Heng T (2019) Creating Visual Essays: Narrative and Thematic Approaches, in Pauwels, L and Mannay, D (eds) The Sage Handbook of Visual Research Methods, London: Sage pp 617‐628 1 Creating Visual Essays: Narrative and Thematic Approaches Terence Heng INTRODUCTION Communicating social research in visual forms is becoming increasingly popular, not simply because of the affordances of technology like smartphones, e-publishing and digital printing that supports the visual, but also because of the acute awareness that we as social researchers have that we are all living in world that constantly consumes and produces visual material in the form of photographs, videos, social media posts and more. Where consumption used to outstrip production, the two now vie fiercely for our attention. Of the many ways of using the visual in social research, the visual essay stands out as a significant way of challenging the archetypal social science journal article format of a set number of words, with a limited number of illustrations. Visual essays have dealt with a multitude of topics and in a wide range of social science disciplines (see Blandy, Congdon and McKnight, 1988; Cavin, 2008; Heng, 2014; Hunt, 2014; Lubeck, 1990; Shanaathanan, 2015; Traverso, 2011; Yagou, 2011), with journals like Visual Communication, Visual Ethnography and Cultural Geographies dedicating sections of issues for visual essays and other visually-oriented outputs. Visual essays also come in all sorts of shapes and forms, and to say that there is only one ‘type’ of visual essay in the social sciences would be erroneous. However, given the multitude of possibilities and permutations to this genre, I propose that this chapter looks solely at the visual essay as one that is a compilation of photographs and text, arranged in a way that communicates one’s research findings and/or fieldwork in new and significant ways, and in doing so achieving ways of understanding that text alone could not. This definition then relies