The central aim of this four-volume collection is to explore key approaches to visual research methods and to consider some of the core principles, issues, debates and controversies surrounding the use of visual techniques in relation to three key enterprises: 1) documentation and representation; 2) interpretation and classification and 3) elicitation and collaboration.
Volume One: Principles, Issues, Debates and Controversies in Visual Research serves as a theoretical backdrop to the field as a whole. It introduces core epistemological, ethical and methodological debates that effectively cut across the four volume collection as a whole.
Volume Two: Documentation and Representation illustrates approaches to visual documentation and representation, from classical documentaries to contemporary, state of the art modes of visual anthropology and ethnography.
Volume Three: Interpretation and Classification examines core debates surrounding and approaches to visual analysis.
Volume Four: Elicitation and Collaboration explores participative approaches to visual inquiry.
Jason Hughes is Professor and Head of the School of Media, Communication and Sociology at the University of Leicester. His first book, Learning to Smoke (2003, Chicago Press), which synthesised aspects of the work of Howard Becker with that of Foucault and Elias, won the 2006 Norbert Elias prize. He has also coauthored with Ruth Simpson and Natasha Slutskaya Gender, Class and Occupation: Working Class Men Doing Dirty Work (Palgrave, 2016), and, together with Eric Dunning, Norbert Elias and Modern Sociology: Knowledge, Interdependence, Power, Process (Bloomsbury, 2013). Other works include the edited volumes Visual Methods (SAGE, 2012) and Internet Research Methods (SAGE, 2012), and coedited volumes Contemporary Approaches to Ethnographic Research (SAGE, 2018), Documentary and Archival Research (SAGE, 2016), Moral Panics in the Contemporary World (Bloomsbury, 2013), and Communities of Practice: Critical Perspectives (Routledge, 2007). His current research, funded by Cancer Research UK, is investigating the “careers” of adolescent e-cigarette users.