Current Sociology

Please welcome our Sociologist of the Month for July 2023, Ravindra N Mohabeer (Media Studies, Vancouver Island University, Canada). His article for Current Sociology A method to analyze invisibility: Navigating the dissonance between woke and safe was one of the two winning articles for the first edition (2023) of the Annual SAGE Current Sociology Best Paper Prize, and is Open Access.

Ravindra N Mohabeer

Could you please tell us about yourself? How did you come to your field of study?

R.N. Mohabeer: I lived in a very visual place when I first came up with this idea. Some places are inherently more visual than others. What was ironic was that I couldn't really see the place since it was, in many ways, invisible to me. I was caught up in flows of information and social dynamics that came from outside, I never realized how I was physically present but otherwise absent. That is, my body lived there but my mind could and did live elsewhere. This was facilitated by media of presence that created a voice for other places as more attractive or powerful, positioned where I was as 'beautiful' but not much more, and ultimately produced a sense of caring, that is, love of the place, as a zero sum; either you loved it or there was something wrong with you.

What I struggled with was what Joshua Meyerowitz called 'no sense of place.' I was in a beautiful space that was devoid of any voice, power, or meaning to me at the time – visible in a physical sense, invisible in all others.

When I finally came to grips with the fact that my family and I were hypervisible in that place as one of very few visible minorities (under 4%) in a small community, a stark contrast to occupying the same body in a different place where I was still classified as a 'minority' but in a place that had a much broader experience of 'others' (40% plus), I wondered how those numbers could be understood from the perspective of visibility. I could never quite get that to work. How could there be fewer people like me in one place and more people like me in another but I still felt invisible? That is, how come interrogating my visibility couldn't provide me with a fulsome analysis?

Once I realized my need to contest the affordances and limitations of the visible, it was like a lightbulb. What else had I been missing and how come I could notice it sometimes and not others? Eventually I started to explore different social phenomena using an intersectional invisibility approach, from family dynamics to social policy, science to art, and many things in between. What I noticed was that the themes of power, voice, affect and vision could be imagined as different saturations when one thought about any example, but that each of these elements changes in time and space and is rarely ever fixed. It seemed fair to consider this as an explanation of the visible, but, to me, it seemed more appropriate to consider it as the invisible given that visibility felt like an element or output rather than as the model itself. This is particularly true when you think about how invisibility is a constant negotiation for many, myself included, who occupy a body that can be viewed as variously precarious by way of circumstance even when that body doesn't physically change along the way.

What do you see as the key findings of your article?

R.N. Mohabeer: As we navigate the world, some things come to our attention and other things don't. But how and why? In this paper that represents a core of my thinking over the last decade, I was thinking about how invisibility is an intersection of seeing, feeling, power, and voice and that whether or not something is socially invisible changes depending on context (time and place). You can imagine the idea of looking through some people, perhaps like the unhoused. Sure they are visible in a physical sense but they are socially and often structurally powerless, often voiceless in public discourse, and they are often people who come in and out of our collective urgency to care about. On the other hand, if you think about the idea of the economy, we see money being spent but the bigger picture, the whole system, that's almost invisible (unseeable) in a direct way but still knowable in other ways. Despite being invisible, the economy impacts everything we do and is powerful.

Invisibility as a socially constructed dynamic is, itself, a way of thinking (and looking) at the world. Used as a methodological lens, my hope is that exploring invisibility as a complicated question adds a critical thinking layer that we can apply to a wide range of subjects. I haven't yet found a field or discipline where I can't think through at least some ideas using this framework. It sometimes helps explain 'that missing piece' or dynamic people struggle with because of its layered approach. As with all considerations of intersectionality, it's easier to imagine elements of any puzzle separately than to think of them as co-constituent and mutable because of their relationships. When things intersect they produce something entirely different from the sum of their parts yet it's the parts that are the most accessible for us to imagine and probe even if that is always already limited. I hope that this framework helps somebody work out an explanation that has eluded them.

What are the wider social implications of your research in the current social climate? How do you think things will change in the future?

