photo essay sociology

Introduction: Visual Sociology and the Relational Image

• First Online: 05 January 2021

Cite this chapter

• Dennis Zuev 3 &
• Gary Bratchford 4  

776 Accesses

1 Citations

• The original version of this chapter was revised. The correction to this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54510-9_7

In the introduction we define our starting points regarding the relationality and performance of the image. We reflect on the changing nature of the visual in the era of social media and outline the range of visual sociology, while briefly discussing the theoretical framework of the book. This chapter concludes with an outline of the subsequent chapters.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info
• Durable hardcover edition

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Change history

20 august 2021.

The original version of the book was inadvertently published without incorporating the author’s proof corrections. The chapter has now been corrected and approved by the author.

See James Bridle’s personal website, accessible: http://booktwo.org/notebook/drone-shadows/ [accessed 25 November 2019].

This includes images and image production including, but limited to, still or moving, digital or analogy, paint or pencil, professional or amateur.

These three domains are not intended as a rigid three-dimensional framework, but rather as three aspects that help us to take further the understanding of the changes in the practices and politics of the visual.

Data capitalism is marked by an increasing number of scandals regarding the storage, sharing and leakage of data, starting with WikiLeaks to Huawei scandal and Amazon versus Microsoft.

SenseTime is a Chinese artificial intelligence software as a service (SaaS) company.

By virtual, we mean online or social media domain and do not imply that it is less ‘real’ than offline domain.

Back, L. (2007). The Art of Listening . London: Bloomsbury.

Google Scholar  

Barthes, R. (1981). Camera Lucida . London: Hill & Wang.

Becker, H. S. (1974). Photography and Sociology. Studies in Visual Communication, 1 (1), 3–26.

Belting, H. (2011). An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body . Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing . London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books.

Bleiker, R. (Ed.). (2018). Visual Global Politics . London: Routledge.

Bourdieu, P. (1990). Photography, a Middle-Brow Art . Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Bousquet, A. (2018). The Eye of War Military Perception from the Telescope to the Drone . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bratchford, G. (2019). Visualising the Invisible: A Guided Walk Around the Pendleton Housing Estate, Salford, UK. Visual Studies, 33 (4), 395–339.

Bratchford, G., & Zuev, D. (2020). Aerial Visibilities: Towards a Visual Sociology of the Sky. Introduction to the Special Issue. Visual Studies, 35 (6) (in print).

Bratchford, G., & Parkinson, R. (2019). Draft of a Memento. Control, (21)14–16.

Bridle, J. (2012, October 12). Under the Shadow of the Drone . Retrieved from http://booktwo.org/notebook/drone-shadows/

Bridle, J. (2013, May 14). James Bridle—Meet He Artist . Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Lza-ZC7UCPk

Brighenti, A. (2010). Visibility in Social Theory and Social Research . London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Brown, M., & Carrabine, E. (2019). The Critical Foundations of Visual Criminology: The State, Crisis, and the Sensory. Critical Criminology, 27 (1), 191–205.

Callahan, W. A. (2020). Sensible Politics: Visualizing International Relations . Cambridge: Oxford University Press.

Cambre, C. (forthcoming). Visual Sociology. Palgrave Handbook of Images . London: Palgrave.

Carrabine, E. (2012). Just Images: Aesthetics, Ethics and Visual Criminology. British Journal of Criminology, 52 (3), 463–489.

Chouliaraki, L., Orwicz, M., & Greeley, R. (2019). Special Issue: The Visual Politics of the Human. Visual Communication, 18 (3), 301–309.

Corrigall-Brown, C., & Wilkes, R. (2012). Picturing Protest: The Visual Framing of Collective Action by First Nations in Canada. American Behavioral Scientist, 56 (2), 223–243.

Edensor, T. (2010). Walking in Rhythms: Place, Regulation, Style and the Flow of Experience. Visual Studies, 25 (1), 69–79.

Gadwalladr, C. (2019). The Great Hack: The Film That Goes Behind the Scenes of the Facebook Data Scandal. The Guardian . https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jul/20/the-great-hack-cambridge-analytica-scandal-facebook-netflix . Accessed 23 July 2019.

Gerbaudo, P. (2015). Protest Avatars as Memetic Signifiers: Political Profile Pictures and the Construction of Collective Identity on Social Media in the 2011 Protest Wave. Information, Communication & Society, 18 , 916–929.

Gill, S. (2020). Review of Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics . Visual Studies, 35 (2–3), 302–303.

