Christos Stavrou

Research Overview

My principal research interests lie in the fields of Sociology, Visual Culture, Photography, Media Studies and Critical Disability Studies. In my current PhD research, which has been funded by ESRC, I investigate the relationship between photography, dis/ability, new promotional visual cultures, and (post)identity bio-politics. Focusing on the historical and political debates over representation, the emerging spectacle, and the apparent inclusion of the non-normative embodiment, within frameworks of social justice and emancipation and especially in relation to the disabled people’s movement; I am interested in: i) questioning the visually politicised articulation and imagination of the human body and normalcy; and ii) how photographic visualisation can be used for and by dis/abled people against ongoing disabling and ableist processes.

I am also interested in visual research methods and particularly the use of cameras and photography in critical and emancipatory sociological research. This compliments my personal photographic practice (street, documentary and fine art) during the last ten years. I extensively engage with photo-documentation, photo-elicitation and the photo-essay (as a photographer, researcher, artist, flâneur, documentarist). In my latest ongoing project I have introduced the concepts of 'visual' and 'photographic profanations' (drawing also from theoretical ideas by Agamben and Virilio) in order to analyse contemporary, visual, urban politics of social organisation and civil disobedience, in relation to the removal of visual signs of protest from public spaces and memory.