Visual Anthropology

This article examines five common misunderstandings about case-study research: (a) theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge; (b) one cannot generalize from a single case, therefore, the single-case study cannot contribute to scientific development; (c) the case study is most useful for generating hypotheses, whereas other methods are more suitable for hypotheses testing and theory building; (d) the case study contains a bias toward verification; and (e) it is often difficult to summarize specific case studies. This article explains and corrects these misunderstandings one by one and concludes with the Kuhnian insight that a scientific discipline without a large number of thoroughly executed case studies is a discipline without systematic production of exemplars, and a discipline without exemplars is an ineffective one. Social science may be strengthened by the execution of a greater number of good case studies.

Back cover text: If the new fin de siècle marks a recurrence of the real, Bent Flyvbjerg’s Rationality and Power epitomizes that development and sets new standards for social and political inquiry. The Danish town of Aalborg is to Flyvbjerg what Florence was to Machiavelli: a laboratory for understanding the real workings of power, and for grasping what they mean to our more general concerns of social and political organization. Politics, administration, and planning are examined in ways that allow  a rare, in-depth understanding. The reader witnesses, firsthand, the classic and endless drama which defines what modernity and democracy are and can be.

This article presents the theoretical and methodological considerations behind a research method which the author calls ‘phronetic planning research’. Such research sets out to answer four questions of power and values for specific instances of planning: (1) Where are we going with planning? (2) Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? (3) Is this development desirable? (4) What, if anything, should we do about it? A central task of phronetic planning research is to provide concrete examples and detailed narratives of the ways in which power and values work in planning and with what consequences to whom, and to suggest how relations of power and values could be changed to work with other consequences. Insofar as planning situations become clear, they are clarified by detailed stories of who is doing what to whom. Clarifications of that kind are a principal concern for phronetic planning research and provide the main link to praxis.

Taken together, the works of Jurgen Habermas and Michel Foucault highlight an essential tension in modernity. This is the tension between the normative and the real, between what should be done and what is actually done. Understanding this tension is crucial to understanding modern democracy, what it is and what it could be. It has been argued that an effective way of making democracy stronger is to strengthen civil society. This article contains a comparative analysis of the central ideas of Habermas and Foucault as they pertain to the question of democracy and civil society. More specifically, the discourse ethics of Habermas is contrasted with the power analytics and ethics of Foucault evaluating their usefulness for those interested in understanding, and bringing about, democratic social change.

In this paper we argue that the use of the communicative theory of Jürgen Habermas in planning theory is problematic because it hampers an understanding of how power shapes planning. We posit an alternative approach based on the power analytics of Michel Foucault which focuses on ‘what is actually done’, as opposed to Habermas’s focus on ‘what should be done’. We discuss how the Foucauldian stance problematises planning, asking difficult questions about the treatment of legitimacy, rationality, knowledge and spatiality. We conclude that Foucault offers a type of analytic planning theory which offers better prospects than does Habermas for those interested in understanding and bringing about democratic social change through planning.

This article provides an answer to what has been called the biggest problem in theorizing and understanding planning: the ambivalence about power found among planning researchers, theorists, and students. The author narrates how he came to work with issues of power and gives an example of how the methodology he developed for power studies—phronetic planning research—may be employed in practice. Phronetic planning research follows the tradition of power studies running from Machiavelli and Nietzsche to Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. It focuses on four value-rational questions: (1) Where are we going with planning? (2) Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? (3) Is this development desirable? (4) What should be done? These questions are exemplified for a specific instance of Scandinavian urban planning. The author finds that the questions, and their answers, make a difference to planning in practice. They make planning research matter.

The Aalborg Project may be interpreted as a metaphor of modern politics, modern administration and planning, and of modernity itself. The basic idea of the project was comprehensive, coherent, and innovative, and it was based on rational and democratic argument. During implementation, however, when idea met reality, the play of Machiavellian princes, Nietzschean will to power, and Foucauldian rationality-as-rationalization resulted in the fragmentation of the project.

