographies and historical periods. In this entry, I will present visual sociology not as a subfield of sociology but rather as a para-field, and trace some of the historical routes and roots contributing to the ongoing emergence of post/disciplinary features. Addressing how and in what context the topic emerged will primarily focus on critical moments and thinkers whose contributions nourish the field in important ways but have sometimes been overlooked. To do visual sociology justice, this depiction must be considered a piece in a vastly larger ecology of schools of visual sociology intercontinentally and historically with diverging perspectives that merit being addressed in a more extensive work. The specific aims of this entry are to present critical points of traction that attend specifically to the questions of how this post/discipline matters for the study of images; what particular set of problems are raised; what consequences visual sociology has had that are important for image studies; and generally what visual sociology contributes to understanding images. Readers will not be surprised to find shared approaches, thinkers, and theoretical perspectives with other topic areas.
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Mediated Interfaces: The body on social media, 2020
An empirical analysis of a child vlogger and influencer’s YouTube Channels using Couldry and Hepp... more An empirical analysis of a child vlogger and influencer’s YouTube Channels using Couldry and Hepp’s version of Elias’s figuration theory and key aspects of children’s online identities and self-presentations.
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Current Sociology, 2019
Introduction to special sub-section on Visual Criminology and the Social Image/s of Crime
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Qulitative Inquiry, 2018
With this special issue, we aim to address visibility not just as a representation of the social,... more With this special issue, we aim to address visibility not just as a representation of the social, but as an aspect and element of social and cultural orders sui generis. The texts in this volume are dedicated to understanding the practices, power relations and the technological infrastructures in which (audio)-visual practices unfold. To make our proposition clear, we lay out a methodological strategy that we – drawing from the French debate – call sociology with the image. Then we provide an overview of the articles in this special issue and point to some ongoing tensions within qualitative inquiry more broadly.
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Sociological Theory, Methods, and Perspectives, Chapter 7, 2018
Our research on " digital self-display " (Lavrence and Cambre 2017) moves beyond the impasse/bina... more Our research on " digital self-display " (Lavrence and Cambre 2017) moves beyond the impasse/binary that much literature on selfies assumes between discourses pathologizing selfies, and discourses positing uncritical celebration of their potentialities to disrupt normative frameworks. Instead, we have undertaken to conduct a responsible, nuanced examination of the tensions and complexities articulated through our pilot phase of seven focus groups in ways we frame as " encounters that open up problems. " We situate selfies, not as merely objects, but rather as social practices. We understand selfie-ing from the start as inclusive of taking photos (plus repetitions), editing, subsequent online sharing (or not), shifting affective valences, and thought-processes: as relational, contextual processes situated in social structures and power relations. Beginning by listening to what people say and avoiding " plugging " data into pre-existing frameworks, we resist both post-qualitative and post-humanist trends reacting to scientistic qualitative research, and instead offer post-structuralist pathways.
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Knowings and Knots Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation (Loveless, N.Ed), 2019
This paper (in press) is part of a collection asking questions about research-creation, creation ... more This paper (in press) is part of a collection asking questions about research-creation, creation as research. It began as a poem performed publicly while walking around a colleague, whose paper I was responding to, with a tensor bandage wrapping and unwrapping, binding and unbinding his arms and torso as I changed direction in my circular windings. Slowly, I placed the lines written on sticky notes on his sweater after reading them. He was a sight, as well as the site of the performance, and together we troubled citational practices and notions of attribution. In a research-creation paradigm, what would these look like and how might they be understood? Are alternative citational practices required as current Western scholarship moves toward recognizing multimodal and performative knowledge production? This paper presents the provocative sight/site/citing of the poem through photographs of the sticky notes paralleled by reflections on this theme.
