events: Visual studies today: The power of images
Abstracts
Petra Bernhardt & Andreas Pribersky
“Missionaries in a Foreign Field”: On the Status of the Visual in Political Science
Despite the widely recognized importance of visuals in political communication, political scientists often overlook examining visuals in their research. The proposed paper therefore addresses the status of visual studies in the academic discipline of political science. Drawing on recent scholarly research on the status of the visual in political science, as well as on experiences of researchers in the field of visual politics from other disciplines, who engage with the implementation of visual studies in disciplinary curricula, the paper tries to give answers to the following questions: What are core topics of visual research in the field of political science? Which visual methods are employed in the discipline, which methods were imported from other disciplines (like sociology or art history)? Which epistemological questions arise through the import of methods from other disciplines? And what could be promising advancements for both, visual studies and political science, by applying an integrated research approach on the visual in the political field?