Using affective methodologies in visual research
While journalism is commonly “understood as the site for impartial, rational-critical discussion of matters of common concern”, journalistic practice has always been emotional (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019, p. 31). Photographs, imagined as cultural texts, can be considered what Cvetkovich calls archives of feelings: that is as “repositories of feelings and emotions, which are encoded not only with the content of the text [photographs] themselves, but in the practices that surround their production and reception.” (2003, p. 7). Departing from challenges that I have encountered in developing a methodological framework for my doctoral thesis, this paper addresses the lack of affective engagement with photojournalistic practice and photographs within journalism studies. It further discusses some of the challenges and opportunities that arise when approaching visual research through a lens of affectivity and emotionality, specifically focusing on photojournalistic practice and visual reporting in Swedish newspapers.
Empirically, I explore conditions set by newspapers for collectively receiving and interpreting visual reporting on refugee migration, focusing on photojournalistic practices and photographs published in four Swedish newspapers during the so-called “refugee crisis” in 2015. Through interviews with photojournalists, photo editors and others involved in visual reporting, I aim to understand the ideals, practices and routines that drive them in their work. Departing from their own experience, I consider the norms and ideals that guide them, the roles that they take in relation to different factors that set the conditions for their practice, as well as the approaches they take in photographic encounters with individuals in precarious situations. To further contextualise the accounts of the interviewees, I use content analysis to collect and analyse photographs published in Swedish newspapers to understand how refugees were visually reported. While the content analysis is useful to systematically approach the material, and allows for a descriptive analysis, it lacks ways to make meaning beyond descriptive levels. Researchers need to engage with emotions, not as a way of dealing with bias or the possible influences on our research, but rather to engage emotions into theoretical explorations (Jaggar in Harding & Pribam, 2009). Photographs, I argue, work beyond verbal and visual language, at the level of emotion and affect, as “affective-discursive practice” (Wetherell, 2013). I use (visual) affective- discourse analysis, not only to address the lack of affective engagement with photojournalistic practice within journalism studies, but because, as argued by Åhäll, applying affective dissonance as a methodological tool offers ways to identify the political in the affective-discursive because affect in itself generates questions of how the world works (2018).