The assignment

This blog is where you will provide the class with an image of globalization and a one-page interpretation of that image.  Please note that an “image” may be nearly any visual media: a photograph, film, television show, graphic art, advertisement, fashion, computer icons, and others.  Your one-page interpretation should:

            (a)        identify the source of the image (if possible)

            (b)       identify the date, time, and location of the image if such context is meaningful

(for example, the location where you took the photograph, or the newspaper in which a printed advertisement appeared)

            (c)        explain what features, concepts, or dynamics of globalization you think the

image represents

(d)       identify relevant authors who address the features, concepts, or dynamics that you identify in your image

The purpose of this assignment is to find “globalization” outside the classroom and in the world around you.  As we will learn this semester, one consequence of “globalization” is the frequent juxtaposition of social opposites: the distant with the proximate, the foreign with the familiar, the global with the local, the modern with the traditional, and the universal with the particular, to name just a few.  Many globalization theorists assert the tensions explains their affective orientations toward globalization.  While the written word can explain the physical juxtaposition of such social tensions, visual media often capture such ideas more powerfully and viscerally.  Indeed, the visual arts arguably provide shared understandings precisely because they reproduce complex ideas in a manner that is accessible to anyone irrespective of language, education, or culture.

When you have identified an image and composed your analysis, you will post it directly to the blog (globalizationunbound.blogspot.com), not to me personally.  If you need technical assistance with posting your image and analysis, I am happy to assist you.  You should also expect to read this blog regularly to view new contributions from your colleagues.  You should also feel free to contribute your own reactions to media posted by others and should expect others to contribute their ideas about the media you contribute.  By the end of the semester, I anticipate the class will have amassed an archive of globalization images that will contribute to future students of globalization.

This assignment reflects a field of sociology known as visual sociology.  This field seeks to identify and explain how people produce and consume images and how these images both reflect and reproduce cultural norms, beliefs, and social conflicts.  To learn more about visual sociology, see http://visualsociology.org/ and http://www.visualsociology.org.uk/ .  While our focus this semester is on the visual sociology of globalization, the field has much broader empirical interests.

Look here for examples: http://www.vigorproject.net/spring2012