Goffmann, E. (1976). Gender Advertisements . New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Goldsmith, A. J. (2010). Policing’s New Visibility. British Journal of Criminology, 50 , 914–934.

Haldrup, M., & Larsen, J. (2003). The Family Gaze. Tourist Studies, 3 (1), 23–46.

Hall, S., & Jefferson, T. (1976). Resistance Through Rituals, Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain . London: Harper Collins Academic.

Hall, S., Held, D., & McGrew, A. (Eds.). (1992). Modernity and Its Futures . Cambridge: Polity Press.

Harper, D. (2002). Talking About Pictures: A Case for Photo Elicitation. Visual Studies, 17 (1), 13–26.

Heck, A., & Schlag, G. (2013). Securitizing Images: The Female Body and the War in Afghanistan. European Journal of International Relations, 19 (4), 891–913.

Heng, T. (2017). Visual Methods in the Field: Photography for the Social Sciences . London: Routledge.

Hochman, N., & Manovich, L. (2013). Zooming into an Instagram City: Reading the Local Through Social Media. First Monday, 18 (7). https://firstmonday.org/article/view/4711/3698 . Accessed 12 February 2020.

Holliday, R. (2000). We’ve Been Framed: Visualising Methodology. The Sociological Review, 48 (4), 503–521.

Ibrahim, Y. (2018). The Unsacred and the Spectacularized: Alan Kurdi and the Migrant Body. Social Media + Society, 4 (4), 1–9.

Jacobs, J. (1992). Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics . New York: Random House.

Jordan, S., & Linder, C. (Eds.). (2016). Cities Interrupted: Visual Culture and Urban Space . London: Bloomsbury.

Knoblauch, H., Baer, A., Laurier, E., Petschke, S., & Schnettler, B. (2008). Visual Analysis: New Developments in the Interpretative Analysis of Video and Photography. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 9 (3): Art. 14. Available at www.qualitativeresearch.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1170/2587 . Accessed 7 June 2018

Knowles, C., & Sweetman, P. (Eds.). (2004). Picturing the Social Landscape: Visual Methods and the Sociological Imagination . London: Routledge.

Kotwas, M., & Kubik, J. (2019). Symbolic Thickening of Public Culture and the Rise of Right-Wing Populism in Poland. East European Politics and Societies, 33 (2), 435–471.

Krase, J. (2012a). An Argument for Seeing in Urban Social Science. Urbanities, 2 (1), 18–29.

Krase, J. (2012b). Seeing Cities Change: Local Culture and Class . Aldershot: Ashgate.

Krase, J., & Shortell, T. (2011). On the Spatial Semiotics of Vernacular Landscapes in Global Cities. Visual Communication, 10 (3), 367–400.

Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (1996). Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design . London: Routledge.

Lin, W. (2020). Participatory Geographic Information Systems in Visual Research. In L. Pauwels & D. Mannay (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Visual Research Methods (2nd ed., pp. 173–185). Los Angeles: Sage.

Lyon, D. (2003). Surveillance After September 1 . UK: Cambridge Polity.

Mannay, D., et al. (2018). Negotiating Closed Doors and Constraining Deadlines: The Potential of Visual Ethnography to Effectively Explore Private and Public Spaces of Motherhood and Parenting. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 47 (6), 758–781.

Messier, P. (2019). Cameras at Work: Dusty Lenses and Processed Videos in the Quarries of Hyderabad. Visual Anthropology, 32 (3–4), 287–308.

Mirzoeff, N. (1999). The Visual Culture Reader . New York: Routledge.

Mitchell, W. J. T. (2015). Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen, 16 (3), 6–18.

Nathansohn, R., & Zuev, D. (Eds.). (2013). Sociology of the Visual Sphere . New York: Routledge.

O’Neill, M., & Hubbard, P. (2010). Walking, Sensing, Belonging: Ethno-Mimesis as Performative Praxis. Visual Studies, 25 (1), 46–58.

Pauwels, L. (2010). Visual Sociology Reframed: An Analytical Synthesis and Discussion of Visual Methods in Social and Cultural Research. Sociological Methods and Research May, 38 , 545–581.

Pauwels, L. (2015). Reframing Visual Social Science: Towards a More Visual Sociology and Anthropology . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pauwels, L., & Mannay, D. (2019). The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods . London: Sage.

Pink, S. (2007). Walking with Video. Visual Studies, 22 (3), 240–252.