Visual research is still a rather dispersed and ill-defined domain within the social sciences. Despite a heightened interest in using visuals in research, efforts toward a more unified conceptual and methodological framework for dealing vigilantly with the specifics of this (relatively) new way of scholarly thinking and doing remain sparse and limited in scope. In this article, the author proposes a more encompassing and refined analytical framework for visual methods of research. The ''Integrated Framework'' tries to account for the great variety within each of the currently discerned types or methods. It does so by moving beyond the more or less arbitrary and often very hybridly defined modes and techniques, with a clear focus on what connects or transcends them. The second part of the article discusses a number of critical issues that have been raised while unfolding the framework. These issues continue to pose a challenge to a more visual social science, but can be turned into opportunities for advancement when dealt with appropriately.

Historical research on the work of Émile Durkheim often is confined to textual analysis and aims to reconstruct his research in the context of anthropological discourses at the turn of the 20th century. As radical changes in the visual culture of the late 19th century shaped the formation of anthropology as an academic discipline, the ambition of this paper is to elaborate the ways Durkheim’s use of ethnographic data and visual material formed the foundation of the theoretical and methodological design of his approach to religion. By tracing features in his Elementary Forms that emphasize visual material and prioritize religious practice, I submit that the photographic evidence given in Spencer and Gillen’s account of Aboriginal religion allowed Durkheim to theorize religion primarily through ritual; photography, as a visual means of representation, enhanced the study of religion by focusing on ritual without necessarily demanding the consideration of its mythical narratives and cosmological accounts. Based on a thorough analysis of his Elementary Forms, this paper argues that Durkheim systematically used the photographs of the Aborigines of Central Australia and that this use of photographs consequently guided his ethnographic depiction and his selection of theoretical concepts and methodological procedures.

This preliminary evaluation of depictions of the human face among North American Plains Indians elicits questions regarding non-Western approaches to portraiture at the interface between visual regimes and experiential approaches to reality. It shows how the appearance of mimetic naturalism in this regional art reflects more profound changes in perceptions of reality and personhood engendered by the colonial encounter. In so doing, the essay aims at reframing the questions we ask about Native American arts by incorporating indigenous approaches to experience and vision that may help us reformulate how we talk about arts outside the Western canon.

NGOs play an important role in international development cooperation, but the allocation of NGO aid has rarely been mapped, let alone explained. Based on a representative dataset for 61 important NGOs from various OECD countries, we analyze the targeting of NGO aid across a large number of recipient countries by jointly considering major determinants of NGO aid in a multivariate regression framework. While our results show that NGOs are more active in the neediest countries, we reject the hypothesis that NGOs complement official aid through engaging in so-called difficult institutional environments. Rather, they tend to replicate the location choices of official "backdonors." Moreover, NGOs follow other NGOs so that aid gets clustered. Finally, NGOs select recipient countries with common traits related to religion or colonial history. Taken together, our findings suggest that NGOs keep a low profile rather than distinguishing themselves from other donors and trying to excel under risky conditions.

The current text locates the anthropological study of roads within the wider context of studies on mobility and modernity. Besides introducing the articles of this special issue of Mobilities on roads and anthropology, this introduction also addresses some of the broader theoretical and epistemological implications of the anthropological perspective on roads, space, time and (im)mobility

Niccolò Machiavelli, the founder of modern political and administrative thought, made clear that an understanding of politics requires distinguishing between formal politics and what later, with Ludwig von Rochau, would become known as Realpolitik. No such distinction has been employed in the study of rationality. Yet I will argue that distinguishing between formal rationality and real rationality is as important for the understanding of rationality and planning as the distinction between formal politics and Realpolitik has been for understanding politics.

As evidenced by the series of commentaries that followed the good performance of the Ecuadorian soccer team at the 2006 Mundial, which I discuss in the last section of this essay, the place of blackness within/outside Ecuadorian national identity continues to be ambiguous despite the multicultural turn formally officialized with the adoption of the 1998 Constitution. Through the analysis of visual representations of Afro-Ecuadorian men, I sketch the long history of black exclusion from the dominant Ecuadorian understanding of the nation during monocultural mestizaje, and the metamorphosis of this exclusion into multiculturalism. This provides a genealogy for today's spontaneous representations of Ecuadorian black athletes found on the internet and on the daily press. As indicated by the essay's title, I conclude that even though notable changes have occurred since the ''multicultural turn,'' there are also profound ideological continuities. I argue that in fact with multiculturalism, mestizajeFas an ideological technology of the state and as a project of the Ecuadorian elitesFhas not disappeared from the political landscape but instead continues to do its work both within and around multiculturalism. Thus, for Afro-Ecuadorians, the passage of the official or national stance from ''monocultural mestizaje'' to ''multiculturalism'' has not been accompanied by the transformations that the change of vocabulary might suggest. Instead, it has reinscribed the prevalent racial order in a ''new'' narration of the nation.

