About the Book
Visual approaches in the humanities and social sciences have been growing in popularity in recent years: photography, comic books, documentaries, ethnographic films, cartography, drawings, visual archives, not to mention the many possibilities offered by digital technologies.
Despite this growing interest, these approaches remain rarely recognized in French-language research. This edited work, which brings together researchers and multidisciplinary artists, explores new avenues of enquiry and research in the visual field. Visual approaches invite us to tell our personal stories in different ways, to loosely quote John Berger. They prolong the power of words, drawing attention to the sensory experience of tiny, fragile, ignored, silent, evanescent lives or those that have turned to ashes.
While the proliferation of images and visual creations is characteristic of our digital age, their uses and the reflections they provoke testify to a persistent and stubborn desire to understand the social world, with its upheavals, constraints, and possibilities.
The stubborn determination to bear witness, to report, to interpret, to reappropriate and even to blur genres through the visual arts testifies, beyond words, to our salutary ontological fragility: what we know and see is never fully fixed.
Table of Contents:
Liste des figures
Remerciements
Introduction Une autre manière de se raconter : genèse et apports des approches visuelles
Dahlia Namian et Isabelle Perreault
Partie 1
Au seuil du visible : entre les ruines et l’usure
Chapitre 1 Visualiser l’histoire orale à travers les ruines de l’industrie
Steven High
Chapitre 2 Au seuil de l’image : quelles écritures pour raconter des vies disparaissantes
Magali Uhl
Chapitre 3 Iridescences. Contre-chanter l’usure du monde
David Jaclin
Chapitre 4 Donner forme à la contestation
Clément de Gaulejac
Partie 2
La trace, la preuve et la spectralité : (re)penser l’image et son usage
Chapitre 5 Pour une méthodologie de l’inspiratio
Dan Kaminski
Chapitre 6 Images sans légendes : les photographies de l’Hôpital psychiatrique du Bon-Sauveur (France, Manche, 20e siècle)
Philippe Artières
Chapitre 7 Les photographies post mortem en archives : réflexion sur l’utilisation secondaire de preuves judiciaires visuelles
Jean-François Cauchie et Isabelle Perreault
Chapitre 8 Archives, traces et spectralité dans Bicentenario de Pablo Álvarez-Mesa
Annaëlle Winand
Chapitre 9 Illustrer des drames et des conflits
Christian Quesnel
Partie 3
Des marges au centre : les récits visuels de soi et des autres
Chapitre 10 La recherche-création comme outil de rencontre
Emanuelle Dufour
Chapitre 11 La fête du Canada : une sociologie politique visuelle
Efe Peker
Chapitre 12 Vers un queering méthodologique : entre déconstruction et construction identitaires à travers la méthode du photovoix
Tara Chanady et Olivier Ferlatte
Chapitre 13 La femme emballée des Chroniques hospitalières
Robert Bastien et Brigitte Lacasse
Chapitre 14 « Montre-moi une histoire », apports et particularités du digital storytelling
Sara Lambert
Chapitre 15 Précariser l’image
Matthieu Brouillard
Biographies des autrices et des auteurs
About the Author :
Philippe Artières (Contributor)
Philippe Artières is Research Director of the CNRS at the Interdisciplinary Institute of Contemporary Anthropology of the EHESS-Paris. A specialist in contemporary history (19th–21st centuries), he has devoted his work to the history of the subject in the West, focusing on modes of individual and collective subjectivation. His research has led him to study both personal archives (writings and images) and archives of social and political struggles (posters, leaflets, banners).
Robert Bastien (Contributor)
Robert Bastien began a career in public health at the very end of the 1980s. After completing undergraduate studies in Arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), he obtained a master’s degree and a PhD in Educational Sciences at the Université de Montréal. In 2004, he joined the Centre de recherche de Montréal sur les inégalités sociales, les discriminations et les pratiques alternatives de citoyenneté (CREMIS). Since 2017, corresponding to his retirement from the public service, he has remained actively involved in teaching, writing, and musical creation projects at UQAM. More recently, he became a member of a working group in “sociologie narrative” within the Association internationale des sociologues de langue française (AISLF).
Mathieu Brouillard (Contributor)
Matthieu Brouillard is a visual artist born in Montreal. Since 2003, he has been creating photographic series, video installations, and films that combine documentary and staged elements, reinvesting aspects of mythology and pictorial tradition, primarily Baroque and Mannerist. Matthieu Brouillard studied visual and media arts as well as art theory at the Université du Québec à Montréal (PhD, 2013). He has been a lecturer and visiting researcher at various universities and art schools, including the Universität Zürich, the Universität der Künste und Design Karlsruhe, the Haute École d’Art et de Design de Genève, and the Universität Bern.
Jean-François Cauchie (Contributor)
Jean-François Cauchie is a sociologist, criminologist, and Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa, where he has taught since 2006. Although clearly interconnected, his research can be broadly divided into two main areas. The first concerns the ways in which institutions of social regulation (religion, criminal law, medicine, etc.) fail to fully grasp the individuals they claim to address. By giving a voice to these individuals at the “margins of the margin,” his articles stand out for their singularity within the field of criminology—and are thus even more necessary. The second area is linked to the work of Professor Alvaro Pires’s Canada Research Chair, which focuses on the evolution of criminal law as well as the conditions for the emergence, selection, and stabilization of innovative ideas.