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Special Issue Edit by maria-carolina cambre
Social Media & Society, 2016
This introduction to the special issue entitled
Me-diated Inter-faces begins
by bringing into q... more This introduction to the special issue entitled
Me-diated Inter-faces begins
by bringing into question the concept of
positioning:
what is it that we are doing when we take a position within the study of social media? Reviewing the work of the inaugural
manifestos of the journal Social Media + Society on one hand, and the introduction to the special issue on selfies for the
International Journal of Communications on the other, this introduction provides both critical and creative in-roads for
thinking and re-thinking digital self-images shared on social media. Given the constantly changing nature of social media,
this paper is a call to researchers of social media to not fall prey to the ossification of our current positions since theorizing
the “social” in social media means always at once theorizing the body. As such this intro offers numerous and diverse
perspectives on the body that might inform emerging thoughts on the socially media body. The introduction then provides
an overview of the papers in this special issue and concludes by offering openings and ruptures for further discussion, rather
than closure or conclusions.
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Papers by maria-carolina cambre
Visual Studies, 2023
This brief response participates in the Visual Studies Round-table discussion of 2022 on the ques... more This brief response participates in the Visual Studies Round-table discussion of 2022 on the question of 'what is an image'
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Visual Pedagogies Concepts, Cases and Practices, Brill Publishers, 2023
Visual Pedagogies, Methodologies and Educational Research develops an inter-disciplinary dialogue... more Visual Pedagogies, Methodologies and Educational Research develops an inter-disciplinary dialogue exploring the relationship between visualisation and pedagogy in multiple global settings to understand our identities in our contemporary world where new technologies have made the visual and moving images ubiquitous in the lives of many people, in particular youth. It impacts on all domains of learning, education and being. This series seeks authors who can problematize the field and develop new understandings of visual cultures, visual modes of production, critiques of visuality in developing new theoretical approaches and methodologies. Contributions from educators from Early Childhood, K-12, Higher Education in all curriculum areas, artists, film-makers, scholars and practitioners are therefore welcomed from across the globe. The series complements the Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy which was established by the Association for Visual Pedagogies to promote video-oriented research concerning learning and teaching in its broadest sense.
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Communication & langages, 2022
Bien que la foodporn ne constitue évidemment pas une véritable pornographie, elle repose sur un i... more Bien que la foodporn ne constitue évidemment pas une véritable pornographie, elle repose sur un imaginaire culturel qui érotise la nourriture.
L’article étudie d’abord certaines de ses conventions iconiques marquantes, établissant que la nourriture y est souvent représentée comme un corps féminin à consommer. Il s’attache ensuite spécifiquement à ce qui survient lorsque dans l’image, de « vrais » corps féminins accompagnent la nourriture. L’analyse révèle qu’alors, la trame hédonique associée à la nourriture dans la foodporn se complexifie. La représentation assimile les corps féminins à des nourritures destinées à être consommées, mais au-delà du niveau référentiel, ces images fonctionnent grâce aux connotations, à l’esthétisation et à l’humour.
Cette polysémie pose la question de leur statut sémiotique dans l’univers numérique.
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This article seeks to amplify discursive constructions of social connection through technology wi... more This article seeks to amplify discursive constructions of social connection through technology with an examination of the proposed and presumed intimacies of the Tinder app. In the first half, we ethnographically examine the sociotechnical dynamics of how users navigate the app and take up or resist the subject positions encouraged by the user interface feature of swiping. In the second half, we provide a discussion of the implications of the swipe logic through post-structural conceptual lenses interrogating the ironic disruption of intimacy of Tinder’s interface.
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Social Media+Society, 2020
Filtered faces are some of the most heavily engaged photos on social media. The vast majority of ... more Filtered faces are some of the most heavily engaged photos on social media. The vast majority of literature on selfies have focused on self-reported practices of creating and posting selfies and how subjects view themselves, but research on using filters and the kinds of looking filter provoke is underexplored. Part of a larger project, this analysis draws from a study using photo-elicitation techniques to discuss selfie filters with 12 focus groups, exploring the dominant discourses of cis-gendered looking within digital sociality. We explore how participants edit their selfies, imagine potential audiences, interact with, and perceive the filtering behaviors of others, asking what the "work" of filters is, visually and socially. We probe the kinds of discourses filters participate in, and their gendered and affective dimensions. Our focus groups indicate that when looking at the selfies of others there is often an a priori assumption that filtering has been applied, whether conspicuously or not, to the extent that visual tune-ups have become central to the genre itself. As such, we explore the ambivalence and anxiety about authenticity that filters produce, as well as the intense looking practices aimed at decoding the legitimacy of images. We posit that filters are part of a digital ecosystem that demands an intensification of looking practices, which produce and enhance specific forms of objectification directed toward selves and others within digital environments.
