The 2022 Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize for Visual Sociology

A social science photography and analysis competition open to undergraduate and graduate students worldwide.

1st Prize: $2,500 – 2nd Prize: $1,500 – 3rd Prize: $500

The Rachel Tanur prize recognises students in the social sciences who incorporate visual analysis in their work. It is named after Rachel Dorothy Tanur (1958-2002), an urban planner and lawyer who cared deeply about people and their lives and was an acute observer of living conditions and human relationships.

To apply: www.racheltanurmemorialprize.org


SAVE THE DATE

SUBMISSION DUE: MARCH 22, 2020 at 11:59 pm (New York time).




Photo by Henry Moncrieff First prize Rachel Tanur Contest 2020

Introducing the 2020 winners of the Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize in Visual Sociology

Through their visual analysis of complex social realities, the 2020 Rachel Tanur Prize winners have highlighted the politics of identities, peoples and places are important themes. As an official partner of this prize, we are excited for you to meet the people behind these important insights, and to have the opportunity to engage with their work.


First Prize: Henry Moncrieff Zabaleta
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Image title: Warao Queen: Challenging beauty in Venezuela
Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize Website

Photo by Henry Moncrieff First prize Rachel Tanur Contest 2020
Venezuelan Warao woman in a landfill

I am Venezuelan with a background as an anthropologist/photographer in Venezuela and France. I stepped into Sociology by exploring photographic essays of the lived realities of inhospitable places with indigenous people who refused to be seen as “vultures” in a garbage dump, and the micro-contradictions of socialism in cockfights. Although I felt like a social scientist with a camera, I was often symbolically labeled “photographer.” This experience in image production had social sensitivity, but I did not consider my photographs proper “sociological” work. I explored visual themes with “obvious contours” and without conceptual elaboration. As the political-social crisis erupted in Venezuela, I found refuge in Mexico where I was provided the space to explore visual sociology, and started doing so through Goffman’s dramaturgical perspective on “violent-looking” gang members.

I started to reinterpret my photographic work with a more mature sociological vision, so I explored President Chávez’s demand for national sovereignty and used my fieldnotes to retell the backstage of Estrella’s portrait for the Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize. In my professional career, this international award motivates me to continue as an interdisciplinary ethnographer linked to visual sociology, and today I consider myself a producer of “photographic data” in the field. My doctoral dissertation will explore the belongings of young people residing on the marginalised periphery of Mexico City. In my research I am committed to going beyond any dominant technical mode or aesthetics, contemplating new concepts, ethics, and visual research strategies with participants.


Second Prize: Pranathi Diwakar
University of Chicago
Image title: Writing on the Wall
Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize Website

Photo by Pranathi Diwakar - Second prize Rachel Tanur Contest 2020
Photo by Pranathi Diwakar – Second prize Rachel Tanur Contest 2020

I am a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Chicago, specialising in urban and cultural sociology. My research explores urban processes, cultural spaces, and social inequality. I captured Writing on the Wall when I was invited to a music video shoot as part of my ethnographic research project on musical practice, caste identity, and urban life in the southern Indian city of Chennai. Gaana songs challenge the discrimination meted out by privileged urban residents towards Gaana music, musicians, and slum residents. This photograph seeks to capture greater nuance in the representation of life in slums by taking seriously how participants in this musical world wish to represent themselves. I paired my photograph with Rachel Tanur’s image of street musicians on an Italian street as a counterpoint to illustrate how differently the street is imagined and occupied by artists whose presence on the street is deemed legitimate. With this entry, I hoped to highlight how marginal urban residents imagine themselves, rather than recreate tired visuals of abject poverty.

Through this process, I have learnt that visual research holds the key to reflecting on the scholarship we produce as social science researchers, and employing the visual medium profoundly impacts the way that we engage with the social world. Ethnographic research is bolstered by a keen visual engagement. Platforms like the Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize are important because they encourage visual analysis as a crucial component of research on social phenomena and support a humanistic approach to understanding human relationships and conditions. The Prize supports the creation of multidimensional and innovative representations of social phenomena and diverse spaces from around the world. Following my involvement in the Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize, I will continue to engage with the visual medium in my interactions with interlocutors and produce scholarship that takes seriously their own visual and aural representations of their lives and the scenes that constitute them.


