%0 Journal Article
%T Looking at Whales: Narration and the Organization of Visual Experience
%A Peter R. Grahame
%J Journal of Contemporary Ethnography
%@ 1552-5414
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/0891241618768071
%X While interest in visual representations of animals is well established in visual sociology, this article explores another set of possibilities connected with practices of looking at animals. In particular, I examine the social organization of visual experience in whale watching, with a focus on the role of narration. Using detailed transcriptions of whale watch narration as data, I argue that naturalists produce publicly witnessed trip sightings by coordinating what can be seen in the water with understandings of whales as objects of scientific research and environmental concern
%K narration
%K tourism
%K whale watching
%K visual practices
%K sociology of seeing
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0891241618768071