Weekends With a Sociologist

Weekends With a Sociologist

I spend much of my weekends doing visual sociology. This term describes using visual methods to analyse social issues, experiences and events. I easily spend five hours or longer walking around drinking in the sights and chronicling my experiences, more often than not posting about my sojourn on social media, especially on Instagram. I photograph, record and make notes about exhibitions, interesting sites and community events.

Canberra, Australia’s capital city, is fun to photograph as quirky public art peppers the urban landscape, attracting interesting people and behaviour. Some of my favourite wanderings have been spent chronicling a few series I hope to bring you soon, such as my visual sociology of how natural and physical sciences are represented at museums, and the relative absence of social science displays (what “counts” as science?). I also enjoy visiting art galleries and have been accumulating a series on how women’s bodies are exhibited and how women’s stories are told, as well as recording the (lack of) artworks by people of colour, especially in major galleries that are dominated by Western European men. I have been collecting works for my series on Australian artists for my Antipodeans project.

I also have a focus on museums and the representation of Indigenous Australian history and culture. I’m especially interested in capturing how non-Indigenous curators collaborate with Indigenous artists (or how they don’t), and how museums acknowledge and reconcile the tension of hosting artefacts that some Indigenous leaders have fought to have restored to them.

Head to my blog to see and read more about my visual sociology of Canberra.

https://othersociologist.com/2016/04/04/weekends-with-a-sociologist/ #sociology   #visualsociology   #socialscience