Speakers

🎯 Keynote Speech 1 | Between Seeing, Shooting, and Showing: ‘their’ lives and ‘our’ views

🗓 Date and Time: Wednesday, June 25, 2025, 15:00, Plenary Film Screening 1 (18:15–20:18) Daldongne 33 Up (2020, 2h3m)

Opening IVSA 2025, this keynote by sociologist Cho Eun engages the ethical, political, and epistemological tensions between seeing, shooting, and showing.
Beginning in Sadang-dong, a Seoul neighborhood marked for demolition in 1986, her long-term visual ethnography foregrounds the life histories of marginalized families across generations. Cho Eun redefines sociological authorship by turning visual data into critical narratives rooted in collaboration and reflexivity.

🎤 Keynote Speaker:
Cho Eun (Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Dongguk University)

🎬 Selected Works:

A Nice Place (Sadang-dong +22) (2009)

Daldongne 33 Up (Sadang-dong +33) (2020)

Many Dreams But… (2002)

Not Just One Family (2001)

👤 About the Speaker

Ph.D. in Sociology, University of Hawaii

Known for qualitative research on urban poor women and the inheritance of poverty
Focuses on class reproduction, gendered poverty, and housing policy in South Korea
Former President, Korean Association of Women’s Studies; active in civic organizations
Merges visual representation with sociological writing, expanding visual sociology’s scope

📌 Visual Sociological Significance

Has pioneered field-based visual ethnography in Korea since the 1980s

Challenges the neutrality of vision and exposes its embedded power relations

Uses film not just as data but as a medium for public dialogue and reflexive engagement

Advocates a decentered and collaborative authorship in visual sociology

🎥Join Our Visual Exploration

Cho Eun’s keynote resonates with IVSA’s pursuit of critical visual research, participatory sociology, and engaged visual practice. Rather than simply recording the lives of those at the margins of society, she invites reflection on the possibility of research grounded in shared experience and collaborative interpretation.

🎯 Keynote Speech 2 | Closing:

The Golding Address for Visual Sociology in Motion

🗓 Date: Saturday, June 28, 2025 | 16:50–18:30

This keynote, delivered by Graeme Gilloch, honors the memory of Jill Golding (1954–2024), a devoted visual sociologist and IVSA board member.
Gilloch examines Balcony (2018), a collection of 568 photographs selected from over 8,500 images taken from Orhan Pamuk’s balcony in Istanbul. These repetitive views of the Bosphorus—birds, fog, ships, clouds, and the Asian shoreline—form a visual rhythm of urban temporality.

He reads these images through the lenses of Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis, Walter Benjamin’s optical unconscious, and Roland Barthes’s noeme.
The talk invites us to reflect on how repetitive visual gestures and interrupted narratives shape sociological perception.

🎤 Keynote Speaker:

Graeme Gilloch (Professor of Sociology, Lancaster University)

🎬 About the Speaker

Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK

Former Professor at Salford University

Specializes in: Critical Theory, Urban Sociology, Visual Cultural Theory

Research Interests:Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Leo Löwenthal

Selected Publications: Siegfried Kracauer: Our Companion in Misfortune (2015)

Walter Benjamin and the Metropolis (2005)

📌 Visual Sociological Significance

Investigates the relationship between visual experience and modern urban life

Explores rhythm, repetition, fragmentation, and memory in visual representation

Interprets Pamuk’s photos as cinematic yet static narratives, evoking “dialectics at a standstill”

The balcony, never visible in the images, becomes a symbolic and epistemological site

Demonstrates how everyday repetition in visuality produces sociological meaning

📌 Visual Sociological Significance

Explores core themes in visual sociology through theoretical reflection on image, rhythm, memory, and place.

Analyzes the relationship between visuality and social structure through Walter Benjamin’s ideas of the optical unconscious and the politics of interruption.

Examines the sensory structure of modernity through urban rhythms and audiovisual fragmentation and repetition.

Reconstructs social time and space through photography and gaze.

Suggests that within the sensory repetition of images, something new can emerge from the familiar.

🎥 Join Our Visual Exploration

Although the balcony never appears in the photographs, it becomes a space of vision and thought. Gilloch’s keynote offers a space for visual sociological reflection on how the repetition of still imagery produces social meaning, and how the rhythm of photography opens new ways of seeing the city.

🎯 Plenary Panel 1 | Refocusing the Lens of Filmic Sociology

– South Korea's Legacy

🗓 Time: Friday, June 27, 2025 | 14:30–15:30,

Plenary Film Screening 2 Saturday, June 27, 2025 | 18:00–19:55

This plenary panel explores how film can function as a form of sociological testimony, with a focus on the documentary The Pregnant Tree and the Goblin (2019). Directors Kim Dong-ryung and Park Kyung-tae address questions of vision, memory, and representation in the context of U.S. military camptown women in Korea. Their work highlights the ethical and political complexities of giving voice to marginalized subjects through the moving image.

