A guide to the methods and techniques used to visually study and communicate culture and society.

Luc Pauwels is Professor of Visual Research Methods in the Faculty of Social Sciences (Department of Communication Studies) and Director of the Visual and Digital Cultures Research Center (ViDi) at the University of Antwerp.

Part I. Remodelling Visual Social Science: 1. Prologue and outline: (re)framing visual social science?; 2. An integrated framework for conducting and assessing visual social research; Part II. The Visual Researcher as Collector and Interpreter: 3. Researching 'found' or 'pre-existing' visual materials; 4. A visual and multimodal model for analyzing online environments; Part III. The Visual Researcher as Producer, Facilitator and Communicator: 5. The mimetic mode: from exploratory to systematic visual data production; 6. Visual elicitation techniques, respondent-generated image production and 'participatory' visual activism; 7. The 'visual essay' as a scholarly format: art meets (social) science?; 8. Social scientific filmmaking and multimedia production: key features and debates; Part IV. Applications/Case Studies: 9. Family photography as a social practice: from the analogue to the digital networked world; 10. A visual study of corporate culture: the workplace as metaphor; 11. Health communication in South Africa: a visual study of posters, billboards and grassroots media; Part V. Visual Research in a Wider Perspective: 12. Ethics of visual research in the offline and online world; 13. A meta-disciplinary framework for producing and assessing visual representations; 14. Advancing visual research: pending issues and future directions.