Third Prize: Desirée Valadares
UC Berkeley
Image title: Absent Presence: Residential Barracks at Manzanar National Historic Site
Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize Website

Photo by Desiree Valadares Prize Rachel Tanur Contest 2020
Photo by Desiree Valadares Prize Rachel Tanur Contest 2020

I am a Canadian-trained landscape architect and Architectural History PhD student at UC Berkeley. The photograph Absent Presence belongs to a series that documents sites of World War II confinement or internment landscapes on the West Coast of the United States and Canada. The Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize provided the opportunity for me to use photography as a method to study these ruins and landscapes from a reflexive, embodied and engaged ethnographic practice as I attended annual pilgrimages to World War II confinement sites organized by the Japanese American and Canadian community from 2016-2018. Manzanar National Historic Site (pictured above) drew my attention not only to culturally-specific commemorative practices but also pointed to the various and often complicated forms of historic site designations that currently enshrine these lands.

I paired my image with Rachel Tanur’s photograph of an image of Maya ruins of Yucatan. I understood her image as critical commentary on tourism, archaeology, national heritage, memory and Indigeneity. Through this process I have learnt about the visual rhetoric of ruination and the role of photography and visual analysis in capturing and documenting ruins as evidence. My involvement in the Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize has encouraged me to further incorporate my own photography and critical insights in my larger dissertation project which centres on World War II incarceration sites outside of the Lower 48 states as they are recovered and remembered amidst outstanding Indigenous (Pacific Islander, Alaska Native and Coast Salish) land claims.


We would like to extend our gratitude to the judges of the 2020 Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize, who have shown through this process their support and enthusiasm for fostering an inclusive and interdisciplinary Visual Sociology. If you would like to make a contribution as a juror in the future please be in touch.

If you would like to make a contribution as a juror, or have any questions about the Rachel Tanur Prize 2022 round please be in touch with Thea Shahrokh, [email protected].

The 2020 Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize for Visual Sociology

A social science photography and analysis competition open to undergraduate and graduate students worldwide.

1st Prize: $2,500 – 2nd Prize: $1,500 – 3rd Prize: $500

The Rachel Tanur prize recognises students in the social sciences who incorporate visual analysis in their work. It is named after Rachel Dorothy Tanur (1958-2002), an urban planner and lawyer who cared deeply about people and their lives and was an acute observer of living conditions and human relationships.

To apply: www.racheltanurmemorialprize.org


SAVE THE DATE

SUBMISSION DUE: JANNUARY 22, 2020




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    Home Page Image Credits


    Photo by Henry Moncrieff First prize Rachel Tanur Contest 2020

    Henry Moncrieff Zabaleta
    1st Prize Rachel Tanur Contest 2020

    Venezuela is internationally known as a “Factory of Queens” for the Miss Universe, the most important female beauty contest in the world. This beauty pageant represents a hegemonic, transversal, and gendered construction of the female body in the socialist country… (read more)

     

    Camilo Leon-Quijano
    1st Prize Rachel Tanur Contest 2018

    Koumba, 16, is one of the best players of Chantereine High School. She lives in a social housing tower in Sarcelles. This city has the biggest social housing density of the country. Her father is retired and he suffers from a chronic illness… (read more)

     

    Photo by Apgraham-Kitza First prize Rachel Tanur Contest 2016

    Aubrey Graham
    1st Prize Rachel Tanur Contest 2014

    At first glance, this image may look similar to those that appear beside ‘donate here’ instructions in magazine ads and non-governmental organization (NGO) websites… (read more)

     

    Kristin Miller
    1st Prize Rachel Tanur Contest 2014

    Three men stand on a sidewalk in San Francisco. They stand equidistant from each other, not even their shadows touching. In any event, they are more engrossed in the smartphones they hold than in anything going on around them… (read more)

     

    tanur 2012 1st prize

    Eryn Snyder
    1st Prize Rachel Tanur Contest 2012

    Four to six times a day, Bedik women haul water from a nearby well back to their community. Their feet have cut trails into the red earth and worn smooth the rocks along the paths up to their mountain villages… (read more)

