Online open day
Do you want to know more about Visual Anthropology? You can visit our online open day page any time to delve into this study programme. Watch videos, talk to students and deepen your knowledge. Or sign up for an online event or open day.
Discover the other Master's tracks in Cultural and Social Anthropology
Study programme
The programme encourages students to creatively explore how new assemblages of words, images, sounds and silences might articulate anthropologically relevant knowledge. The development of a new audio-visual vocabulary, that breaks into existing media formats, and seeks to re-sensitize numbed audiences in our media saturated societies, is one of the underlying agendas of this program. It requires that student enter the program with a solid knowledge of the technical know-how of film and photography.
Prof. Mattijs van de Port explains what Visual Anthropology is.
Academic staff
Long-term immersion in a fieldwork site, which implies the re-socialization of the researcher in other people's life worlds, is the hallmark of all anthropological research. This is no different for visual anthropologists. On the contrary, the best work in visual anthropology is grounded in the trust, intimacy and tacit knowledge that comes with 'deep hanging out'. Students will therefore conduct ethnographic fieldwork, and will develop their research plans together with students who have opted for text-based research. We deem this important, as a visual anthropology should at all times be in dialog with other modes of doing anthropology, and should not be peripheral to the discipline as a whole.
After graduation
As an anthropology graduate, you will need to make a shift towards actively empathising with the wishes and ideas of employers and learning to identify the most effective way to present yourself. The Master's programme in anthropology provides training in these skills. For example, you know how to start a (research) project, how to gain access to specific groups of people and are able to build a network of informants in an unfamiliar setting.
Is Visual Anthropology for you?
A student specializing in Visual Anthropology partly does what all anthropology students in the Master’s programme do: conducting a well prepared qualitative fieldwork in a wide range of regional, thematic and theoretical specializations that leads to ethnographically rich and theoretically informed results. What is different is how you report and what you produce, as this will be partly audio-visual work and partly textual. It is crucial that you have a profound interest in the field of anthropology and that you feel like investing all your energies in wrestling with Anthropological theory and practice during this master year.