In Seeing Matters, Sarah Awad offers a psychological exploration of how images shape our actions, perceptions, and identities. She examines how we use images to symbolically and materially influence the world, others, and ourselves, while also revealing how the images around us shape our thoughts, emotions, and memories. Awad investigates the social and political dynamics of visual culture, questioning who is seen, how they are portrayed, and why these representations matter. By using clear language and real-world examples, she makes complex theories accessible to readers, offering diverse methodological approaches for analyzing a wide range of image genres – such as graffiti, digital memes, photojournalism, and caricatures. This comprehensive analysis addresses the politics of visual representation, making the book an essential guide for researchers across disciplines, while providing valuable insights into how images impact society and our everyday lives.
Seeing Matters is a masterful exploration of the pervasive power of images. With keen psychological insight, Sarah Awad reveals how the images we create and encounter shape our minds, emotions, and the very fabric of our shared reality.
Vlad Glaveanu - Professor of Psychology, Dublin City University
‘The powerful role of images in everyday communication has been amplified by the expansion of visually focused social media and other platforms. Sarah Awad's engaging book is a crucial resource for analysing the role of those images and for thinking more deeply about their social life.’
David Beer - Professor of Sociology, University of York, UK
‘We live in cultures characterised by abundant, efflorescent, fast-flowing images. We make them, share them, scroll past them, dwell on them. Awad shows us how to follow the social lives of images so that we can keep sight of how they matter. Against the temptation to see an incomprehensible glut, we are reminded that images move evermore to the centre of how we affect each other and work out shared social realities in our public and intimate lives.’
Nicholas Carah - author of Media & Society: Power, Platforms & Participation
‘Images don’t just reflect the world; they shape it. In Seeing Matters, Dr Sarah Awad examines the creation, circulation, and transformation of images, revealing their role in shaping cultural emotions, social relations, and collective action. Combining interdisciplinary theory with insightful methods, this book is a pathbreaking analysis of contemporary visual culture.’
Alex Gillespie - Professor, London School of Economics, UK
‘I am deeply impressed by Sarah Awad’s comprehensive study of the power and use of images and her command of 20th- and 21st-century theories. Especially potent are her nuanced analyses of images of suffering and death that circulate in the news, digital media, and urban environments. Her questions about the ethical purposes of such images should make us all pause.’
Deborah J. Haynes - author of Bakhtin and the Visual Arts and The Vocation of the Artist
‘The book offers a highly engaging roadmap to consider practices of ‘seeing’ from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. It is especially effective in drawing attention to the interplay between social and psychological processes in perceiving, understanding and consuming imagery.’
Josephine Hoegaerts - Professor of European Culture after 1800, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
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