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E Elgar Handbook of Qualitative Research Methodologies in workplace contexts, 2020
Introduction Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth CDA) is a qualitative approach that analyzes... more Introduction Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth CDA) is a qualitative approach that analyzes the context and content of spoken and written discourses, and has been called an epistemology, methodology and method. If we understand the concept of discourse to include the performative operations and uses of language beyond the words themselves, then analyzing discourses also requires asking why one discourse takes precedence over another (Olssen et al., 2004). Generally, educational policy scholars using CDA take critical theory perspectives alongside CDA to analyze "everything from mission statements and textbooks produced in response to a policy mandate, to transcripts of meetings and evidence considered during policymaking processes" (Lester et al., 2016). In this chapter, we conduct a critical review of the literature over a 10-year span in Canadian education policy research as a heuristic to examine how the reported use of CDA is represented, since CDA is becoming an increasingly important and powerful analytical approach for scholars in education and beyond. Significantly, researchers using CDA tend to reject the notion of research as value-free and use their research to address social justice issues through an activist research approach (Rogers et al., 2016). Our aim is to examine a salient cross-section of examples of articles claiming to take a CDA approach, during a timespan where it was gaining traction in the literature, assess their usage of CDA and make suggestions for further dialogue around operationalizing CDA. The criteria for inclusion/exclusion for this critical review considered year of publication (2008-2018), Canadian specific education policy and the use of CDA in titles or keywords. These constraints were put in place to limit breadth in order to provide a in depth critical review that could do a deep dive into operative definitions of CDA and how it being used in the specific area of policy analysis.
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Cultural Sociology, 2019
Popular discourse describing selfies as the narcissistic practice of teenagers or a tool of perso... more Popular discourse describing selfies as the narcissistic practice of teenagers or a tool of personal empowerment, minimize the structural constraints under which selfies operate as a ubiquitous mode of sociality. Based on focus group discussions in two Canadian cities, we explore how young adults describe their selfie experiences and explore three discursive tensions expressed in the transcripts. First, how questions of "control" were taken up; second, how "visibility" was understood as fragile, and animated by an anxiety of invisibility; third, the nature of "fun" that selfies generate. We conclude by exploring some of the epistemological shifts that these practices indicate.
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Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture, 2019
After the unsettling and tragic image of Alan Kurdi on the beach exploded into public consciousne... more After the unsettling and tragic image of Alan Kurdi on the beach exploded into public consciousness through news channels, it was modified many times through various kinds of media by people around the world. This chapter reflects on how the outpouring of subsequent Kurdi images sourced from the original photograph are inter-linked with each other and engaged in a visual dialog that no one fragment is entirely privy to, yet gestures towards. These iterations invisibly agitate and inform other images, such as that of Ai Weiwei who inhabits the child’s position through a gesture in another photograph. The invisible space of tension created by showing one thing to work through something else creates a parallelism on a basis of elective affinities that enables the structuring of the sensible.
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Qualitative Inquiry, 2018
With this special issue, we aim to address visibility not just as a representation of the social,... more With this special issue, we aim to address visibility not just as a representation of the social, but as an aspect and element of social and cultural orders and actions sui generis. The texts in this volume are dedicated to understanding the practices, power relations and the technological infrastructures in which (audio)-visual practices unfold. To make our proposition clear, we lay out a methodological strategy that we—drawing from French, German and Anglo-Saxon debate—call sociology with the image. Then we provide an overview of the articles in this special issue and point to some ongoing tensions within qualitative inquiry more broadly.
