https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800418792946 Qualitative Inquiry 1–11 © The Author(s) 2018 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1077800418792946 journals.sagepub.com/home/qix Original Article This special issue was proposed to Qualitative Inquiry partly in response to the German/European context, where increasing pressure has been exerted on qualitative research from so-called evidence-based quantitative meth- odologies. While our proposition to expand the range of critical methodologies to an analysis of “visibilities” was well received in 2015, when this idea for the special issue was developed and proposed. Last year, a new “methods war” emerged in Germany through the attacks of the evi- dence-based “Akademie für Soziologie” on qualitative research, and resulted in some alarm and defensiveness within parts of the qualitative community and its journals. Thus, the climate for an expansion of interpretive and especially critical methodologies has—unexpectedly— become rather chilly. We were aware of similar tensions in the United States (Denzin, Lincoln, & Giardina, 2006), and observed that journals such as—especially— Qualitative Inquiry were actively confronting the issue: this meant there would be a good fit between our special issue and QI. In the context of the proposed special issue, the papers of this issue delineate the scope of the method- ological problem of visibility and contribute perspectives from Polish, French, Danish, Swedish and Russian con- texts also. We hope that in this way we can bring together and raise awareness of some of the strands of a conversa- tion that spans nations and continents where researchers are experiencing similar tensions in terms of the scientis- tic tightening of the bounds of qualitative work. The social sciences have never been without the image: In their history, the visual has figured as one dimension of meaning among others. Too often however, visual informa- tion has been relegated to illustrative status, as an example, or as a support for an explanation or description rather than as an important source of knowledge construction. When we consider the methodology of visual discourse analysis, the images are the argument. This move is not a facile divi- sion of knowledge into esthetic and cognitive categories; rather it is a way to recognize the inbrication of the esthetic and the cognitive. Following Patti Lather (1994), this is an effort to “anticipate a generative methodology that regis- ters a possibility and marks a provisional space in which a different science might take form” (p. 36). Relevant here are Marcus and Fischer’s, 1986 observations that “In peri- ods when fields are without secure foundations, practices become the engine of innovation” (p. 166, in Lather, 1994, p. 37). In other words, our analytical task is not a matter of looking harder or more closely, but of seeing what frames our seeing—spaces of constructed visibility and incitements to see which constitute power/ knowledge” (1994, p. 38). With this special issue, we aim to address visibility not just as a representation of the social, but as an aspect and 792946QIX XX X 10.1177/1077800418792946Qualitative InquiryTraue et al. research-article 2018 1 Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany 2 CNRS, Lille, France 3 Concordia University, Montreal, Québec, Canada Corresponding Author: Carolina Cambre, Faculty of Arts and Science, Concordia University, 1610 Saint-Catherines Street, Montreal, Québec, Canada H4B 1R6. Email: carolina.cambre@concordia.ca Visibilities and Visual Discourses: Rethinking the Social With the Image Boris Traue 1 , Mathias Blanc 2 , and Carolina Cambre 3 Abstract With this special issue, we aim to address visibility not just as a representation of the social, but as an aspect and element of social and cultural orders and actions sui generis. The texts in this volume are dedicated to understanding the practices, power relations and the technological infrastructures in which (audio)-visual practices unfold. To make our proposition clear, we lay out a methodological strategy that we—drawing from French, German and Anglo-Saxon debate—call sociology with the image. Then we provide an overview of the articles in this special issue and point to some ongoing tensions within qualitative inquiry more broadly. Keywords visual, visual discourse analysis, qualitative methods, multimodal, sensory analysis