In this paper we disrupt established methodological boundaries in consumer research. We embark on a creative exploration to address the lack of an appropriate methodological toolkit. Graphic narratives have the potential to illuminate the social realities and humanly interesting themes underlying contemporary consumer culture. This potential is illustrated through introduction of the ethno/graphic novel, a "hyper-intense" merge of theory, data, representation and induction. We provide Toxic Play: Consuming Beer Pong, as an illustrated example and original contribution to consumer research knowledge. Alongside the illustration, we discuss the methodological underpinnings of the ethno/graphic novel approach and provide guidance on: projects/storyworlds, data scavenging, analysis and re-interpretation, hyper-intense translations, representation/illustration, and dissemination. This article is a call for increased application of alternative shapes of knowledge:methodologies that welcome audiences as coproducers of meaning in intense scientific adventures. The result of this methodological exploration holds potential for an extended and reinvigorated communicative function of consumer research.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in hospitals that offer cosmetic surgery to the poor, this article examines the causes of a rapid growth in plastic surgery rates in Brazil over the past two decades. It argues that problems with diverse social origins manifest themselves as aesthetic defects, which are diagnosed and treated by the beauty industry. But plastic surgery also incites the consumer desires of people on the margins of the market economy and mobilizes a racialized ‘beauty myth’ (a key trope in national identity) in marketing and clinical practice. Beauty practices offer a means to compete in a neoliberal libidinal economy where anxieties surrounding new markets of work and sex mingle with fantasies of social mobility, glamour, and modernity.

The use of film-making as a research method and film as publication currently sits rather awkwardly in the social sciences.While some disciplines situate film (and video) production within a visual sub-discipline, this approach risks diminishing the non-visual and ‘more than visual’ elements of film. Filmic publication has also been hampered by the assumption that it is less theoretical than text and incompatible with the
peer and editorial review process of the journal article. Today, technological innovations have made the processes of production, editing and storage of films (as digital videos) easier and cheaper, and the Internet has opened up new platforms for dissemination. The ability of film to creatively cut across a diverse range of academic and non-academic networks chimes with the general call to reach new audiences and engage more directly with policymakers and the communities we work among. This
article looks at geography’s uneven relationship with film and proposes that the online digitisation of the research and learning environment is challenging our reliance on text. The growing ubiquity of sound-driven and image-driven media calls for a rise in filmic literacy and the development of a digital filmic geography that is not only theoretically rigorous but also creative, collaborative and practice-led.

A B S T R A C T . From a sample of 51 major international airlines, we offer a critical discourse analysis of so-called loyalty or frequent-flyer programmes and their related business-class services. As examples of cultural capital par excellence, these seemingly innocuous discursive formations act as significant agents of, and channels for, globalist relations of power in the context of international travel and tourism. The principal logic of frequent-flyer programmes hinges on establishing a synthetically personalized (see framework by which 'loyalty' is defined and rewarded, and by which privilege is then awarded and regulated. However, what actually sustains this commodified interpersonal appeal is the airlines' skilful reworking of symbolic capital, their manipulation of the illusion of distinction, and the exploitation of social anxieties about status. This is all achieved through a series of discursive strategies that stylize (see Cameron, 2000a) 'preferred' passengers as elite. Our analysis of frequent-flyer programmes and business-class services exposes some of the ways social privilege and superiority are nowadays measured, as well as the normative production of luxury. We argue that, for the sake of global marketability and profit, the semiotic realization of super-elitism by the airline industry powerfully 're-organizes' anachronistic modes of tourism while also reformulating very traditional notions of class distinction. K E Y W O R D S : discourse, elitism, globalization, identity, semiotics, stylization, tourism materiality to language, in this case it is an economic materiality and advantage that is sought/achieved. Discourse is thus ideological in that it not only (a) construes and constitutes identities and relationships, and (b) represents and reproduces systems of belief and power, but also because it (c) establishes and maintains structures of inequality and privilege (see, e.g. In this article, we show how it is possible to see all three of these discursive 'products' being strategically achieved in the semiotic organization and promotion (or marketing) of airline frequent-flyer programmes. In particular, our analysis of programmes from a convenience sample of 51 international airlines (46 different frequent-flyer programmes) offers an insight into not only the transience of identity, but also the identities of transients (i.e. international tourists/travellers). What concerns us most is how the logic of frequent-flyer programmes hinges on a principal reward framework by which regular customers are declared 'elite' and how this status is then fabricated and regulated. In and of itself, this is a topical curiosity; however, we argue that the very particular semiotic realization of 'elite' membership statuses also exposes frequent-flyer programmes as important agents of, and channels for, globalist relations of power in the context of international travel and tourism.