R.N. Mohabeer: Thinking about invisibility in the way that I proposed allows us to navigate a new way to imagine how and why people and things come to matter. It helps us think about a lot of different things in our lives and ask why some of them are more present than others, and why some of them are seen to be more important and others less. In the current social climate there has been a lot of valuable reflection on representational presence (and absence), that asks us to look at who is physically 'at the table' as it were. Using the notion of invisibility as a framework, however, allows us to consider whether 'curating' visible change is the same as creating meaningful difference; that is, by displaying efforts to promote diversity visibly are we actually diversifying thought, inclusion, caring and action, or is it just important to look like we are? Taking invisibility as a mode of analysis allows us to ask about how the surface layer of the visible may, in fact, hide much more of the same under a facade of progress. When it comes to thinking about competing to seem aware – appearing to be 'woke' about systemic failures however you imagine that term in practice – we really have to think about whether we are producing new forms of invisibility that perpetuate the absences of power, voice, and caring by showing that we represent a diversity of people even if we do not also include them. Emerging urges to publicly demonstrate diversity do not require change at the core. They can easily operate in a space of invisibility and be masked by a slight of hand that shows up as more diverse while hiding the practice of staying the same.

My model asks us to think about everything as always at an intersection of ways of knowing. As a parallel example, you might imagine the value of thinking about invisibility by thinking about how being seen – being visible – is not the opposite of being invisible. The more something is hyper-visible, everywhere, all the time, in your face, the less likely it is that you can actually see it in a nuanced way or that that person or thing will be able to chart their own course (exercise their agency). Hypervisibility is its own form of being invisible because being hypervisible often comes at the expense of being able to control (exercise your own power) to construct your own narrative (voice), or encourage people how to feel about you (affect). You can see that with some celebrities who, once they become known for one thing, often can't change tracks and try something new. If you go to a concert for a prominent artist, for example, their hypervisibility makes it almost impossible for them to try out new material or do something different without their fans saying "play us your hits, that's why we paid to be here!" That shows that the more visible you are, sometimes the more invisible you become.

What I hope is that we don't get caught in a moment where we mistake paying attention to things that have long been overlooked, sometimes referred to as becoming 'woke,' as the genesis of class or social consciousness. Instead, perhaps we can look at how power can be exercised by co-opting the appearance and display of awareness as a form of cultural currency, that is, exercising power and caring to be seen to be saying and doing the right things, in the moment, but perhaps devoid of material consequence or committment. Invisibility as a lens, on the ground, is a way to focus on intersections that govern how and whether we engage in the world in any given time and place at multiple levels concurrently. Meaningful social change requires us to pay attention beyond 'representation' as 'enumeration' and think more about how invisibility is so much more than being seen.

Do you have any links to images, documents or other pieces of research which build on or add to the article? Or a suggested reading list?

R.N. Mohabeer: I've used this framework in a couple of papers I published recently (the first looks at the idea that I mentioned at the start, living in a real place that is very visual but also very invisible in other ways):
- Mohabeer, R. (2021) Visual reciprocity and #vanlife in the visual commons: Vancouver Island is a VW bus, Visual Studies, DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2021.1975499
- Mohabeer, R. (2022) Becoming Invisible to/and Still Not Belong: Rethinking the Dwelling of BIPOC Scholars at the Physical and Disciplinary Margins of Communication Studies in Canada. Canadian Journal of Communication Vol. 47, No. 3, pp. 511-530

Maurice Merleau Ponty's (1969) The Visible and the Invisible which I found at the end of my writing but I look forward to diving into deeper along with some of the commentary that it prompted.

Anderson Franklin, a social psychologist writes extensively from a therapeutic perspective about what he called 'invisibility syndrome' faced by African-American people. It offers a really interesting perspective on how invisibility is lived by people who experience it.

In the article I wrote for this journal, among others, I would highly recommend a few pieces that really probe the broad complexities of intersectional invisibility as an analytic lens:
- Harms E (2013) The Boss: Conspicuous invisibility in Ho Chi Minh City. City & Society 25(2): 195–215.
- Licona A, Maldonado M (2014) The social production of Latin@ visibilities and invisibilities: Geographies of power in small town America. Antipode 46: 517–536.
- Lollar K (2015) Strategic invisibility: Resisting the inhospitable dwelling place. Review of Communication 15(4): 298–315.
- Purdie-Vaughns V, Eibach RP (2008) Intersectional invisibility: The distinctive advantages and disadvantages of multiple subordinate-group identities. Sex Roles 59(5): 377–391.
- Tucker A (2009) Queer Visibilities: Space, Identity and Interaction in Cape Town. Malden, MA, Oxford and Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.