Themes of the workshop

How can moving images become a way of researching, questioning, and communicating the social world? The CJD project, in collaboration with guest editor Dr. Vincent Delbos-Klein, is pleased to host a hybrid workshop on filmic sociology in October 2026. The workshop aims to explore the use of filmic approaches in sociological and ethnographic studies. We welcome works-in-progress in a range of audiovisual formats, including short films, film essays, visual ethnographies, animations, and other experimental visual projects. Through a collective process of research, review, and reflection, we hope to create a space where students, early-career scholars, activist-artists, and filmmakers can explore the methodology of filmic sociology in their work. Selected works will be screened and discussed during the workshop and highlighted on the CJD website. The workshop is supported by the “Artistic Intervention and Social Action” research cluster at ICCS-NYCU, Taiwan.

This workshop is based on a collective approach to filmic sociology, a scientific discipline situated within the broader field of visual sociology (Harper 2012). Filmic sociology uses moving images and sound not merely as illustrative materials, but as tools for investigating, analysing, writing about, and presenting the social world (Pink 2021; Durand and Sebag 2020). Although film-based sociological approaches have gained renewed academic visibility since the 2010s (Durand and Sebag 2020), they have a longer history. Experiments in filmic sociology can be traced back to the 1960s, notably to Chronique d’un été, directed by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin in 1961. This film remains a major milestone, as it brings together sociological inquiry, cinéma-vérité, reflexivity, and the confrontation of filmed participants with their own image, long before elicitation methods became more standardized (Rouch and Morin 1961; Morin 1962; Henley 2009).

The development of digital technologies has further strengthened the relevance of filmic sociology. Digital tools have widened access to audiovisual production (Tryon, 2009), while also deeply transforming our relationship to images (Manovich 2001; Ehrlich 2021). Moving images today circulate through smartphones, social media, video games, digital archives, livestreams, and online platforms, becoming an increasingly important part of how we document, communicate, and understand daily life. These technologies do not simply make images easier to produce: they also reshape the power relations involved in their making, circulation, and reception, by allowing filmed participants to negotiate, challenge, or produce their own representations (Barbosa 1996; Serafinelli and Cox 2019; Brown, O’Leary, and Joshi 2024). Beyond its methodological function, filmic sociology also engages with the symbolic and imaginative dimensions of social life. In this sense, it can contribute to a sociology of imaginaries, insofar as it helps us observe how social groups represent themselves, imagine other possible forms of life, and make visible horizons of emancipation that remain minoritized or marginalized (Castoriadis 1975; Boltanski 2009; Delbos-Klein 2026).

Considered as a methodological operator, the filmic image opens up fruitful epistemological questions. It allows us to examine the relationship between observation and representation (Rose 2001), between description and staging (Nichols 1991), and between the recording of reality and the construction of a point of view (Winston 1995). It also raises a central question for the social sciences: how can a subject be analysed without reproducing the very relations of domination that sociology seeks to make visible and critique (Bourdieu 1987; Spivak 2009; Smith 2021)? Filmic sociology therefore invites us to rethink the place of research participants in the production of knowledge, through co-constructed, reflexive, and shared forms of restitution (Pink 2021). This call for papers is organized around four complementary axes.

Axis 1 — Sociology of the Image

How can images help us understand the social world? This axis focuses on images as objects of sociological analysis. A film is never a simple copy of reality: it results from a set of operations—framing, duration, editing, sound, off-screen space, and modes of address—that contribute to the construction of a point of view on the social world (Nichols 1991; Niney 2002). A sociology of the image may focus on media, documentary, or fictional representations, but also on ordinary uses of images, regimes of visibility, stereotypes, collective imaginaries, and the relations of domination that images may reproduce or challenge (Hall 1997; Mitchell 1994).  This approach invites us to question the evidentiary status granted to images, especially in documentary cinema, whose force has historically relied on an indexical promise without ever being reducible to a transparent recording of reality (Bazin 1958; Nichols 1991; Niney 2002). We welcome contributions that analyse how documentary, activist, or experimental images, as archival materials, make visible forms of agency, critique, or subjectivation that sometimes escape ordinary categories of social recognition (Boltanski 2009; Rancière 2007; Abbey 2022).

Axis 2 — Sociology through Images

How can moving images become a way of doing research? This second axis focuses on the filmic image as a method of inquiry. Filming sociologically means entering a relational space, negotiating a presence, and making gestures, interactions, silences, and sensory dimensions visible—elements that are often difficult to grasp through text alone (MacDougall 2006; Pink 2015; Durand and Sebag 2020). Sociology through images also raises the question of co-constructing knowledge: filmed participants may become partners in interpretation, narration, and sometimes in the making of the film itself (Ruby 2000; Pink 2021), especially through participatory, collaborative, or reflexive devices. In this sense, film can serve a broader project of public sociology (Burawoy 2009).