Pink, S., Sumartojo, S., Lupton, D., & LaBond, C. H. (2017). Empathetic Technologies: Digital Materiality and Video Ethnography. Visual Studies, 32 (4), 371–381.

Prosser, J. (1998). Image-Based Research: A Sourcebook for Qualitative Researchers . London: Routledge.

Rose, G. (2010). Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials . London: Sage.

Schatzki, T. (2002). The Site of the Social. A Philosophical Exploration of the Constitution of Social Life and Change . University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

Shortell, T., & Brown, E. (Eds.). (2014). Walking in the European city: Quotidian Mobility and Urban Ethnography . London: Routledge.

Simonite, T. (2019). Behind the Rise of China’s Facial-Recognition Giants . https://www.wired.com/story/behind-rise-chinas-facial-recognition-giants/ . Accessed 11 Apr 2019.

Sindelar, M. J. (2019). When Workers Toil Unseen, Artists Intervene: On the In/visibility of Labor in the Arabian Gulf States. Visual Anthropology, 32 (3–4), 265–286.

Sontag, S. (1979). On Photography . Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Stein, R. L. (2017). GoPro Occupation: Networked Cameras, Israeli Military Rule, and the Digital Promise. Current Anthropology, 58 (15), 56–S64.

Stubblefield, T. (2005). 9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster . Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Sturken, M., & Cartwright, L. (2018). Practices of Looking. An Introduction to Visual Culture . Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

Traue, B., Blanc, M., & Cambre, C. (2019). Visibilities and Visual Discourses: Rethinking the Social with the Image. Qualitative Inquiry, 25 (4), 327–337.

Tyler, I. (2019). Stigma Machines . London: Zed Book.

Vergani, M., & Zuev, D. (2011). Analysis of YouTube Videos Used by Activists in the Uyghur Nationalist Movement: Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Methods. Journal of Contemporary China, 20 (69), 205–229.

Wissel, C. (2013). Operations of Recognition: Seeing Urbanizing Landscapes with the Feet. In R. Nathansohn & D. Zuev (Eds.), Sociology of the Visual Sphere . New York: Routledge.

Zuev, D. (2006). Reconstructing the Meanings of Traveling Among Young People in Modern Russia: The Use of the Photo Interview. European Spatial Research and Policy, 13 (1), 113–131.

Zuev, D. (2016). Visual Methods in Event Studies. In T. Pernecky (Ed.), Approaches and Methods in Event Studies (pp. 96–119). London, UK: Routledge.

Zuev, D., & Bratchford, G. (2020). The Citizen Drone: Protest, Sousveillance and Droneviewing. Visual Studies, 35 (6) (in print).

Zuev, D., & Krase, J. (2017). Visual Sociology. Sociopedia.Isa . http://www.sagepub.net/isa/admin/viewPDF.aspx?&art=VisualSociology.pdf

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

City University of Macau, Macau, China

Dennis Zuev

University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK

Gary Bratchford

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dennis Zuev .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Zuev, D., Bratchford, G. (2020). Introduction: Visual Sociology and the Relational Image. In: Visual Sociology. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54510-9_1

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54510-9_1

Published : 05 January 2021

Publisher Name : Palgrave Pivot, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-030-54509-3

Online ISBN : 978-3-030-54510-9

eBook Packages : Social Sciences Social Sciences (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

• More Resources

Numerous assignments on TRAILS ask students to make photographs or collect pictures in the form of essays, presentations, or other formats. This resource collection of Visual Sociology and Photography Projects showcases the range of visual sociology projects available on TRAILS. 

All ASA members get a subscription to TRAILS as a benefit of membership. Log in with your ASA account by clicking the button below.

By logging in, you agree to abide by the TRAILS user agreement .

Our website uses cookies to improve your browsing experience, to increase the speed and security for the site, to provide analytics about our site and visitors, and for marketing. By proceeding to the site, you are expressing your consent to the use of cookies. To find out more about how we use cookies, see our Privacy Policy .

• Request new password
• Create a new account

Our Social World: Introduction to Sociology

Student resources, photo essay, home as material culture, homes are good examples of material culture. their construction is influenced not only by local materials but also by ideas of what a home is. homes shape the context in which family members interact, so they can influence the nonmaterial culture – including beliefs, values and symbols. houses, like clothes, act as symbols that communicate levels of prestige., questions to consider :.

When looking at the pictures above, can you tell which home houses the most important person? Why or why not? How does your answer reveal how symbols are social constructions whose meaning may vary from society to society?

How did the size, shape, and material of the building in which you were raised indicate your family’s social class level?

