Seeing and Believing

Social media platforms are often denounced as “bubbles” or “echo chambers.” In this view, what we see tends to reinforce what we already believe, and what we already believe shapes what we see. Yet social movements such as Black Lives Matter rely heavily on the widespread dissemination of digital photographs and videos through social media. In at least some cases, visual images can challenge normative and normalized ways of grasping the world and prompt their viewers to see differently—and even bring people together.Seeing and Believing marshals religious resources to recast the significance of digital images in the struggle for social justice. Ellen T. Armour examines what distinguishes digital photography from its analogue predecessor and places the circulation of digital images in the broader context of virtual visual cultures. She explores the challenges and opportunities that visually saturated social media landscapes present for users and organizers. Despite the power of digital platforms and algorithms, possibilities for disruption and resistance emerge from how people engage with these systems. Armour offers ways of seeing drawn from Christianity and found in other religious traditions to help us break with entrenched habits and rethink how we engage with the images that grab our attention. Developing theological perspectives on the power and peril of photography and technology, Seeing and Believing provides suggestions for navigating the new media landscape that can spark what Armour calls “photographic insurrection.”

Seeing and Believing is a meticulous and engaging portrait of how digital technology, especially social media, affects society. Never abstracting or ignoring the gaze of whiteness in seeking racial justice, Armour shows the reader how photographic insurrection can upend oppressive relationships generated by biodisciplinary powers., The ethical questions that animate Seeing and Believing are achingly current: How do we live with the aggressive seductions of digital worlds? Can religious teachings offer us any help? This fully engaged and persistently hopeful book moves through the stripping-away of critique to find resources for insurrection., Developing an account of 'photographic insurrection,' Seeing and Believing calls and calls out, attuning us to the ways that our new digital public square can be mobilized toward justice. Prophetic, critical, and meditative, this text will most certainly impact the way we see the world—and ourselves. Or at least it did for me., Ellen Armour's sensitivity to diverse articulations of power informs her treatment of images as both inducing conformity and spawning resistance. This is especially relevant for the consideration of social media since these platforms are shaped both by their providers and by their consumers. This book brings intensive theological reflection to the study of visual culture in a way that will engage scholars of many kinds.

Ellen T. Armour is E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Chair and Professor of Feminist Theology at Vanderbilt Divinity School, where she also directs the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality. Her books include Signs and Wonders: Theology After Modernity (Columbia, 2016).