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Books by maria-carolina cambre
considerations of what can be envisioned as visual pedagogies, ofering
classic, creative, and contemporary re-workings of these paradigms. In
complementary yet overlapping parts, this book explores understandings
of visual pedagogies as learning with, through and/or about images, visual
and digital environments, embodied performances and immersive
experiences. As visual practices in academia gain momentum, the need to
navigate visuality in ways that enhance sensibility and awareness of
how/what we observe, analyze, criticize and reect on in any given
moment continues to grow. We understand visual pedagogies as nomadic
in the sense that the how and the what of image centered learning is not
separable. What does this mean? First it means recognizing pedagogical
practices as always already implicated. In other words, the form itself
carries its own message. Visual pedagogies respond to, and are actualized
within, the cultural contexts in which they are working. At the same time,
they carry the possibilities of being taken up in diverse ways beyond one
particular context. As living morphing practices, visual pedagogies expand
on contextual afordances, while at the same time providing the means of
exceeding them. Thus there are folk-literacies in perpetual movement that
are producing visual pedagogies where points of traction for theorizing
and research can form. These then can be mobilized as springboards for
analysis and examination of how visual pedagogies become apparent. This
book takes up multiple diverse contexts through an international selection
of authors. The parts work to address conceptual, empirical and practical
considerations through diferent emphases, yet in conversation with each
other.
In press by maria-carolina cambre
2nd Volume: Visual Pedagogies, Methodologies & Educational Research Series
Special Issue Edit by maria-carolina cambre
Me-diated Inter-faces begins
by bringing into question the concept of
positioning:
what is it that we are doing when we take a position within the study of social media? Reviewing the work of the inaugural
manifestos of the journal Social Media + Society on one hand, and the introduction to the special issue on selfies for the
International Journal of Communications on the other, this introduction provides both critical and creative in-roads for
thinking and re-thinking digital self-images shared on social media. Given the constantly changing nature of social media,
this paper is a call to researchers of social media to not fall prey to the ossification of our current positions since theorizing
the “social” in social media means always at once theorizing the body. As such this intro offers numerous and diverse
perspectives on the body that might inform emerging thoughts on the socially media body. The introduction then provides
an overview of the papers in this special issue and concludes by offering openings and ruptures for further discussion, rather
than closure or conclusions.
Papers by maria-carolina cambre
L’article étudie d’abord certaines de ses conventions iconiques marquantes, établissant que la nourriture y est souvent représentée comme un corps féminin à consommer. Il s’attache ensuite spécifiquement à ce qui survient lorsque dans l’image, de « vrais » corps féminins accompagnent la nourriture. L’analyse révèle qu’alors, la trame hédonique associée à la nourriture dans la foodporn se complexifie. La représentation assimile les corps féminins à des nourritures destinées à être consommées, mais au-delà du niveau référentiel, ces images fonctionnent grâce aux connotations, à l’esthétisation et à l’humour.
Cette polysémie pose la question de leur statut sémiotique dans l’univers numérique.
considerations of what can be envisioned as visual pedagogies, ofering
classic, creative, and contemporary re-workings of these paradigms. In
complementary yet overlapping parts, this book explores understandings
of visual pedagogies as learning with, through and/or about images, visual
and digital environments, embodied performances and immersive
experiences. As visual practices in academia gain momentum, the need to
navigate visuality in ways that enhance sensibility and awareness of
how/what we observe, analyze, criticize and reect on in any given
moment continues to grow. We understand visual pedagogies as nomadic
in the sense that the how and the what of image centered learning is not
separable. What does this mean? First it means recognizing pedagogical
practices as always already implicated. In other words, the form itself
carries its own message. Visual pedagogies respond to, and are actualized
within, the cultural contexts in which they are working. At the same time,
they carry the possibilities of being taken up in diverse ways beyond one
particular context. As living morphing practices, visual pedagogies expand
on contextual afordances, while at the same time providing the means of
exceeding them. Thus there are folk-literacies in perpetual movement that
are producing visual pedagogies where points of traction for theorizing
and research can form. These then can be mobilized as springboards for
analysis and examination of how visual pedagogies become apparent. This
book takes up multiple diverse contexts through an international selection
of authors. The parts work to address conceptual, empirical and practical
considerations through diferent emphases, yet in conversation with each
other.
