Harper, D. (1998) ‘An Argument for Visual Sociology’, in Prosser, J. (ed.) Image-based Research: A Sourcebook for Qualitative Researchers. London: Falmer Press, pp. 20–35.

Harper argues for visual sociology as a framework capable of joining empirical recording, documentary photography and symbolic interpretation. His intervention resists the disciplinary habit of treating visual material as secondary to written evidence. Images can record aspects of social reality that conventional fieldnotes omit, while their meanings remain shaped by context, production, circulation and interpretation. Visual evidence is consequently neither self-authenticating nor reducible to textual description. The methodological strength of visual sociology lies in holding together these two propositions: images have empirical specificity, and their evidential status is socially mediated. Within Prosser’s broader sourcebook, questions of representation, trustworthiness, interpretation and reflexivity are treated as common methodological problems rather than reasons to exclude images from research. Harper’s argument provides a bridge between documentary practice, ethnography and sociology, making the visual archive available for cumulative analysis while preserving the need to reconstruct who made an image, under what conditions, for which audience and through which subsequent uses.

Kolb, R. and Richter, D. (2022) ‘Scores – From Situated Knowledges to Shared Action’, OnCurating, 53, pp. 121–125.

Kolb and Richter translate situated knowledge into a practical score-based format designed for enactment, modification and circulation. Their central idea is that a score can hold enough structure to be recognisable while remaining open enough to produce different outcomes in different contexts. This creates a compact model of curatorial authorship in which instruction does not eliminate agency but distributes it. Methodologically, the score becomes a transmissible research object: it can travel across places, be enacted by different groups, generate documentation and return to the platform in altered form. The conceptual bridge is to performance studies, participatory art and open-source culture, because the identity of the work is maintained through iterability rather than through material fixity. The score therefore offers a powerful model for curatorial frameworks that define conditions, thresholds and responsibilities while leaving the content of participation genuinely open to situated transformation.

Richter, D. (2012) ‘Some Thoughts on New Waves of Art Education and Mediation’, OnCurating, 13, pp. 2–4.

Richter identifies the educational turn in contemporary art as a transformation of institutional practice through discussions, archives, screenings, collaborative formats and new modes of mediation. Her important move is to resist treating these forms as merely supplementary to exhibitions; instead, they become modes of knowledge production with their own political and epistemic stakes. The contribution is theoretical as well as institutional: pedagogy becomes a field in which alliances with activist, postcolonial, feminist and anti-racist discourses can reorganise what art institutions do and whom they address. Methodologically, Richter reads mediation as a practice of redistribution, where cultural production crosses disciplinary and social boundaries and where discursive formats become part of the work itself. The bridge to wider theory lies in the politics of institutions and cognitive labour, since educational programming is understood simultaneously as a site of emancipation, conflict and potential capture. Curatorial pedagogy therefore becomes a contested infrastructure rather than a neutral public-service layer.