Abstract: Everyday life at the Finnish-Russian border has undergone significant changes in recent years. The development of neighbourly relations and the growth of cross-border traffic and interaction, which began after the collapse of the Soviet Union, have been disrupted by border crossing restrictions and closures, a consequence of COVID-19 pandemic and Russia's attack into Ukraine. This visual essay provides an account of everyday life on the border over the past 15 years through my personal experiences and observations as a border scholar. The selected visual images illustrate how the material and social landscape, as well as people's experiences and agency (including my own), transform at the Finnish-Russian border in response to the shifting political climate and changing border policies.

Abstract: Augmented reality filters allow users of popular social media sites such as Instagram to change their appearance through the application of digital overlays that adhere to the user’s face. The instantaneous (and often ‘beautifying’) application of filters has seen them become much discussed amongst users, journalists and increasingly, academics. Despite the cultural ubiquity of filters in Western social media use, Instagram provides extremely limited data concerning what filters are popular, how filters are used and by whom. Coupled with their ephemerality, the obtuse and impermanent nature of Instagram’s AR filters present unique obstacles when studying this elastic technology. Addressing the difficulty of accessing Instagram filters as an ephemeral data set, this research uses a modified version of Light, Burgess, and Duguay (2018)’s ‘walkthrough’ method to manually create a stable and therefore quantifiable sample of 608 filters. I analyse this sample to establish an original typology of 12 common filter types: Surgery; Beauty; Makeup; Alt Beauty; Cyborgian; Digital Adornment; Character; Silly; World; Creative; Pastiche; and Aesthetic. This typology is accompanied by critical descriptions and a visual companion guide, providing direction on identifying each type and its traits. Finally, a brief qualitative analysis of the typology’s sample confirms that the beautifying Surgery filter type was the most common, and over half the sampled filters include skin smoothing, posing new considerations for how we may understand the proliferation of beautification affordances in filters broadly.

Abstract: This article investigates urban change, making fi lms from research approaches which use ethnographic walking interviews, public walking tours and psychogeographic techniques. The case study focuses on Newport, South Wales, UK. Using this example, I explore the longer-term impacts of the (mostly) state-led recon fi guration of British towns and cities from the late-1950s to the mid-1970s. Contemporary fi lm for this period sets the context and links to Guy Debord ’ s concept of psychogeography, psychogeography in fi lm, and associated walking techniques. This article builds a methodology from these principles, where one-to-one participant-led walking interviews – both outdoor and using online maps – reacquaint people over aged 55 with earlier periods of their biographies. These approaches reveal deeply-held memories and articulate feelings relevant to the present and future. This article develops and analyses practice, offering ways to fi lm walking tours to sensitivity present and explore place narratives over time: fi rstly, working with community activists to reveal the politics of local housing; and secondly, a commission with a theatre company where three artists follow a speci fi c walking route which explores urban change and rights to the city. As towns and cities face challenges these approaches offer visual methods to engage the public in place making.

Abstract: Gated Communities (GCs), as residential enclaves in urban and suburban environments that offer exclusive housing and a multitude of onsite amenities, are burgeoning in many fast-growing Egyptian cities. In the past few years, several upscale Egyptian GCs have received unequivocal attention in high-profile TV advertisements and campaigns which package and technologically mediate social spaces overlaid with aesthetics of unique architectural character, distinctive leisure amenities, social exclusiveness, and prestigious lifestyles. Set against this backdrop, this paper takes up a postphenomenological-geosemiotic approach toward the examination of the affects of elitism that transpire in one upmarket urban enclave's advertisement, namely Mountain View. Arguably, in the filmic narrative of the promoted social spaces, the technological mediation and intentionality of the camera shot scale modulate multi-sensory and multi-spatio-temporal relationships between viewers and the GC lifeworld/residents that are worthy of scrutiny. Key findings include how POV camera shots are employed and appropriated to mitigate (and mediate) the representation of transnational elite semiotic landscapes and the pertinent affective intersubjectivities of doing eliteness. The systematic analysis of MV's semiotic aggregate unravels an affective aggregate that is, in essence, a concrete instantiation of Foucault's notions of heterotopia and (post)-panopticism.

Abstract: This article explores the audiovisual research method Community Digital Storytelling (CDST) as developed for a project documenting Indigenous delta voices in Bangladesh and Vietnam. Centred on the co-production and collection of community stories, this interdisciplinary method incorporates smartphone filmmaking, environmental storytelling, community-based participatory research, and Indigenous methodologies. Addressing community participation, power dynamics and fieldwork challenges, CDST is presented as an adaptable method capable of capturing eco-imaginaries, fostering dialogue on socioecological challenges, and amplifying the voices of marginalised communities. The article contributes a valuable guide to participatory media production with communities in various contexts, offering insights for scholars and practitioners seeking inclusive, respectful, and impactful research practices.

Abstract: This paper reports on a qualitative study that employed participatory visual methods to understand how adolescents access contraception in a rural community of northern KwaZulu-Natal. We focus on a cellphilm, a short film recorded with a cellphone, produced by a group of adolescent girls to share their perspectives regarding the challenges they encounter when seeking reproductive health services at primary health care facilities. Harsh health care worker attitudes, sub-standard communication and the lack of confidentiality were significant barriers to adolescents accessing youth-friendly sexual and reproductive health services in this community. Entrenched socio-cultural beliefs on adolescent female sexuality underpinned judgement and victimisation of girls seeking contraception and antenatal care services. In efforts to contest health care providers’ moralistic attitudes and illuminate the consequences thereof, adolescent girls exercise their agency by creating a cellphilm for health authorities.

