Research Methods for Cultural Studies

analysing visual experience 129
Figure 7.3 David at work in the garden. The following summer I continued my video walks
with David (and sometimes Anne too) through the garden. I walked along the new pathway,
photographed David at work in the garden and met other local residents as they also passed
through the garden or came over to chat. Photo © Sarah Pink 2006.
However, situating a visual methodology within cultural studies is a complex
task. Cultural studies itself is an academic field that is defined by its theoretical
and substantive area of interest – the power relations and institutions of modernity
(and if one wants to use the rather contested term, also postmodernity),
colonialism and postcolonialism rather than by its methodology. Whereas, for
example, social anthropology was historically associated with the long-term
fieldwork method developed since the mid-twentieth century (although it is less
so now) and sociology with interviewing and survey methods, cultural studies
methodologies have tended to be eclectic (McGuigan 1997), drawing from
different disciplines as and when appropriate. Thus, one way to approach the
question of visual methodologies in cultural studies is by investigating how
visual approaches have developed in the disciplines that have generated the
methodologies cultural studies draws on. Indeed, with the recent expansion of
texts on visual research and analysis across the social sciences and humanities,
and the interest in ethnography in cultural studies, a wide range of methods and
approaches to the visual that are relevant to scholars working in cultural studies
is now documented. Some such texts focus on the analysis of visual images (for
example, Rose 2001), some advocate a broader ‘visual’ approach to understanding
culture (for example, MacDougall 1998; Grimshaw 2001), and others