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Visual Sources in Teaching History and Gender in Social Work
Visual sources play a growing role in historical studies as well as in teaching as they offer new routes to understanding the past. The ways to construct and define social problems as well as approaches to solving them varied in different periods of history. To do so, it is important to challenge an ideological base of such concepts that often are taken-for-granted, to learn how to consider images as a means to conceive the world, as an important form of social knowledge. What are the differences on men’s and women’s labor in care work? How these distinctions were represented in certain sources and for which purposes? Photographs and episodes from the films, posters and cartoons depicting various images of men and women in the roles of parents, tutors, social care workers, nurses can be used not just as illustrations or representations but also as an important element of a studied context – as important as official documents or personal narratives. The aim of this lecture is to contribute to social work training by providing an overview of experiences, theories and methodologies on the visual, by collecting and building knowledge based on visual material and demonstrating its relevance to the study of human behavior, social networks and welfare policies.