Keynote Speakers
Claudia Mitchell is a James McGill Professor in the Faculty of Education, McGill University, and an Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Education, University of KwaZulu-Natal, where she is co-founder and Executive-Director of the Centre for Visual Methodologies for Social Change. Her research focuses on the use of such visual and other participatory methodologies as photo-voice, community video and working with family photographs, particularly in addressing gender and HIV and AIDS, teacher identity, and the culture of girlhood within broader studies of children and popular culture and media studies. In addition to working (and sometimes living) in South Africa since 1994, she has experience in Zambia, Malawi, Swaziland, Ethiopia and Rwanda, serving as an adviser to various ministries such as the Minister of Gender and Family Promotion in Rwanda. She is the co-author/co-editor of 12 books including Putting people in the picture: Visual methodologies for social change, and Methodologies for mapping a Southern African girlhood. She is a co-founding editor of Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. In 2008 the Canadian Bureau for International Education honoured her for her innovative work with the visual in international education.
Keynote presentation "Visual methodologies in social action: From practice to policy" draws on material from Visual methods; Changing methods, changing worlds (forthcoming, Sage).
Marcus Banks is Professor of Visual Anthropology at the University of Oxford. After completing a doctorate in social anthropology at Cambridge he went on to train as a documentary filmmaker at the National Film and Television School, Beaconsfield. His past research has concentrated on early ethnographic and other non-fiction film, as well as the visual dimensions of culture. He has published two books on visual methods (Visual methods in social research, Sage, 2001 and Using visual data in qualitative research, Sage, 2007) and many articles on methods, ethnographic film, and other related matters. His current research concerns the evidential status of images in forensic contexts.
Plenary keynote: Slow research, or letting the image breathe.
Dona Schwartz earned her PhD at the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, and works as a photographic artist, scholar, and educator. Among her many academic publications are two photographic ethnographies, Waucoma Twilight: Generations of the Farm (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992) and Contesting the Super Bowl (Routledge, 1997). Her first photographic monograph, In the Kitchen, will be published by Kehrer Verlag in 2009. Her photographic work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States and internationally and is included in the collections of the Musée de l'Elysée, the George Eastman House, the Harry Ransom Center, the Portland Art Museum, the Kinsey Institute, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. Dona was born in Philadelphia, PA and lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is on the faculty of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota.
Keynote photographic exhibition.
Paper: Visual Art meets Visual Methods: Making a Case for Making Pictures
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Last updated by Ross Featherstone on 3rd February 2009