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The proliferation of digital devices and online social media and networking technologies has altered the backpacking landscape in recent years. Thanks to the ready availability of online communication, travelers are now able to stay in continuous touch with friends, family and other travelers while on the move. This article introduces the practice of ‘flashpacking’ to describe this emerging trend and interrogates the patterns of connection and disconnection that become possible as corporeal travel and social technologies converge. Drawing on the concepts of ‘assemblages’ and ‘affordances’, we outline several aspects of this new sociality: virtual mooring, following, collaborating, and (dis)connecting. The conclusion situates this discussion alongside broader questions about the shifting nature of social life in an increasingly mobile and mediated world and suggests directions for future research at the intersection of tourism and technology

""This article is an ethnographic study of a 29-kilometer stretch of cross-border highway located in South Albania and linking the city of Gjirokaster with the main checkpoint on the Albanian–Greek border. The road, its politics, and its poetics
constitute an ideal point of entry for an anthropological analysis of contemporary South Albania. The physical and social construction, uses, and perceptions of this road uniquely encapsulate three phenomena that dominate social life in postsocialist South Albania: the transition to a market economy, new nationalisms, and massive emigration (mainly to Greece). Taking this cross-border road section as my main ethnographic
point of reference, I suggest the fruitfulness of further discussion of the relationship between roads, narratives, and anthropology.

[roads, globalization, transnationalism, development, postsocialism, materiality, Albania]""

This article explores the works of the late anthropologist Frank Cancian, specifically considering Another Place (1974), Orange County Housecleaners (2006), and Lacedonia-An Italian Town, 1957 (2016). Rereading his works together reveals Another Place as a point of departure that concretized Cancian's vision of documentary photography as a vocation. In particular, the article explores the implications of an exchange with none other than John Collier Jr. that followed the publication of Another Place. This moment reveals Cancian's orientation towards visual ethnography as toolkit to mobilize a version of cultural relativism and demonstrates Cancian's resistance to any rigid notions of scientific visual anthropology. The article therefore argues that, in essentially separating the products of his photographic practice (e.g., photobooks) from his "professional" anthropology, Cancian sought new modes of expression through photography. In so doing, he thus confronted an enduring problem for visual scholars-how to engage the world analytically vs. aesthetically. Especially for this reason, bringing Cancian out of contemporary obscurity is useful for visually oriented scholars today.

This article concerns representations of popular Muslim belief and practice in modern Iran. Of primary interest here will be a horror film called Khvabgah-i dukhtaran/Girls' Dormitory, in which a young woman becomes the target of a crazed killer claiming to be under the command of jinn. I discuss how the film, which some have reported is of particular appeal to young girls and women, engages with elite discourses on the essentially female character of popular (religious) culture. I also examine what the “horror” of the film reveals about many people's understandings of cosmology and anthropology in Iran, especially with respect to the modern articulation of a “national theology.” Such understandings in turn problematize the film's place in horror cinema from a Western perspective and perhaps explain the genre's relative absence from Iranian screens over the years. Finally, I turn to the broader significance of this release in terms of filmmaking and filmgoing in Iran as well as its possible connections to female-centered horror film movements elsewhere.

This article deals with artistic imagery characterized by an
unconventional use of conventional Christian representations
of the holy and the sacred and tries to answer the question
as to why so many believers feel hurt by this kind of art. It is
argued that one can better understand this reaction if one is
prepared to accept that all sensorial sensations are variations
of touch and that religion is an embodied phenomenon.

