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Doing Visual Ethnography
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Doing Visual Ethnography

Fourth Edition


January 2021 | 304 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd

This book is the definitive guide to understanding and doing visual ethnography.

Sarah Pink’s landmark text provides you with both the critical theoretical foundations and the creative tools and techniques you need to conduct your own visual ethnography.

Covering the material and the digital, and tying key concepts and ideas to real world contexts throughout, this fully updated fourth edition:

  • Provides clear and critical guidance on research planning and ethics
  • Discusses new and emerging technologies, including digitally connected devices and wearable cameras.
  •  Introduces contemporary methods such as futures ethnography, distance ethnography, team ethnography, and the use of documentary.
  • Explores the latest theory and practice in photographic and video ethnography.
  • Shows you how visual ethnography can be applied, participatory, and even interventional.

A milestone in visual and ethnographic research, this book is a must-have for students and researchers across the social sciences. It is an essential invitation, and companion, to doing impactful, creative, and critical visual research.

Sarah Pink Professor of Design and Emerging Technologies at Monash University, where she is also Director of the interdisciplinary Emerging Technology Research Lab.

 
Part I: Interdisciplinary Theory and Practice
 
Chapter 1: Interdisciplinary Visual Ethnography
 
Chapter 2: Seeing, Knowing and Sharing
 
Chapter 3: Design, Ethics and Practice
 
Part II: Making, Knowing and Meaning
 
Chapter 4: Photographic Ethnography Practice
 
Chapter 5: Video Ethnography Practice
 
Chapter 6: Making Visual Ethnographic Meanings
 
Part III: Sharing, Intervention and Futures
 
Chapter 7: Visual Ethnography in Scholarship
 
Chapter 8: Documentary and Visual Ethnography
 
Chapter 9: Interventional Visual Ethnography

Sarah Pink's work has been in the forefront of social research methods for decades. With this revised edition of Doing Visual Ethnography, she builds on her clear and compelling descriptions of how to do visual methods by incorporating discussion of the latest digitised ways of seeing, as well as emphasising the importance of multisensory, participatory and future-oriented approaches. Readers across the humanities and social sciences will find much in this book to intrigue and inspire them.

Deborah Lupton
The University of New South Wales

The fourth edition of Sarah Pink's classic, Doing Visual Ethnography, is a tour de force.  On each and every page of this important, wonderfully updated and insightful book, Pink demonstrates - in clear and compelling prose - a profound mastery of the technological, practical, theoretical and ethical intricacies of image-based ethnographic research in contemporary society.

This work is more than the presentation of a how-to set of of visual methodologies. Indeed, Doing Visual Ethnography is nothing less than a sophisticated and comprehensive model for conducting social science research in the 21st century - a gift for present and future ethnographers.

Paul Stoller
West Chester University, author of 'Adventures in Blogging: Public Anthropology and Popular Media'

This is an excellent book which I explicitly recommended to students to read. It's very clearly written and contains valuable information on how to use new technologies in visual methods. I will make it an essential reading next time.

Dr Tanja Ahlin
Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam
December 1, 2021