How do the physical of material aspects of dwellings in which families reside shape the interaction and experiences of family members and thereby influence the nonmaterial culture shared by a family?

How much privacy did the home in which you were raised provide for each of its members? How did that influence your family life when you were a child and your expectations for family life as an adult?

Sociology of the South

Deconstructing the dirty south, one post at a time, southern food is life (photo essay).

Sweet Ice Tea

Sweet tea is the corner stone to any southern meal. Besides breakfast that is. This liquid gold is a must to any quality southern home.I can not remember a family meal where the drink on everyone’s place mat was this incredible creation. It has to power to to turn a bad day into a good one.

While i my self am not extremely fond of pickled okra like the rest of my family, I am a fan of other ways to prepare the southern veggie. While steaming and grilling okra are excellent there is only real way to serve this vegetable. That style is of course fried, fried okra compliments any meal, add hot sauce and the meal can take a delicious turn.

While its know that the south, and especially Memphis is famous for BBQ, but we as Memphians know some of the best BBQ comes from home. My dad has had and used this smoker to make some of the best smoked pork, chicken, and beef. While my father has taught me many tings I will be able to use later in my life, I am most thankful for the knowledge of properly smoking various meat.

Again, I realize that this photo is not technically something you can actually eat, but it represents southern tradition. Venison (deer meat) is a a beautiful thing. While it is not the easiest meat to come by, it is quite delicious if prepared right. Along with being just great in flavor, it is a much leaner meat that beef or pork. My dad and I frequent our hunting spots and with luck we can harvest enough deer meat to fill an entire freezer. My family over the years has filled a small cook book of different recipes of deliciousness.

Grits. What is more southern than grits in the morning? I am not the most traveled person around, and the few northern cities i have visited do not have a good place to acquire this delicious southern dish. Add some cheese to grits and you my firned have a fine meal, that is easy and extremely cheap to make.

What is more down home than preserves? They are some what like jam and jelly, but better. My grandmother, for as long as I can remember, has not been able to resist the urge to jar and preserve fruit for later dates. I can not remember the last time i have needed to actually buy jelly or jam.

I find myself always coming back to fried food, and that is in no way a bad thing. I don’t know what it is that drives us southerners to throw all kinds of food into the frier. Out of everything that has found it way into the frier, pickles have proven to be one of the best one of the greatest appetizers around.

What more needs to be said about fried catfish and hush puppies? if you do not hve someone that is willing to make this for you there are multiple restaurants in the city of Memphis who would be happy to. Soul Fish being my personal favorite.

Still hungry after that delicious fried or smoked southern dinner? What better way to continue to gorge yourself than pie. What kind of pie you ask? Pecan Pie, that’s what kind. I can not imagine a finer way to end a meal.

With Thanksgiving right around the corner you will most likely come into contact with these puppies.

Cobbler. Peach, cranberry, cherry, blackberry, strawberry cobbler. It is a butter based desert, anyone with a soul knows that is the best kind of desert. If you have saved room from that pecan pie (we all know you did) grab a slab of this next a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Ah cornbread. Just another picture perfect side dish to any southern cuisine. Accompanied with a good stew (venison of course) any innocent by-stander could find themselves polishing off an entire pan of the maize inspired bread.

Biscuits may be the best breakfast food in the world. As mentioned before i am not a travel guru, but one question I have for northerners is what is the big deal with toast? If i had been subjected to toast breakfast for my entire life I am sure i would be rude all of the time as well. The family I stayed with claimed to have never purchased grits and had never thought to buy biscuits. We did not get along much after that early morning conversation.

What can i say that already has not been said about fried chicken? Not a lot is the answer, forgive my french, but it is damn good. If you can find man woman/man who can fry chicken marry them immediately. Until you find that special someone, Gus’ World Famous Fried Chicken will do the trick and then some.

18 thoughts on “ Southern Food is Life (Photo Essay) ”

EssayPro has a number of advantages over other custom research paper writing service . This website provides a wide range of topics and writers, and the writing quality of its papers is good enough for top-notch grades. You can communicate directly with the writer to discuss your requirements, and you can also see samples of their work. The company also offers unlimited revisions within 30 days after you place your order. EssayPro is also accessible 24/7, making it an excellent choice for those who need urgent assistance.