Keywords: art and religion, blasphemy, embodiment, sense
of touch

AIDS media lead unexpected lives once distributed through urban space: billboards fade, posters go missing, bumper stickers travel to other cities. The materiality of AIDS campaign objects and of the urban settings in which they are displayed structures how the public interprets their messages. Ethnographic observation of AIDS media in situ and interview data reveal how the materiality of objects and places shapes the availability of AIDS knowledge in Accra, Ghana. Significantly for AIDS organizations, these material conditions often systematically obstruct access to AIDS knowledge for particular groups. Attending to materiality rethinks how scholars assess the cultural power of media.

Visual research methods are quickly becoming key topics of interest within the social sciences, and they are now widely recognised as having the potential to evoke emphatic understanding of the ways in which other people experience their worlds. For this reason, there has been an explosion in the use of visual techniques of data production, and in this book the author offers a reflective, in-depth account of these methods to inform and support researchers from across the higher education spectrum.

The book is concerned with the process of applying visual methods as a tool of inquiry from design, to production, to analysis and dissemination. Drawing on research projects which reflect real world situations, the author methodically guides you through the research process in detail, enabling you to examine and understand the practices and value of visual and narrative approaches as effective qualitative tools in the field of social science and related disciplines.

Key topics include:

techniques of data production, including collage, mapping, drawing and photographs;
the practicalities of application;
the positioning of the researcher;
interpretation of visual data;
ethical issues;
images and narratives in public spaces;
evaluative analysis of creative approaches.
Visual, Narrative and Creative Research Methods will be an invaluable companion for students and postgraduates aiming to develop their knowledge of the topic. It will also support lecturers and researchers with an interest in visual and creative methods and qualitative research more generally.

Online video streaming marks a participatory turn in Colombia’s propaganda war. To understand this shift, I analyze a video the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) produced of its kidnapping of 12 provincial parliamentarians in 2002, tracing fragments of that video as they “recombine” online in two other videos that antagonistically resignify it. I conduct the same exercise with footage of the military’s rescue of Íngrid Betancourt and 14 other hostages in 2008, and contrast its celebratory recombinations with those of the FARC’s video. Building upon Warner’s theory of publics and counterpublics and Bakhtin’s concept of re-accentuation, I argue “recombinatory circulation” reproduces the biases of Colombia’s mass media, constraining pro-FARC counterpublics. I contextualize the circulation analysis with ethnography focused on former hostages, demobilized rebels, and military intelligence officials. Beyond Colombia, this article argues for converting interactive circulation into an empirical and analytical prism to illuminate the politics of online publics.

This article introduces "ethnographic metacommentary," an experiential, processual, and protracted approach to ethnography. My proposed method goes beyond stating complexity as the defining characteristic of an anthropological project, visual or otherwise. To demonstrate the method, I write an ethnographic metacommentary of my 3-minute film Performing Naturalness (2008), which is about the surveillance of foreigners in Tokyo. A number of contexts on the film are explored-the political situation from which it arose, the background of the experiment chosen for the project, and genealogies of art practice. The method includes the process of "furtherings"-self-reflexive explorations that unpack aspects of the project that often retreat from anthropological ethnography. Overall, in the process of writing this ethnographic metacommentary, this article explores the nuanced experiences of Filipinos in transnational migration, contributes to the conversation on contemporary Philippine conceptual art and its relationship with anthropology and film/art practice, and fleshes out difficulties of representation in collaborative projects due to differences in intentions and locatedness. I show how ethnographic metacommentary is a productive thought process that fleshes out ruptures in the filmmaking process that are often concealed from the audience, and even from the filmmakers.

The main aim of the reflection involved in these book dealt
with the suffering of immigrants and, generally, of the populations
defined as marginal and/or vulnerable. By the concept of suffering,
we are here indicating not just the dimension of illness, but the broader
aspect of ill-being that brings together the individual aspects and the
historical, economic and political processes, with particular attention
to the progressive institutionalisation of the interventions intended to
relieve suffering. The common aim of the projects was to examine
the social causes and individual experiences of suffering in different
contexts, particularly focusing on issues such as: the social and
political nature of illness and disease; the interfaces between the
meanings of people’s identity and social belonging and the knowledge
and practices of the institutional agenda aimed at the policies of healing
and hosting; the subjective narratives of pain; the local forms of individual
or collective agency for dealing with the experience of suffering
in order to try to attend the processual aspects of social life.