Tara Chanady (Contributor)
As part of her PhD in Communication at Université de Montréal, Tara Chanady specialized in media representations of lesbian, bisexual, and queer women, including in Quebec television, as well as in lesbian spaces and the identity issues of women from sexual diversity communities in Montreal from 1980 to the present. She has given numerous lectures on her research and has published several articles in journals such as Lesbian Studies (2021) and Recherches Féministes (2020). During her postdoctoral fellowship at the École de santé publique de l’Université de Montréal in 2021–2022, she worked on mental health and substance use issues among LGBTQ+ youth populations. Tara Chanady has also been a lecturer in Communication at Université de Montréal since 2015. Her approach seeks to critically examine discourses and norms regarding gender and sexuality.
Clément de Gaulejac (Contributor)
Clément de Gaulejac is an artist, writer and illustrator living in Montréal since the early 2000s. His work as an artist has been exhibited, among other places, at Galerie UQO (Les Maîtres du monde sont des gens, 2019), VOX, as well as Axenéo7 (Monuments aux morts de la Liberté, 2015). He has published Les artistes (2017), Grande école (2012), and Le livre noir de l’art conceptuel (2011) at Éditions le Quartanier. In 2022, Tu vois ce que je veux dire ? (Presses de l’Université de Montréal) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards. As an illustrator, he regularly collaborates with various newspapers, journals, and publishing houses, and since 2012 has produced posters in support of various social and political movements. In 2021, he was awarded the research grant from the Grantham Foundation for Art and the Environment.
Emmanuelle Dufour (Contributor)
Emanuelle Dufour holds a PhD in Art Education through the Arts from Concordia University. Her doctoral research-creation project—recognized with both an exceptional double distinction from the jury, the Governor General’s Academic Gold Medal, and the Distinction Award from the Center for Oral History and Digital Storytelling—was the first thesis in Quebec to be presented in the form of a contributive graphic novel. In recent years, she has worked as a coordinator, project manager, research assistant and professional, as well as consultant on various projects related to Indigenous cultural safety at UdeM and the Ville de Montréal, and as an illustrator, comic artist, and art director for different graphic facilitation projects carried out in collaboration with Indigenous organizations and collectives. She is currently Pedagogical Advisor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) at Collège Ahuntsic and its Espace d’autochtonisation, a lecturer in the Récits et médias autochtones programs (UdeM) and at the École d’études autochtones (Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue), while also completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre interuniversitaire d’études et de recherches autochtones (CIÉRA).
Olivier Ferlatte (Contributor)
Olivier Ferlatte holds a PhD in Public Health from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and is an Assistant Professor in the Département de médecine sociale et préventive at the École de santé publique de l’Université de Montréal. His research focuses on the relationship between stigma, substance use and mental health in 2S/LGBTQIA+ communities. He is a recognized expert on the applications of syndemics theory and intersectionality to 2S/LGBTQIA+ health, and findings drawn from his research have influenced the development of policies and programs aimed at improving the health of 2S/LGBTQIA+ people. His scientific work is based on several methodologies (qualitative, quantitative, art-based method, mixed approaches) and is motivated by a particular interest in community engagement and the participation of people affected by health inequalities as research partners.
David Jaclin (Contributor)
David Jaclin holds a doctorate in Anthropology from the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris and a doctorate in Communication Studies from the Université de Montréal. He is Associate Professor at the School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies at the University of Ottawa and director of the HumAnimaLab. His research focuses on the history of the domestication of living beings, on contemporary human/nature relationships, and, in doing so, on the informational and communicational processes that shape these relationships. He is developing, as an extension of his previous work on the trafficking of so-called 'exotic' animals, a research on/in water focussing on the circulation of this (vital) element and its anthropocenic reconfigurations.
Efe Peker (Contributor)
Efe Peker is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University of Ottawa. He holds a joint-PhD in History (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) and in Sociology (Simon Fraser University), and he completed his SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2017-19) in Sociology at McGill University. His research focuses on state-religion relations, secularity, immigration and diversity, and nationalist-populist politics in comparative-historical perspective.
Isabelle Perreault (Editor)
Isabelle Perreault is a historian and Full Professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa. She is interested in the historical sociology of life choices (suicide and abortion) and non-normative sexuality, as well as psychiatric (de)institutionalization in Quebec during the 20th century. She is codirector of the axis Biopolitical Issues and Minority Groups, along with Dahlia Namian.
Dahlia Namian (Editor)
Dahlia Namian is a sociologist and Full Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Ottawa. She is an affiliated researcher at the Montreal Research Center on Social Inequalities (CREMIS) and co-director of the Biopolitical Issues and Minority Groups research group at the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Citizenship and Minorities (CIRCEM). She is also a member of the coordinating committee of the Centre interdisciplinaire en droit social de l'Outaouais (CIDSO). Her research focuses on social inequalities and health, specifically the construction and regulation of the social pathologies of capitalism, such as homelessness, poverty, and addiction.