Abstract: Human bodies and health states are becoming increasingly digitised and datafied through the use of digital technologies such as mobile and wearable devices, apps and software, electronic medical records and social media platforms. The ways that people learn about their bodies and health through their encounters with other people, living things and elements of the natural environment are often invisible in portrayals of digital health technologies. This article reports on a project in which we sought to surface more-than-digital, multisensory, affective and more-than-human modes of learning and knowing about health and wellbeing. This project involved a series of qualitative online workshops which incorporated two visually based activities: participants’ creation of maps of personal health information ecologies, and their responses to photographic prompts showing aspects of natural environments. These maps and images inspired participants to express and discuss their thoughts and feelings related to the ways they learn about and conceptualise their health and wellbeing from and with a diverse set of human and nonhuman agents. Taking this approach, we were able to develop an understanding of digital health technologies and health literacies within the more-than-digital contexts and complex health information ecologies of people’s everyday lives.

Abstract: Woman social media content creators’ visual expertise is ill understood and arguably overlooked. Through the example of lifestyle-creators, this article explores the ways they plan, produce, and look at imagery on Instagram and YouTube, and shows that creators have specific ways to learn, communicate, and take part into social practices that are key in formulating their skilled vision and visual professionality. The study is part of a larger nethnographic project in which lifestyle-YouTube channels and related social media platforms have been studied for three years. In this article, online observation of 13 creators and content analysis of instructional ‘how I edit’ – videos show, that creators have trained sense of vision that involves everyday work practices common both for amateur and professional photography practitioners. The findings suggest that creators’ skilled vision is produced through four processes: (1) sharing expertise; (2) the use of specific technology and software; (3) routine; (4) creativity. Finally, it is argued that investigating creators’ skilled vision adds to our understanding of the mechanisms that have excluded a great deal of ‘feminine’ creativity from our historical and present accounts. I situate lifestyle creators within a longer tradition of women engaging with photography, photographic technologies, and product advice, and offer ways for understanding digitally networked ‘influencing’ and visual practices on social media today.

Abstract: This article aims to introduce the publication in English of Ruthie Ginsburg's ‘Citizens' Photography: A Comparative Analysis' (2018) and Regev Nathansohn's ‘Shooting Occupation: The Sociology of Visual Representation’ (2007), both of which deal in different ways with the visual representation of Palestine/Israel, and specially of the Israeli occupation. The article does this by discussing the subjects of visibility and images in relation to Palestine/Israel, with a focus on how the occupied territories are seen from within the Green Line.

Abstract: This visual essay, analysing a series of photographs curated by Indian photographer K.R. Sunil, explores how climate change leads to human precarity, triggering feelings of economic, psychological, and cultural displacement akin to a sense of homelessness. The series titled 'Home' strings the photographs, taken from the shorelines of the south Indian state Kerala, of houses on the seashore which are destroyed by the rage of the waters. These black and white photographs made their entry into the art exhibition titled Lokame Tharavadu (the world is a single home) curated by Bose Krishnamachari in 2021 for The Kochi Biennale Foundation in collaboration with the Government of Kerala and sparked discussions on the visible aftermaths of climate change. This essay attempts to analyse how photographing precarity transacts an eco-anxiety (Clayton, S., C. M. Manning, K. Krygsman, and M. Speiser. 2017. Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications, and Guidance. Washington, DC: APA & EcoAmerica) and solastagia (Albrecht, G. 2005. " 'Solastalgia': a new concept in health and identity". PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature 3, 44–59.) even though one may not be directly linked to the eco-dystopian (Nayar, P. K. 2019. Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture. 1st ed. Routledge) reality of homelessness that is captured in the photographs.

Abstract: Taking advantage of developments in digital technology and the transmission of information, citizens’ photography has become a common way that ordinary people, rather than exclusively professionals, now produce knowledge. It also represents the promise of a democratisation of information-making and distribution. After defining citizens’ photography, this article offers a comparative analysis of its performance in the spheres of media/journalism, the social sciences, and human rights organisations, and shows its role in each field and its intricate relationship with experts in those fields. The analysis in these fields is concerned with the historical formation of such photography, the source of citizens’ photography’s strength or fragility, and its conditions. While most scholars have considered this practice in a single, isolated field of knowledge, this article seeks to understand its centrality to a civil politics of visual participation via a comparative approach. The article concludes with a detailed description of one of the first citizens’ photography projects in Palestine: ‘Palestinian Diaries’ (1990), which is unknown to local residents because it was broadcast only in Europe.

Abstract: This visual essay revisits the infamous medical science experiments conducted on prisoners at Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison, 1952–1974. It reads 'a body' into the prison's now dilapidated architecture, where the geographies and logics of imprisonment and medical science once intersected. Appropriating visual conventions of scientific representation to image the internal spaces of the former prison, the photographs and 3D prints composing this essay seek to raise and wrestle with questions about memory-making, archiving, and the creation of material culture in the context of captivity. This is not simply to document a vanishing site in order to recuperate a lost story, but to reflexively stage or enact an engagement with inescapable loss and to contemplate the stakes of that loss in our understanding of knowledge, power, and freedom.

Abstract: The article is the result of the collaboration of a sociologist and librarian who have photodocumented the Sagamore Hill National Historic Site for decades to study the changed ecology, revaluation of landscape, and the sense of nature, changing overtime. The research methods included archival research, field interviews, and comparative documentation. The visual, spacial, and temporal contexts controlling the air we breathe include: the historic contexts of natural formations, the stewardships by the Roosevelt Family, TR Association, the National Park Service management, and the dynamic interactions of people on the site. The documents are studied to theorize the larger socio-cultural changes, altering our visions and the social construct of nature. The aspects of breathing air and life itself, and the desirability of safe, healthy enjoyable public spheres emerge and make this case study useful for comparative analysis.