This edited collection seeks to enrich the dialogue about the expansive possibilities of visual sociological research facilitation. Although facilitating ethical research has long been identified within medical research literatures, there is a dearth of distinct perspectives and voices in academic theorizing when it comes to facilitating ethical research. For example, how can researchers learn and incorporate community created approaches to facilitation into their visual research approaches? Although ethics, positionality, and reflexivity remain important components of visual research, the authors argue that the incremental decisions made in real time by research facilitators within the process of visual research is currently under-theorized. This edited collection seeks to discuss how thinking about facilitation in a more critical and nuanced manner, as well as thinking through the kinds of relations, problems and local changes that happen within a project, can help visual sociological researchers move towards more equitable research practices.

The book takes up some of the theoretical and practical challenges offered by Visual Sociology, Image-based Research, Media Studies, Rural Development, and Community-based and Participatory Research, and in so doing offers audiences an array of visual approaches to studying and bringing about social change.

Deriving from innovative new work by six researchers, this book questions what the new media's role is in contemporary Africa. The chapters are diverse - covering different areas of sociality in different countries - but they unite in their methodological and analytical foundation. The focus is on media-related practices, which require engagement with different perspectives and concerns while situating these in a wider analytical context. The contributions to this collection provide fresh ethnographic descriptions of how new media practices can affect socialities in significant but unpredictable ways.

An accessible, engaging, and timely overview of the key debates surrounding the role of mobile media in today’s society. Edited by Thilo von Pape and Veronika Karnowski, this volume includes contributions from a variety of geographical and disciplinary backgrounds, reflecting the diverse standpoints within the field of mobile media and communication. The collection explores perspectives from the micro-level of individual or small group appropriation of mobile media, to the uses and effects among larger communities, public spaces, and societies at large. The chapters address individual uses and effects of mobile media, such as problematic smartphone use, news consumption through mobile media, and mobile media as an empowerment tool for entrepreneurs. They also discuss the role of mobile media in private and professional social constellations (phubbing, personal mobile device use at work) and in struggles over personal empowerment, counter-power, and global development. Looking beyond the smartphone, the book also explores underlying infrastructures and emerging technologies such as augmented and virtual reality. This book is a key resource for students and scholars of media and communication, as well as policy-makers and practitioners working in related areas such as media education.

Over the past 10 to 15 years there has emerged an increasing concern with mobility in the social sciences and humanities. Here, Peter Merriman provides a contribution to the mobilities turn in the social sciences, encouraging academics to rethink the relationship between movement, embodied practices, space and place.

In post–World War II Canada, black women’s positions within the teaching profession served as sites of struggle and conflict as the nation worked to address the needs of its diversifying population. From their entry into teachers’ college through their careers in the classroom and administration, black women educators encountered systemic racism and gender barriers at every step. So they worked to change the system. Using oral narratives to tell the story of black access and education in Ontario between the 1940s and the 1980s, Schooling the System provides textured insight into how issues of race, gender, class, geographic origin, and training shaped women’s distinct experiences within the profession. By valuing women’s voices and lived experiences, Funké Aladejebi illustrates that black women, as a diverse group, made vital contributions to the creation and development of anti-racist education in Canada. As cultural mediators within Ontario school systems, these women circumvented subtle and overt forms of racial and social exclusion to create resistive teaching methods that centred black knowledges and traditions. Within their wider communities and activist circles, they fought to change entrenched ideas about what Canadian citizenship should look like. As schools continue to grapple with creating diverse educational programs for all Canadians, Schooling the System is a timely excavation of the meaningful contributions of black women educators who helped create equitable policies and practices in schools and communities.