This article addresses a challenge for sociologists who teach at institutions located in unfamiliar cultural contexts through a photo elicitation project to develop students' sociological imaginations while teaching the instructor about students' social contexts. In introductory courses, we must present sociology as a field of study that is…

Teaching the Holocaust in a first-year writing course--using photographs of the Shoah as a primary resource--authorizes students to engage in research and writing that provides a place of empathetic, dignified witnessing for those who were denied the possibility of realizing the lives they were meant to live. The author believes that in engaging…

Examining Malcolm Browne's photograph of the burning monk as well as appropriations of it by the Ministers' Vietnam Committee, I argue that self-immolation is a powerful rhetorical act that utilizes self-inflicted violence as a means of performing a visual embodiment of violence done by an "other." I assert that the power and resonance…

This article presents the author's comments on Robin Kelsey's "Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850-1890," a book about government documents that happen to be visual materials. The word "archive" now has intellectual cache in the academic world, but its currency has little to do with the…

This paper addresses an increasingly popular technique for eliciting student "voice" through the analysis of young people's images as a medium of expression, focusing in particular on photography. Of course, there has been considerable critical interrogation of student voice activities in the recent past and the complexities and challenges…

Less attention has been paid to teachers' relationship to contemporary visual culture, and specifically about their own visual culture. In this paper, the author would like to focus on how they relate to these global visual discourses, in order to discuss their participation in the production of visual imaginaries. She will confront the argument…

Investigations linking communication media experiences and self-concepts suggest that changes in the self-concept of Afro-American students may be acutely affected in instructional environments through group activities employing mediated approaches, participation in the media as producers rather than consumers, and instruction through visual…

This article looks closely at one instantiation of a poetry-centered practice as supported by June Jordan's Poetry for the People, specifically in the context of an inaugural poetry contest. It builds on an earlier empirical study, which investigated the partnership between Poetry for the People and one East Bay Area high school and the rich…