This paper describes the main methodologies of visual anthropology and discusses their use in marketing research. After a brief history of the emergence of pictures and videos in anthropology, we present the epistemological and methodological shifts in visual anthropology. Based on this, we identify two ways of using pictures and videos in the field of research: as a recording device and as a research tool. In the first approach, video and still cameras are used to obtain more detailed, precise and lively ethnographic descriptions of consumption behavior. The researcher attempts to draw up an exhaustive list of the objects owned by the consumer (inventory technique) or he uses a camera to record specific actions or objects he wants to focus on (videography). In the second approach, pioneered by Jean Rouch, videos are used in a more reflexive and subjective way. The camera is no longer considered as an objective recording device. It is used in a participative and collaborative way to develop a shared understanding of consumption experiences. By the mediation of the camera, the researcher’s aim is to bring the viewer into people’s experiences. The camera becomes the participant as well as the collaborator.

Contextual and interpretive approaches have broadened perspectives on historical cartography since the 1980s, but maps still continue to be understood as a means of encoding and communicating spatial information and ideas. These established approaches to maps, however, are embedded in modernist assumptions and may misrepresent the function and meaning of maps, especially in contexts such as Renaissance Europe. This article considers the meaning of the magical associations and aspects of Renaissance maps from a relational perspective. It is argued on historical and theoretical grounds that maps engaged, and were recognized to engage, directly with the workings of the world and thus exercised causations of a magical kind. The explicit magical associations of cartography waned towards the end of the 17th century, but the magic of maps became hidden rather than lost in the process.

Cet article présente les méthodologies développées en anthropologie visuelle et discute leurs applications en recherche et étude marketing. Après une rapide description historique de l’émergence des images en anthropologie, nous présentons les évolutions épistémologiques et méthodologiques de l’anthropologie visuelle. À partir de cette réflexion, deux modes d’utilisation des photographies et vidéos sont proposés : l’image comme outil d’enregistrement et l’image comme objet de recherche. Dans la première approche, les appareils photo et vidéo sont utilisés pour obtenir une description ethnographique plus fine, plus riche et plus vivante. Soit le chercheur essaie de dresser une liste la plus exhaustive possible des objets possédés par les consommateurs (logique de l’inventaire), soit il utilise les appareils photo et vidéo pour fixer les éléments remarquables qu’il souhaite étudier de façon plus approfondie (logique de la prise de notes visuelles). Dans la seconde approche, initiée par Jean Rouch, la vidéo est utilisée de façon plus réflexive et subjective. La caméra n’est plus considérée comme un outil d’enregistrement mais comme un objet de médiation avec les consommateurs pour développer une compréhension partagée des expériences vécues, qu’il s’agisse des expériences de magasinage ou d’usage de produits et services. La caméra devient participante et collaborative.

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This article explores how the affordances of pictorial representations of sign language forms (as enacted by illustrated signers) impact institutional processes of enskillment to sign language use. First, I attend to the participation framework roles such images inhabit in processes through which deaf teachers work to socialize novice signers to control the viewpoint reversals fundamental to local signing practices. I then explore how novice signers' participant roles in relation to these images shift as they transition from animating the pictorially represented signs to performing them in ways aimed at yielding identification with the portrayed figures of personhood. Finally, through an analysis of a pictorially illustrated Nepali Sign Language version of Nepal's new national anthem, I show how the particulars of such figures have shifted in response to dramatic political changes following Nepal's Maoist Civil War.

His research and creative work have focused on questions of belonging, otherness and self-transformation, particularly in the areas of religion and ethics. Recently he has been exploring the interstices between ethnographic practice and media art, and developing a new project on the religious and moral dimensions of new technologies.

This article concerns deaf children and young people living in South Africa who are South African Sign Language users and who participated in an interdisciplinary research project using the medium of teaching film and photography with the goal of enhancing resilience. Specifically, this paper explores three questions that emerged from the deaf young people's experience and involvement with the project: (i) What is disclosed about deaf young people's worldmaking through the filmic and photographic modality? (ii) What specific impacts do deaf young people's ontologically visual habitations of the world have on the production of their film/photographic works? (iii) How does deaf young people's visual, embodied praxis through film and photography enable resilience? The presentation of findings and related theoretical discussion is organised around three key themes: (i) 'writing' into reality through photographic practice, (ii) filmmaking as embodied emotional praxis and (iii) enhancing resilience through visual methodologies. The discussion is interspersed with examples of the young people's own work.