ABSTRACT MARTIN, KELLY NORRIS. Visual Research: Introducing a Schema for Methodologies and Contexts. (Under the direction of Victoria J. Gallagher.) Studying the visual has become tremendously important to many disciplines because images express a range of human experience sometimes ambiguously articulated in verbal discourse, namely, “spatially oriented, nonlinear, multidimensional, and dynamic” human experiences (Foss, 2005, p. 143). In fact, the power of the image to plainly communicate occurs not “in spite of language’s absence but also frequently because of language’s absence” (Ott & Dickinson, 2009, p. 392). Presently, the challenge for visual research is that scholars investigate images from varied disciplines with separate and distinctive methods with little discussion or exchange across fields. Furthermore, more disciplines are requiring students to take courses in visual communication and more professors are being hired to teach those courses. However, these visual communication professors have nowhere to go (in the United States) in order to become prepared to teach and conduct research in visual communication. They enroll in programs in journalism and mass communication, linguistics, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, and so on. Then, they either adapt what they learn from these fields to the field of visual communication or they teach themselves about the methods, theories, and literature of visual communication. This project focused on comparing and contrasting the strengths and limitations of various visual research methods in order to demonstrate the breadth of the methods and how they inform one another. The goals of this project were to introduce 1) four primary methodological approaches to visual research: visual rhetoric, visual studies visual communication and design-making, 2) a visual organizational schema that textually and