     

    tanur 2012 1st prize

    Emilie Dubois
    1st Prize Rachel Tanur Contest 2010

    I swung off the curb and onto the M4 bus relieved to finally step out of the thick, simmering street air of a New York City late summer afternoon… (read more)

     

    tanur 2012 1st prize

    Haruna Miyagawa Fukui
    1st Prize Rachel Tanur Contest 2010

    This photograph was taken on a sunny spring weekend at the Japanese Friendship Garden in San Diego, California. The photographer is a graduate student from Japan… (read more)

    • 2020 1st Prize - Henry Moncrieff Zabaleta
      Venezuela is internationally known as a “Factory of Queens” for the Miss Universe, the most important female beauty contest in the world.This beauty pageant represents a hegemonic, transversal, and gendered construction of the female body in the socialist country... (read more)

    • 2018 1st Prize - Camilo Leon-Quijano
      Koumba looks at the horizon from the balcony of her apartment. In the background, we see the social housing buildings of Sarcelles, France... (read more)

    • 2016 1st Prize - Apgraham Kitza
      At first glance, this image may look similar to those that appear beside ‘donate here’ instructions in magazine ads and non-governmental organization (NGO) websites... (read more)

    • 2014 1st Prize - Kristin Miller
      Three men stand on a sidewalk in San Francisco. They stand equidistant from each other, not even their shadows touching. In any event, they are more engrossed in the smartphones they hold than in anything going on around them...(read more)

    • 2012 1st Prize - Eryn Snyder
      Four to six times a day, Bedik women haul water from a nearby well back to their community. Their feet have cut trails into the red earth and worn smooth the rocks along the paths up to their mountain villages... (read more)

    • 2010 1st Prize - Emilie Dubois
      I swung off the curb and onto the M4 bus relieved to finally step out of the thick, simmering street air of a New York City late summer afternoon... (read more)

    • 2008 1st Prize - Haruna Miyagawa Fukui
      This photograph was taken on a sunny spring weekend at the Japanese Friendship Garden in San Diego, California. The photographer is a graduate student from Japan... (read more)

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    Guidance on Ethics in Visual Research


    R

    esearch ethics are often particularly nuanced and situated for visual sociological research and its dissemination. RC57 adheres to the ISA’s Code of Ethics and is committed to the ongoing development of high ethical standards concerning visual research and the dissemination of visual research results.

    RC57 engages in ongoing discussions on various ethical dilemmas concerning visual research (including presentations and publications) across different cultural settings and social contexts. For examples of these discussions see the abstracts from relevant RC57 sessions at XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology.

    In addition to the ISA’s Code of Ethics the following publication is a useful starting point when research topics, methods, data, analysis and dissemination etc., involve visual materials/processes:

    Paperdemas D. and the International Visual Sociology Association (2009), “IVSA Code of Research Ethics and Guidelines,” Visual Studies, 24(3), pp. 250-57.

    Advice for Presenting Visual Research

    When preparing to present visual research at conferences, lectures, seminars and/or other forms of public engagement, consider the following:

    • Is each image essential?
    • Do I have permission (verbal or written as appropriate) to use each of the images?
    • Have I attributed each image appropriately?
    • To what extent might each image be considered sensitive?
    • Is a ‘trigger warning’ appropriate?
    Useful Resources

    The broad field of visual research offers a wealth of ethics resources. The following items are simply starting points and will not suit every ethical question/dilemma/context. Let us know of other resources to include.

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      RC57 Mission Statement


      V

      isual Sociology is a diverse field of study which gathers sociologists involved in visual studies and studies of the visual. As a relatively new discipline and methodology within the Sociology, Visual Sociology attracts growing numbers of scholars and students who are using visual methods, and/or interested in the production, use and dissemination of visual knowledge.

      The overall goal of the research committee is to bridge discussions on theoretical and practical aspects of the analysis of visual data. The research committee provides the opportunity to share, exchange and develop ideas which are relevant to Visual Sociology in the global arena. The focus of the research committee is on applying visual methods in sociology at large, and developing theoretical perspectives as well as specific sociological methods, such as web-site analysis, photo-elicitation interviews, sociological video and photo production and analysis.