This axis welcomes contributions on filmic methodologies, audiovisual research protocols, the ethics of filming, participatory forms, research-creation devices, and the public restitution of scientific results (Banks 2001; Barbash and Taylor 1997; Durand and Sebag 2020).

Axis 3 — Sociology of Digital Technologies

How are digital technologies changing the ways we create, share, and understand moving images? This third axis examines the contemporary transformations of motion images in the digital age. Lightweight cameras, smartphones, editing software, online platforms, and digital circulation have changed the conditions under which images are produced, received, and archived (Manovich 2001; Jenkins 2006; Gaudreault and Marion 2013). These transformations reshape everyday practices of self-documentation, testimony, political mobilization, surveillance, memory, and identity construction (Serafinelli and Cox 2019; Couldry and Hepp 2017; Pink et al. 2016).

Digital technologies democratize access to audiovisual tools, but they also produce new asymmetries: unequal access, dependence on platforms, attention economies, data extraction, algorithmic standardization of visible forms, and renewed crises of trust in images (van Dijck 2013; Zuboff 2019; Chun 2021). From this perspective, filmic sociology can become a privileged observatory of contemporary social transformations. It allows us to analyse how digital images circulate, how they produce new regimes of evidence, and how they reconfigure the boundaries between amateur and professional, public and private, documentary and fiction, archive and flow (Lister 2013; Rodowick 2007). This axis welcomes contributions on the social uses of audiovisual technologies, digital platforms, ordinary filmic practices, activist images, digital archives, interactive devices, hybrid documentary forms, and the effects of artificial intelligence on the production and reception of images.

Axis 4  — Sociology of the Unfilmable

Can everything be filmed? What remains beyond the reach of the camera? This fourth axis addresses the limits of filmic sociology and the moments when filming becomes difficult, impossible, or ethically questionable. The “unfilmable” does not refer only to what cannot technically be recorded, but also to what should not be filmed, what resists representation, or what risks being distorted, exposed, or violated by the presence of the camera.

Contributions may explore the ethical boundaries between researchers and participants, the asymmetry produced by the camera, the potential violence of representation, and the methodological choices involved in filming vulnerable situations, traumatic experiences, intimate spaces, invisible forms of domination, or politically sensitive contexts. This axis also welcomes reflections on absence, silence, refusal, opacity, off-screen space, and the use of alternative visual or sonic forms when direct representation is impossible or undesirable. By questioning what escapes or resists the image, this axis invites contributors to rethink the epistemological, political, and ethical boundaries of filmic sociology.

Submission Guidelines

Authors must send the following documents via email to: iccs.cjdproject@gmail.com

Email subject: WIP Workshop – [Your name]

• A Video URL (uploaded privately to Vimeo or YouTube), including the password if applicable.
• A presentation text in Word format.
• Author(s)’ name(s) and institutional affiliation(s).
• A representative still frame from the video to be used as the cover image if published.
• A short trailer of the video to be used for CJD’s and ICCS’s websites and social platforms.

Requirements:

• Video length: 5–20 minutes. Videos exceeding 20 minutes will only be considered if the author(s) provide an additional explanation regarding the choice of duration.
• Trailer length: Less than 1 minute. File format: MP4 or MOV.
• The text (maximum 2,000 words) must include:
  • The video title (both in the original language and English)
  • 3–5 keywords
  • The synopsis (up to 100 words, both in the original language and English)
  • The methodology and production process
  • Specific research questions
  • An explanation of how the video responds to these questions
  • Ethical concerns
  • Disclosure on the use of AI, if applicable
  • A bibliography
• Research questions should engage with topics relevant to the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, art, history, political science, or related fields.
• The video may be in any language. Authors are encouraged to include subtitles where possible. Uploading videos to YouTube can be a useful way to generate auto-subtitles.
• The text can be in either Chinese or English.
• Authors are responsible for ensuring that there are no copyright conflicts in their submission. Visual/audio materials or archives should be used with appropriate permission.
• The video does not need to be a complete work; works-in-progress are not only accepted, but strongly encouraged.
• Previous filmmaking experience is not required. We welcome experimental works, collaborative projects, and first attempts that use moving images to explore research questions.
• Selected submissions will be screened in a hybrid workshop in October 2026. By submitting, the author(s) agree to allow in-person and online audiences to access the video during the workshop, meanwhile the author(s) will receive a reward of 4,000 NTD for each video (a valid Taiwanese identity card/residential card and a Taiwanese bank account under the author’s name are required for remuneration).
• The copyright of the video remains with the author(s). CJD and ICCS reserve the right to use, circulate, and promote the video for academic and educational purposes. The author(s) may withdraw the full video when the workshop ends. When submitting, the author(s) agree to provide a sample video (or a trailer) for open access on the CJD and ICCS social media platforms, as part of the CJD digital archives.