"Visual Methodologies: Beyond the Written and towards the Sensory": South-South Exchange Programme

SEPHIS, the South-South exchange programme for research on the history of development, offers grants to its workshop on questions surrounding the use of documentary film, video recordings, photographic imaging, and voice recordings, among others. The workshop hopes to examine what underlies "this movement beyond the written and what relationships to the word are assumed in such processes of knowledge production and strategies for promoting social change." The workshop will be held in Alexandria, Egypt, April 15-24 2011.

SEPHIS is seeking a group of 12-15 young scholars and intellectuals of social movements (activists) from different parts of the Global South. Three experts in the field of visual methodologies from the South will guide the workshop sessions and work with selected candidates in refining their projects. Participants will be drawn from 1) students enrolled in MA and/or PhD programmes in the Global South; and 2) researchers engaged in local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and social movements who aim to utilise visual methods in their programme of research and action.

“This workshop hopes to address the following questions in the form of training and dialogue with young scholars in the Global South:

• What epistemological questions and assumptions are embedded in the move towards the visual and/or the sensory?
  
• What methodological concerns are at stake?
  
• What constitutes the visual and the sensory and what relationships prevail between them? What can visual knowledge tell us about particular facades of social realities?
  
• What is the historicity of visual knowledge and its deployment in social science and among members of civil society
  
• What are the social conditions of production that inform the recourse to the visual and what political economies shape its production?”

“SEPHIS will cover travel and accommodation expenses of selected candidates and provide access to workshop supporting material. SEPHIS has been engaged in networking among researchers across the Global South since 1994. The fundamental goal of the programme is to encourage researchers located in the South to expand their scholarly horizons and to cultivate links with their colleagues in other parts of the South. The objective of the SEPHIS programme is to support dialogue and collaboration between researchers from the South with their respective visions of development and history, to encourage comparative research, and to strengthen research capacity in the South.”