Audiovisual Thinking

A collage of three video essays made by my Cultural Studies graduate students in CGU’s methods course, Visual Research Methods, has been published in Audiovisual Thinking: The Journal of Academic Videos. Their work and the journal itself are worth a good look! I introduce their essays thus:

“The course looks at areas of visual research within Cultural Studies—Visual Culture, Ethnographic and Documentary Media, and Digital Storytelling—linking these traditions to larger fields and methods within Cultural Studies: the Humanities and Critical Theory, the Social Sciences (particularly Anthropology and Sociology), the Arts and New Media respectively. The students were asked to consider visual research by using methods that were themselves visual. A video essay, ethnography or documentary, and digital storytelling project were required coursework, along with one traditional research paper.”

The Journal’s “Academic Video Manifesto” reads:

“For hundreds of years, scholars have been limited to the written word and the occasional 2D illustration, but today, the revolution in affordable audiovisual technology is challenging the dominance of text as the primary means of communication and expression. We believe that scholars should also have the right to express themselves and their research and ideas in any (and as many) formats and media that they see fit.”