      With this in mind, the Committee and its membership has 3 objectives:

      • To generate further discussions concerning the collection of visual data in the field (in archives, photo albums, media, websites etc.) as well as the production of visual materials by the researcher (photography and documentaries) with an emphasis on
        methods of analysis of these data.
      • To work is the contemporary and historical analysis of the socio-cultural locus of the visual. The key concern here is how the visual is produced, used and disseminated, and how it intersects with the verbal and other means of communication and
        sensual experiences.
      • Lastly, it is our goal to put to debate broader theoretical issues of the Sociology of the visual sphere and discuss the applicability of various sociological theories in the analysis of the visual data.
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      V

      isual Sociology RC57 is an international, inter/trans disciplinary community of academics, practitioners and professionals with a shared interested in the visual as a way to unpack and frame our experience of the world. We live in a visual age and so it is right that we work with images and think about visual artefacts, building global partnerships and scholarly links to collaboratively see the world, sociologically. We have an elected board which is revised every four years, with one member not being able to serve for more than two-terms.

      With members from the Middle East, Asia, Australia, Europe and the Americas, specialising in a range of disciplines, including (but not limited to) Sociology, Anthropology, Ethnography, Visual Culture, Photography, Media and Communication, Criminology, Geography, Pedagogy, Politics and more, we are well represented, academically and globally.

      Through our workshops, conferences and publications, we encourage debate, analysis and application of Visual Sociology, both in the interest of scholarly and methodological advancement as well as for practical application that contribute to a better world. In particular, we host free, pre-Forum and pre Congress workshops wherever the ISA participates globally. The workshops are an important facet of what we do, and we are one of only a handful of groups (TG/WG or RC) who offer free, pre-forum activities. In an effort to democratise knowledge and make it accessible to all, the Pre-forum/Congress workshops reflect the ethos and values of our group to share ideas, spaces and understanding with local partners, academics and communities, to better acquaint ourselves with the spaces outside our immediate locality and to collaboratively co-create knowledge and build
      relationships.

      Additionally, we also pride ourselves on our very own, standalone event, the Visual Workshop. A biannual event that moves between a Board member’s host institution, the Visual Workshop is our own international, PGR/ECR focused forum. These workshops offer a space to build collegiate relationships, learn and exchange ideas, whilst emphasising PGR/ECR development, supported by key thinkers and established academics and
      practitioners in the field.

      T

      he Visual Sociology Research Committee (RC57) is the 57 th Research Committee within the International Sociological Association (ISA), having achieved RC status in 2018, 10 years after its initial inception. Originating as an ad-hoc group of graduate students who first met at an International Visual
      Sociological Association (IVSA) summer school in 2006, the Visual Sociology Thematic Group (TG05) was formally established one year later in 2007 by Dennis Zuev and Regev Nathansohn, holding its first sessions at the ISA forum, Barcelona in 2007 and was officially approved by the ISA in 2009. The group was upgraded to a working group (WG03) in 2013 and again, finally to a full Research Committee (RC57) in 2017, having exceeded the 100 members threshold. At present, the RC 57 is only one of two official bodies engaging with and foregrounding Visual Sociology as a disciplinary field.

      In addition to our collegiate and scholarly work, we also offer a photography prize, the Rachel Tanur Prize in Visual Sociology (in collaboration with the SSRC, USA and the Mark Family Trust). The prize recognizes students in the social sciences who incorporate visual analysis in their work. It is named for Rachel Dorothy Tanur (1958–2002), an urban planner and lawyer who cared deeply about people and their lives and was an acute observer of living conditions and human relationships.

      The award is also biannual and is administered by SSRC in collaboration with ISA RC57 who provide jury members for the prize. The award is given at the ISA Forum/Congress and in addition to a financial award and publication, the winner is given honorary membership of the RC57 board and mentoring for two years by members of RC57, which we are delighted to participate in and consider it an honor to co-host.

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      ISA-Visual Sociology
      Research Committee RC57