🎥 Screening:The Pregnant Tree and the Goblin (2019)
Directors: Kim Dong-ryung, Park Kyung-tae
Running Time: 115 minutes
Language: Korean (English subtitles provided)

🎬 Director Bios

Director Kim Dong-ryung

B.A. in English Literature, Ewha Womans University
Studied film directing at the Korean Academy of Film Arts
Her short film was invited to the Wide Angle section of the 9th Busan International Film Festival in 2004
Her first feature documentary American Alley focuses on the lives of foreign women in U.S. military camptowns in Korea, supported by the Korean Film Council and Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation
She has continued to document the lives of marginalized women through films like The Tour of Duty and The Pregnant Tree and the Goblin

Selected Works:
The Pregnant Tree and the Goblin (2019)
Tour of Duty (2012)
American Alley (2008)

Director Park Kyung-tae

While studying sociology at Dongguk University, he began working on activist video projects and directed Me and the Owl (2002), based on his engagement with camptown issues
Continued to work on projects like There is (2006), which focuses on mixed-race children of U.S. soldiers, and A Nice Place (2009)
Currently studying film in France and developing a new documentary on U.S. military camptowns in Korea and the U.S.

Works:
The Pregnant Tree and the Goblin (2019)
There is (2006)
Me and the Owl (2003)

🧠 IVSA Film Screening: The Pregnant Tree and the Goblin

This film follows the lives of women from U.S. military camptowns in Korea, a population long marginalized in Korean society. It explores how oral testimonies and visual images attempt to reconstruct memory—and how they can also betray it.

When Language Betrays the Event
Women from camptowns are often rendered voiceless. Even oral history, which claims to write “history from below,” only records those who are linguistically and socially legible. Stigma and internalized shame prevent many from narrating their lives. The film examines the narrative strategies these women must adopt to be recognized as “legitimate victims,” raising the question: who is allowed to speak?

When the Image Betrays the Event
The photo of Yoon Geum-i, a camptown woman murdered by a U.S. soldier, became a symbol in anti-American protests. Yet her identity and story remain largely unknown. Images can seem to reveal pain, but their meaning is shaped by power—who uses them, who controls them, and who benefits. The film interrogates the ethics of representation and shows how the voices of women like Yoon are often erased in public discourse.

💬 Panel Topic: Speaking Sociology through Film – At the Boundaries of Vision, Memory, and Representation

This plenary panel centers on the following questions:

How can film serve as a tool for sociological testimony?

Do images convey truth, or do they construct it?

How are the testimonies and silences of camptown women consumed in today’s society?

What are the conditions under which a victim’s voice is socially believed?

🎯 Plenary Panel 2 | Decentering Power in Visual Studies

🗓 Time: Saturday, June 28, 2025 | 13:00–14:45

This plenary panel brings together three powerful approaches to ethically engaging with memory, trauma, and artistic agency.
Gina Kim presents her Comfortless Trilogy, using VR cinema to transform spectators into embodied witnesses.
Ahn Yi-ho shares his performance practice that blends traditional Korean pansori with contemporary rhythm through the band Leenalchi.
Baruch Gottlieb introduces the concept of complicit curation, arguing for a methodology of embodied, situated knowing in response to the collapse of rigid institutional authority.

🗣Panelists:
Gina Kim (UCLA Professor, Film Director)
Ahn Yi-ho (Pansori Artist, Member of Leenalchi)
Baruch Gottlieb (Media Artist, Curator, Philosopher)

🎥 Featured Elements:

Bloodless (2017)

Tearless (2021)

Comfortless (2023)

Selected Leenalchi performances

Presentation: “Complicit Curation”

Speaker Highlights

Gina Kim

Professor at UCLA, acclaimed transnational filmmaker

Directed Never Forever and Final Recipe

Comfortless Trilogy (VR films engaging in U.S. military camptown women’s histories)

“VR is not a medium for representing pain, but for placing the viewer within it”

Ahn Yi-ho

Trained in pansori since 1995; co-founder of Leenalchi

Combines traditional Korean vocal art with modern rhythm

Embodies a practice of being fully present in the moment of sound

Seeks to sustain pansori as a living, evolving art form

Baruch Gottlieb

Trained in film at Concordia University; PhD in Digital Aesthetics (UdK Berlin)

Former professor at Yonsei University; now teaching at UdK Berlin

Author of Gratitude for Technology, The Political Economy of Small Things, and Digital Materialism

Curator of Flusser & the Arts, FEEB'ACK: McLuhan and Art

Presentation: complicit curation

“Touch is invisible. You must be involved to know what it is saying. As the legitimacy of ‘explicit’ institutions shakes, we cultivate the ‘complicity’ needed to meet urgent needs."

🔍 Discussion Focus

In what ways does immersive VR enable a different kind of embodiment of pain?

How does pansori function as a voice of the present?

How can curation become an ethical act through its relationship with the body and through participation?

How do image, sound, and space transform pain into a shared experience?

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