DISCUSSION Visual Anthropology: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats Gareth Davey This article briefly examines visual anthropology’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, in the form of a SWOT analysis. The aim is to comment on the subdiscipline’s current status, raise awareness of challenges faced and ident- ify possibilities for the future. Visual anthropology’s strengths and opportunities include its increased acceptance by mainstream anthropology; a diverse and inter- disciplinary research agenda; synergy between academic and applied perspectives; and the potential of new visual methods. Weaknesses and threats include difficulty defining the subdiscipline; limited collaboration (for many research articles are single-authored); and dominance of American scholars. The implications of these factors for the future of visual anthropology are also discussed. Visual Anthropology, one of only several peer-reviewed academic journals that represent the work of visual anthropologists, constitutes a substantial proportion of the subdiscipline’s research output in textual form. Recently, the journal celebrated an important milestone—its 20th year of publication—marking two decades of service to anthropologists, filmmakers and other humanists. This is therefore a fitting time to reflect on visual anthropology as a subdiscipline, and to identify specific ways the journal can serve in the years ahead. With this in mind, the present article discusses the current status of visual anthropology in the form of a SWOT analysis, to examine its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. This paper follows on from an earlier analysis [Davey 2008] of the original articles that were published in Visual Anthropology since its inaugural issue in 1987, up to the end of 2007. The findings, which represent a large proportion of the subdiscipline’s research output in textual form, offered insights into the nature of visual anthropological research, some of which forms the background of the analysis reported here. GARETH DAVEY is a social scientist with interdisciplinary interests. He is a Senior Lecturer at Hong Kong Shue Yan University, and was recently a visiting scholar in mainland China. His research spans a number of countries and regions, particularly South and Southeast Asia. E-mail: Davey@hksyu.edu Visual Anthropology, 23: 344–352, 2010 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2010.485015 344