VIGO · VIGO – Exploring the Role of Visuality in Governance

VIGO is a study of how visuality affects governance. The project builds on the idea that visuality creates and shares social meaning, thereby shaping governance – intended as the conceptual representation of change in underlying social systems and the efforts to manage or steer the effects of these changes. Visuality’s impact in governance – highlighting an issue’s salience, proposing interpretations, arousing sentiment, and legitimizing or undermining a claim – is so substantial that we can speak of ‘visual governance’. In other words, the pursuit of governance goals can be achieved through systems of visual (re)production at the national and global levels. This is particularly evident if we think of the attention that governance challenges on issues such as migration, climate change, and pandemics have visually attracted. Images of overcrowded migrant boats, starving polar bears on melting glaciers, and infographics showing the latest COVID-19 mortality rates have gone viral. As the adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, surprisingly, scant research has been devoted to understanding the effect that visual representation has on governance. This is precisely where ‘VIGO – Exploring the Role of Visuality in Governance’ will produce crucial insights. By adopting a comparative multi-scalar and multi-modal methodology, the project will be the first of its kind to provide a comprehensive analysis of the role of visuality in (migration) governance. In doing so, VIGO has three key objectives: (1) Contribute to theory-building by conceptualizing visual governance; (2) Explore the role of visuality in governance at the macro, meso and micro levels across two geographic areas (Europe and Canada); and (3) Test innovative methodological approaches in International Relations.