Colloidal suspensions consist of micron sized solid particles suspended in a solvent. The particles are Brownian so that the suspension as a whole behaves as a thermal system governed by the laws of statistical mechanics. The thermodynamic nature of these systems allows scientists to use colloidal suspensions as models for investigating numerous processes that typically take place on the atomic scale but are often very difficult to investigate. In this talk I will describe how we use confocal microscopy techniques to investigate the structure and dynamics of these systems and gain an understanding of dislocation nucleation and transport in colloidal crystals. Such dislocations are examples of singular point defects in 2D crystals and line defects in 3D crystals.