A professional essay writing service https://www.topreviewstars.com/best-homework-help-services/ is a great choice for students. The company has been around for 7 years and has received a 4.74-star rating from customers. Its writers are qualified and specialize in a wide variety of academic disciplines. In addition, its writers are willing to make suggestions for their customers.

coinbase trading bot is one of the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. It offers a variety of crypto tokens including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and many more. The platform provides a variety of tools and services to help its customers trade and invest.

Check out the latest zellbury collection online at Highwayfashions. Explore the wide range of branded dresses online at Highwayfashions. Get your favorite dresses online in all over Pakistan at low prices.

作文是一篇有重点的文章，利用证据、分析和解释来阐述一个观点或论点 https://www.academicsaviour.com/online-quiz-dai-kao 。

一篇论文的结构应该是清晰的，由引言、主体和结论组成。引言应说明主要观点，并对正文部分将要讨论的内容进行概述。

LunwenHelp是一个有着专业素养和技术水平的代写团队，在代写留学生Report行业经营多年，本着帮助与提高的精神为许许多多的学生客户解决很多作业问题。https://www.lunwenhelp.com/report-daixie/

作为Report代写机构，我们深知deadline对于您的重要性。按时交稿是我们的承诺，超时赔付是我们的保障。每一篇Report都是原创，定制款，唯一性。 https://www.lunwenhelp.com/report-daixie/

Meeloun论文网是一家专业提供留学论文代写网站，为留学生提供优质的论文代写服务包括但不限于各类assignment代写，essay代写，report代写，homework代写，网课代修，程序代写，EXAM代考，QUIZ代写等各类留学论文作业，价格有诚意，分数有保障，服务有质量，欢迎咨询。 https://www.lxws.net/nursingdaixie.html

说到留学生网课代修代上的最佳伙伴，HotEssay绝对当仁不让。HotEssay是成立于2015年专业的留学网课代修代上机构。在这个竞争日益激烈的行业中，HotEssay仍然可以坚持长达五年之久，祖师说明其强大的实力。 http://www.hotessay.net/our_service5.php

Your writing is perfect and complete. safetoto However, I think it will be more wonderful if your post includes additional topics that I am thinking of. I have a lot of posts on my site similar to your topic. Would you like to visit once?

Looking at this article, I miss the time when I didn’t wear a mask. totosite Hopefully this corona will end soon. My blog is a blog that mainly posts pictures of daily life before Corona and landscapes at that time. If you want to remember that time again, please visit us.

I have been looking for articles on these topics for a long time. baccarat online I don’t know how grateful you are for posting on this topic. Thank you for the numerous articles on this site, I will subscribe to those links in my bookmarks and visit them often. Have a nice day

I’ve been searching for hours on this topic and finally found your post. casinosite , I have read your post and I am very impressed. We prefer your opinion and will visit this site frequently to refer to your opinion. When would you like to visit my site?

Great web site you have here.. It’s hard to find high-quality writing like yours these days. I really appreciate people like you! Take care!! Karya Bintang Abadi

Explore a wide collection of formal and Fashion shoes for women at Adoro. Find the perfect pair to elevate your style and confidence.

Friday Night Funkin is the best music game I’ve ever played!

While Southern food nourishes the body, essay writing help nourishes the mind. Just as a good meal satisfies hunger, quality assistance in essay writing satisfies academic needs, guiding students towards success.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Guest Essay

America’s Trails Are a Wonder, and They Need Our Help

By Justin Farrell and Steven Ring

Dr. Farrell is a professor of sociology at the School of the Environment at Yale and the author of “Billionaire Wilderness.” Mr. Ring, a former trail worker at Yosemite National Park, is a graduate student at Yale.

As dawn broke on a fall day in 2020 over the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park, a crew of young men and women labored to fix a precarious footbridge below Wapama Falls — at 1,400 feet, one of the tallest waterfalls in the park. Several park visitors were swept off the bridge to their deaths in recent years during periods of high water.

Using pulleys and their combined strength, they struggled to maneuver a 400-pound granite slab into place on a new bridge abutment to support the span. Just as a crew member yelled across the ravine for more slack on the rope, a hiker strolled around the bend and stopped, seemingly dumbfounded. He tilted his head, covered with a wide-brimmed hat, to get a better look.

“What are you all doing out here?” he yelled.

The crew members were among thousands of mostly youthful workers who labor to maintain the trails that thread through America’s public lands. It’s hard, sweaty work, and there aren’t enough workers to do all that’s needed in these treasured and sacred spaces.

