Sociology and Criminology-Open Access
Open Access

Abstract

A Method to Analyse Invisibility

Philip Listin*

This article starts by considering how ‘the talk’ that black and non-black minority families give to their children comes as a requirement to transfer the wisdom of the way to be invisible forward through generations. It isn't uncommon to believe being visible as a social good, but this is often almost so straightforward when one occupies a body deemed as ‘other.’ this text exposes this tension to explore how invisibility are often understood as an independent, complex, and nuanced social dynamic in its title by considering literature that uses invisibility as an analytical lens, providing a synthesis of that literature to provide a preliminary multidimensional model of invisibility to extend extant tools for sociological study. This literature considers race, gender, sexuality, various presentations of power, and different social systems to demonstrate a model that identifies how the intersection of power, affect, presence, and voice fluidly transfigure across time and space to form an overall social construct of invisibility. This suggests that deeper development of a multidimensional construct of invisibility can provide a reasoned and valuable additional lens to affect a spread of social dynamics.

Published Date: 2021-06-19; Received Date: 2021-06-08