Artistry in Social Science Research

Date
2016-01-06
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Abstract
This interpretive research study is an inquiry into social science researchers’ aesthetic practices in relation with photographic-based research practices. Specifically, it is an hermeneutic study that probes their experiences of practice careers and trajectories of practitioners in relation to expectations, traditions, and conventions of visual research communities. I explore through my conversations with five visual researchers from diverse social science disciplines the relevancy of aesthetics in evolving photographic research practices guided by philosophical hermeneutics and practice theory. Participants demonstrate that photographic-based research practices are messy, interdisciplinary, and complex because of the shared, entwined histories of photography, disciplinary traditions, and emerging aesthetic practices. The inquiry explores changing practices over time and space, creating a possible trajectory of aesthetic practice in photographic-based research practices. This trajectory is based on participants’ recollections of practice careers and literature about photography’s emergence into multiple histories across disciplines and fields and its ultimate establishment as a legitimate social science approach to data collection, analysis, and dissemination. It probes participants’ expectations, traditions, desires, and values of photographic-based research practices and relationships with aesthetic practices as their visual research careers evolved over time and space. Visual researchers face increasing complexity and challenges in their individual practices because of evolving shared practices. This includes their place(s) within visual research and disciplinary communities, borrowing from other disciplines, challenges to traditional expectations of collective practices, and their own desires to innovate and contribute to visual research methods. Aesthetic practices further complicate both individual and community practices, as aesthetics is still viewed by some practitioners as the domain of the arts and irrelevant to social science while others explore social worlds with aesthetic experience and expressions.
Description
Keywords
Art History, Fine Arts, Mass Communications, Sociology, Sociology--Theory and Methods
Citation
Dam, S. C. (2016). Artistry in Social Science Research (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/24998