ABSTRACT
Visuals matter to socio-political analysis, and they do so in a categorically different way than words. Sight, or the act of seeing, is one of the key human senses and thereby ‘visuality’, either in the form of rendering visible, invisible, or visible in particular ways, is a vital part of most forms of representation. 1 Visuality – both as ‘ways of seeing’, and in the form of the artefacts produced through them (such as still or moving images, signs, symbols, charts, graphs, sculptures and so on) – plays a central role in numerous manifestations of security practices. Yet, the vast majority of works in critical approaches to security have focused on the verbal and the written rather than the visual as the modality through which security can be analysed. In other words, critical reflection on visuality and the uses of visuals is still relatively limited within the critical security studies literature. This is understandable, in that the study of visual objects and signs eventually encounters the limits of language (Barthes 1973: 9). Visual aspects of meaning making and discourse have properties that discourse analysis of written or spoken artefacts cannot reach. Indeed, to get a comprehensive grasp of meaning on the one hand and practice on the other, critical scholars of security need to engage visual modalities in addition to verbal or written ones (cf. Williams 2003; McDonald 2008).