2nd Volume: Visual Pedagogies, Methodologies & Educational Research Series
Me-diated Inter-faces begins
by bringing into question the concept of
positioning:
what is it that we are doing when we take a position within the study of social media? Reviewing the work of the inaugural
manifestos of the journal Social Media + Society on one hand, and the introduction to the special issue on selfies for the
International Journal of Communications on the other, this introduction provides both critical and creative in-roads for
thinking and re-thinking digital self-images shared on social media. Given the constantly changing nature of social media,
this paper is a call to researchers of social media to not fall prey to the ossification of our current positions since theorizing
the “social” in social media means always at once theorizing the body. As such this intro offers numerous and diverse
perspectives on the body that might inform emerging thoughts on the socially media body. The introduction then provides
an overview of the papers in this special issue and concludes by offering openings and ruptures for further discussion, rather
than closure or conclusions.
L’article étudie d’abord certaines de ses conventions iconiques marquantes, établissant que la nourriture y est souvent représentée comme un corps féminin à consommer. Il s’attache ensuite spécifiquement à ce qui survient lorsque dans l’image, de « vrais » corps féminins accompagnent la nourriture. L’analyse révèle qu’alors, la trame hédonique associée à la nourriture dans la foodporn se complexifie. La représentation assimile les corps féminins à des nourritures destinées à être consommées, mais au-delà du niveau référentiel, ces images fonctionnent grâce aux connotations, à l’esthétisation et à l’humour.
Cette polysémie pose la question de leur statut sémiotique dans l’univers numérique.
Here we explore the area of ethical consciousness as a location for decolonialism.
We emphasize the urgency in “cracking the canon” of what counts as knowledge
in education, & point out how digital literacies can play a critical role in achieving this if such literacy emerges from decolonial pedagogies and decolonial ethics spaces that ensure epistemic diversity and justice. We use, as example, the Inca knot system to describe that society’s complex and performative engagement with information- knowledge that gave attention to form as having critical meaning related to the inseparability of the ethics of knowledge, information, and communication. Using this foundation we continue with an in- depth discussion of digital literacies
and media literacy education. Thinking through how some current classroom practices
lack vital ethical foundations, and consequently students lack the critical skills
for understanding information technology in anything more than instrumental
ways.
proposed and presumed intimacies of the Tinder app. In the first half, we ethnographically examine the sociotechnical
dynamics of how users navigate the app and take up or resist the subject positions encouraged by the user interface feature of
swiping. In the second half, we provide a discussion of the implications of the swipe logic through post-structural conceptual
lenses interrogating the ironic disruption of intimacy of Tinder’s interface.
Robinson, L., Mashakalugo, C., Obol, A.J., Cambre, MC. (2015). Phenomenological passports: Youth and experiences of place, mobility and globalization. In S. Poyntz & J. Kennelly (Eds.), Phenomenology of youth cultures and globalization: Lifeworlds and surplus meanings in changing times.154-179. Routledge: Studies in Social and Political Thought Series.
discussing the online "group" anonymous, visual culture and social media activism, masking and unmasking, witnessing, semiotics, and the ideas of Deleuze & Guattari.
In the field we forge dialogic relations, crucial aspects of knowledge production. We use a variety of ways of recording and documenting what goes on at different stages of our research in formal and non-formal educational settings, based on methodological, theoretical and epistemological reasons. This session will focus on the methodological affordances and limitations of engaging with visual techniques when researching in formal and non-formal educational settings. Visual data are often produced and analyzed in relation to other types of data (e.g., written, oral and alternative modalities). One might then situate this type of research as multi-modal data production and analysis. The use of multi-modal data collection techniques and analyses demand closer attention since they attempt to decenter "words" or language in what comes to be understood as knowledge. We are particularly interested in discussing with those who conduct this kind of research: i) what epistemic and theoretical opportunities this kind of multi-layered methodological perspective has to
SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED THROUGH HOLIDAYS! (SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE THERE WERE SOME GLITCHES IN THE SUBMISSION SYSTEM)
The International Visual Sociology Association invites submissions for its 35th annual meeting that will take place at Concordia University, Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture [CISSC]) in Montreal, Canada.