Making the visual invisible: exploring creative forms of dissemination that respect anonymity but retain impact
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Abstract
Contemporary society is characterised by an occularcentric culture in which the visual image permeates our everyday lives. In social science research the visual has been presented as a tool to fight familiarity, engender participatory practice and provide the basis for reflexive qualitative inquiry. However, the visual images created by participants raise a number of questions in relation to ethical dissemination where concerns such as concealed identities and preserving anonymity become methodologically challenging. A preoccupation with anonymity can act as a resistance to discourses of the ethics of visibility, where participants want to be identified in their visual images; but, once research data are placed in the public domain or re-worked in the media the impact and interpretation of visual images can become extremely difficult to control. In response, this paper explores creative ways of disseminating research, which preserve the potential of visual inquiry while retaining ethical practice. The paper explores different ways of presenting visual research findings so that the affective power of the data production remains without the associated images, enabling the capacity to engage both cognitively and emotionally with an audience. Drawing on a project that adopted techniques of visual data production in the Welsh context, the paper presents the ways in which necessity can become the mother of ethical invention in visual social science research; and why it is sometimes necessary to make the visual invisible both for research participants and non-consenting others.
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