The trails they manage usher visitors to such places as the cascading waterfalls of Alabama’s Talladega National Forest, the rolling Allegheny Mountains and the lush, lake-filled landscapes of Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. The National Park Service recorded 325.5 million visits to its parks last year, up 4 percent over the previous year and the second busiest year on record. But the 236,000 miles of trails that wend their way through the parks, forests and deserts are often neglected and are certainly undervalued. That poses dangers to hikers and impedes access to the wonders that can be found on public lands.

These trails are testaments to the sheer human effort of generations of stewards who tended to them, often without pay. But fewer and fewer people are willing to do this hard work, either for money or for the satisfaction of donating their time and elbow grease.

“We only get to hire half the staff we’re actually hiring for” because there aren’t enough applicants, said Remo Fickler, a grizzled 23-year National Park Service veteran and trail crew supervisor in Yosemite, lamenting the decline.

To us, this indifference points to a problem of meaning, evinced by a worsening epidemic of loneliness, generational declines in civic engagement and a dwindling commitment to stewardship as honorable public service.

Indigenous tribes for centuries cultivated and maintained intricate trail networks before federal agencies claimed them. Trails proliferated during the 19th century as more people visited the nascent parks, and the miles grew rapidly in the 20th century with the support of the National Park Service, the Civilian Conservation Corps and the National Trails System Act.

But America’s trails don’t care for themselves, and during World War II, many fell into disrepair as attention was directed to the war and recovery. Afterward, the park service refocused and repaired and modernized its trails. Still, water, gravity and use by humans and horses and, in some areas, bikes and off-road vehicles are perpetually wearing on them, creating serious safety hazards for visitors. Injuries occur frequently, and deaths from slips and falls happen every year. In Yosemite, for example, 16 people have died from slips and falls (not in climbing accidents) since 2007.

Trail crews often serve as the only eyes and ears in the backcountry. Crews are often the first to report a wildfire or to begin the search for a missing person. The same crews fix safety hazards to prevent tragedies. Worker shortages place a heavier burden on crew leaders like Mr. Fickler, especially in parks like Yosemite, which has only about 25 permanent employees on its trail staff for over 750 miles. About four million annual visits are made to Yosemite.

Well-kept trails protect the nation’s fragile natural resources by shepherding visitors to certain areas while keeping other areas untrammeled. But crowdsourced apps like AllTrails and Strava, where anyone can record an off-trail route, can contribute to the degradation of the surrounding terrain. After the 2018 release of “Free Solo,” the Academy Award-winning documentary film set in Yosemite, visitors tramped off trail to get a closer view of El Capitan. A warren of improvised routes resulted, damaging the landscape and creating dangers for users.

Money can certainly help address the trail problems on federal lands, but that seems, like willing workers, in short supply. The National Park Service, which oversees 85 million acres, faces $23 billion in deferred maintenance, and since 2011, the agency has cut nearly one in five jobs from its operation staff, even though visitation rose and four new national parks have been authorized. At the U.S. Forest Service, which manages an additional 193 million acres, 45 percent of its permanent employees have left since 2021.

The bipartisan Great American Outdoors Act, signed by President Donald Trump in 2020, sought to address trail funding shortfalls, yet four years after its passage, the Forest Service estimates that it still lacks even one full-time trail worker in more than one-third of its districts, and 410 full-time trail jobs remain unfilled.

Federal funding is important. So is reversing the nation’s declining civic health.

What we really need is a national commitment to environmental stewardship to protect our wild places and assure that it is possible for people — young and old, mobile and physically challenged — to visit them and move through them safely. But what we have seen is a national shift inward, into our phones, our basements, our political tribes. We need to aspire to something more.

Franklin Roosevelt touched on this idea in 1933 when he spoke about the formation of the Civilian Conservation Corps, created in the Depression to employ young men to improve America’s public lands, forests and parks. “What is being accomplished,” he said, “will conserve our natural resources, create future national wealth and prove of moral and spiritual value.”

Trail crew jobs, whether paid or volunteer, can be experiential models for how to counteract America’s lonely shift inward. Working on public lands provides the setting to learn and embody the values of long-term stewardship and communal obligation in a specific place, for a specific civic purpose.

“On trail crews, people value you for the things that really matter,” Darian Gumper, a young woman with six years of experience on trail crews, told us. “Are you a hard worker? Do you look out for the community? There’s no way to hide it out here.”

Justin Farrell is a professor of sociology at the School of the Environment at Yale and the author of “Billionaire Wilderness.” Steven Ring, a former trail worker at Yosemite National Park, is a graduate student at Yale.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .