“The Politics of the Eye: Imagery of the American Political
Landscape”
2012 Visual Culture Graduate Student Conference
Keynote Speaker: Matthew Frye Jacobson
Saint Louis
University, St. Louis, MO
Fri., October 5 and Sat., October 6, 2012
Submission Deadline: May 1, 2012
As the nation faces unprecedented challenges to fulfill a
vision of fairness and opportunity for everyone—expressed most vocally in
popular political culture in the Occupy Wall Street Movement—historians too are
beset by new questions of representational fairness. Cultural historian Matthew
Frye Jacobson claims that historians are crafting new relationships to history
itself, a process he describes as “a mental habit of apprehending the past in
the present and history-in-the-making.”
The biennial Visual Culture Conference organized by graduate
students in the American Studies Department at Saint Louis University seeks
graduate student papers from all disciplines that engage the theme, “Politics
of the Eye: Imagery of the American Political Landscape.” Recognizing that the
American political landscape expands beyond Wall Street reform, right-wing
opposition to Obama, and street protests, the conference seeks to explore how
visual aspects of the political landscape force us to examine how diverse and
competing political narratives, past and present, are created and refined
through visual media. Mindful of Jacobson’s urging to apprehend “the past in
the present,” we are also interested in papers that question the current model
of the visual archive and explore how we might expand both the means of
archiving information and the criteria for what deserves archiving.
We seek papers that expand upon a wide variety of visual
media, including photography, television, film, art and digital media, to
explore critical perspectives in the production, interpretation, and
consumption of the American political landscape, past and present. Some areas
of inquiry might include, but are not limited to:
- Discourses on the politics of representation
- Visuality and spectatorship
- Creation of meaning in competing cultural and political arenas
- Theories on political, visual documents
- Documenting the political process
- Alternative visual histories
- Visual, political texts involving memory
- How visual media create and sustain political dichotomies
The Conference Committee invites all those interested to
submit abstracts of up to 500 words for individual papers, or up to 750 words
for panel submissions, no later than May
1, 2012. Please also submit a current one-page CV with contact information
(especially your email address) for each presenter, and a list of any audio
and/or visual equipment necessary for your presentation. Email submissions to SLUVCC2012@gmail.com.
Please visit the conference’s website at http://www.sluvcc2012.blogspot.com
and follow us on Twitter @SLU_VCC_2012. For further information about the
conference, please contact Conference Chair Mike McCollum at Atl2boulder@gmail.com.
Sincerely,
Mike McCollum
Chair, 2012 Saint Louis University Visual Culture Graduate
Student Conference
PhD Student in American Studies, Saint Louis University
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