‘photography + (con) text’ was set up with the aim of promoting the collaboration and exchange between social researchers and practitioners who use photography in their research and practice.

This conference, hosted by the Institute, in collaboration with the Royal Anthropological Institute and Birkbeck, Department of Politics, aims to provide a space of exchange, stimulating dialogue between social researchers and practitioners who engage with photography creatively and critically. It will serve as a platform for photography; encouraging its uses, analyses and practices in social research, expanding the possibilities of photographic practice beyond its current observational and illustrative uses within academia.

The character of research and practice with photography has changed significantly over the past decades, such that inquiries into the nature of different screen media, their interactivity, in art installations, their digitisation, the politics of their making, distribution and reception has emerged alongside more traditional perspectives and topics such as cultural memory and visual heritage.

At the same time, cultural, technological and political shifts have led us to re-address the use of photography in academic research, challenging photography as an archaic practice to the moving image or an art practice outside an ideological or social platform.

Call or papers and visual submissions

Submissions are welcomed that discuss how through photography social researchers and practitioners play an important collaborative role in exploring people’s social life and how photography is being used and reconfigured to enrich social research practices, dissemination of data and in enriching academic writing.

Contributions are welcome from researchers, practitioners and artists working in all fields such as education, social research, the arts, museums, archives and anyone who is engaged with the analysis and the production of photography.

Panels are not limited to the following themes but can be used to guide submissions.

• The still image in a world in movement
• Photographs in a world of textual hegemony
• The use of photographs in a social research environment and academic writing
• Photographic ethnographies
• The politics of visual evidence and the archive
• Politics and photography
• The social life of photographs

Submissions

Submissions are invited from, but not limited, to academics, researchers, educators, curators, artists, independent scholars and practitioners.

Submissions may be made via e-mail attachment (Word documents or PDF preferred). Please include the following information with your submission:

1. Title of your submission
2. Name(s) of the author(s)
3. Affiliation(s) of the author(s) if applicable
4. E-mail address(s) of the author(s)
5. Short Abstract (maximum 300 characters)
6. Long Abstract (maximum 250 words)

Early submissions are greatly appreciated.  Please send proposals or further enquiries to Barbara Knorpp (Anthropologist, UCL) via b.knorpp@ucl.ac.uk and Marcel Reyes-Cortez (Photographer, Researcher) via reyes.cortez@yahoo.com

‘photography + (con) text’ is pleased to announce a call for papers and visual submissions for a conference on Photography in Academic Research to be held at the Institute in September 2016.