Becuase my art is about people, and visual sociology has many cross overs with art. Though no doubt the purist in both camps will hate me for such a statemet... I have some research questions and I use art practice to go abut answering them, but I am always asking myself the questions, "what makes me qualified to be the one to make assumptions on behalf of other people? Who am I to say that what I am saying is right?" Perhaps there is no way of really knowing definitive answers like that, but if I look to precedents in related discplines this may help me think through my own answers.

Its about methodology for me. How can I use what I am creating in a way that is effective in eliciting answers to my research questions? I've not studied sociology so I need to know the lay of the land before I go out there like a bull in a china shop. So far what we have been doing has been reaffirming my own approaches, rather than teaching me anything new, but this is good. I need the reality check that what I am doing is sane and there are precedents out there.  It's interesting being here with a whole bunch of sociologists and a few anthropologists, and finding that neither is able to articulate succintly what the difference between the two actually is. This is another question that may never be answered, because everyone seems to have their own interpretation on it.

I don't know why, but I really (clearly naively) thought that there might be at least a couple of artists here but no, to my knowledege not a soul. Yet artists are often looking at the same things that  visual sociologists are looing at, just from a different point of view, so it would make sense to combine forces. Some of the debates that are going on with visual sociologists are ones that art had long ago, and this is interesting. Why isn't there more interdiscplinary communication? Are we really so protective of our own fields we don't want to help the others out? In discussions and group work, I find myself having to remind the people that I am with that what we are doing is visual, not just theoretical, and that we can use images for more than just evidence that something is happening.... and I am learning from the sociologists alot more about people,  how they behave, their representations and the ways in which others who do not have an art background interpret images, which is invaluable. The relationship is symbiotic.

So much of the "participatory" methods that have been discussed and theorised as novel ways of research are what community artists have been doing for decades. The difference I can see though is that whilst the artists facilitate ways of empowerment though art for communities, I've not observed so much of the products of community art then being used as artefacts which can articulate research outcomes. I guess this is because community artists are not going in with an agenda of elicitiing information, instead they are facilitating creativity and self expression. But, what a great team a visual sociologist and a community artist could make.... incidentally I am neither and do not have any desire to fill this niche  myself, but I can still recognise the potentials that are there.