Exposing globalization: Visual approaches to researching global interconnectivity in the urban everyday

This article explores how visual approaches to globalization as expressed and enacted in everyday life may enrich and complement the more abstract and mainly quantitatively supported discourses around this convoluted phenomenon. Visual methods, with their focus on empirically observable aspects of culture, indeed have the capacity to uncover forms of global interconnectivity in urban settings, by looking carefully at the material environment and artifacts as cultural expressions and at visual practices and performances of people within those spaces. Observing globalization in urban public space involves a wide variety of resources, methods, techniques and technologies, each with their specific affordances and limitations. Therefore this contribution is less a detailed study about globalization than it is about how to study aspects of globalization through its visual dimensions and by using visual means and methods to capture data and to communicate insight in novel ways