Engaging Visual Culture

How to help students negotiate visual culture's potent and multilayered meanings. Engaging Visual Culture is a guidebook for teachers to help students make sense of the pervasive flow of visual information shaping their worldview and way of being. The authors offer practical strategies to help students learn to think critically about visual culture, its meanings, and its impact on their lives. Each of the nine chapters focuses on three key concepts: Expose, Explode, and Empower. By exposing students to the presence and power of visual culture, and "exploding" the passive acceptance of the visual messages all around us, students are empowered to participate actively in constructing their own meanings.

This collection brings together the ideas of key global scholars focusing on the lives of youth and young adults, examining their visual and cultural identity constructs. Embracing an international perspective encompassing the Global North and Global South, chapters explore expressions and performances of youth and young adults as shifting and entangled, in and through the clothed body, gender, sexuality, race, artistic and pedagogical making practices, in spaces and places, framed by new materialism, social media, popular and material culture. The overarching emphasis of the collection is on youth and young adults’ strategies for engaging in and with the world, becoming a someone, and belonging, in settings that include a juvenile arbitration program, an artist community, high schools, universities, families and social media. This truly interdisciplinary and international collection will have resonance not just within cultural and media studies, but also in education, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, child and youth studies, visual culture, and communication studies.

This is a revised, expanded, and updated edition of the highly successful Visual Culture. Like its predecessor, this new version is about visual literacy, exploring how meaning is both made and transmitted in an increasingly visual world. It is designed to introduce students and other interested readers to the analysis of all kinds of visual text, whether drawings, paintings, photographs, films, advertisements, television or new media forms. The book is illustrated with examples that range from medieval painting to contemporary advertising images, and is written in a lively and engaging style. The first part of the book takes the reader through differing theoretical approaches to visual analysis, and includes chapters on iconology, form, art history, ideology, semiotics and hermeneutics. The second part shifts from a theoretical to a medium-based approach and comprises chapters on fine art, photography, film, television and new media. These chapters are connected by an underlying theme about the complex relationship between visual culture and reality. New for the second edition are ten more theoretically advanced Key Debate sections, which conclude each chapter by provoking readers to set off and think for themselves. Prominent among the new provocateurs are Kant, Baudrillard, Althusser, Deleuze, Benjamin, and Foucault. New examples and illustrations have also been added, together with updated suggestions for further reading. The book draws together seemingly diverse approaches, while ultimately arguing for a polysemic approach to visual analysis. Building on the success of the first edition, this new edition continues to provide an ideal introduction for students taking courses in visual culture and communications in a wide range of disciplines, including media and cultural studies, sociology, art and design.

Insightful and engaging, this new Canadian edition of Practices of Looking offers a broad overview of contemporary visual culture from an integrated North American perspective. With a strong awareness of the centrality of visual stimulation in our everyday lives, the authors explore the manyways we use icons, photographs, film, television, video games, advertisements, scientific images, and other visual media to create meaning and construct identity. Fully recognizing the many social, cultural, and political differences that make the Canadian visual experience distinct, thiscomprehensive volume highlights Canadian visual culture against the backdrop of an increasingly globalized visual world.

In the fully rewritten third edition of this classic text, Nicholas Mirzoeff introduces visual culture as visual activism, or activating the visible. In this view, visual culture is a practice: a way of doing, making, and seeing. The 12 new chapters begin with five foundational concepts, including Indigenous ways of seeing, visual activism in the wake of slavery, and unfixing the gaze. The second section outlines three currently successful tactics of visual activism: removal of statues and monuments; restitution of cultural property; and practices of repair and reparations. The final section addresses catastrophe and trauma, from Palestine’s Nakba to the climate disaster and the intersections of plague and war. Each section also includes new, in-depth case studies called "Visualizations," ranging from oil painting to Kongo power figures and the mediated practice of taking a knee. Engaging with questions of racializing, colonialism, and undoing gender throughout, this edition maps the activist turn in the field since 2014 and sets directions for its future expansion. This is a key text in visual culture studies and an essential resource for research and teaching in the field.

Visual culture has become one of the most dynamic fields of scholarship, a reflection of how the study of human culture increasingly requires distinctively visual ways of thinking and methods of analysis. Bringing together leading international scholars to assess all aspects of visual culture, the Handbook aims to provide a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the subject. The Handbook embraces the extraordinary range of disciplines which now engage in the study of the visual - film and photography, television, fashion, visual arts, digital media, geography, philosophy, architecture, material culture, sociology, cultural studies and art history. Throughout, the Handbook is responsive to the cross-disciplinary nature of many of the key questions raised in visual culture around digitization, globalization, cyberculture, surveillance, spectacle, and the role of art. The Handbook guides readers new to the area, as well as experienced researchers, into the topics, issues and questions that have emerged in the study of visual culture since the start of the new millennium, conveying the boldness, excitement and vitality of the subject.

Culture, Technology and the Image explores the technologies deployed when images are archived, accessed, and distributed. The chapters discuss the ways in which habits and techniques used in learning and communicating knowledge about images are affected by technological developments. The volume discusses a wide range of issues, including access and participation; research, pedagogy, and teaching; curation and documentation; circulation and re-use; and conservation and preservation. The book illustrates how knowledge about images is intertwined with the methods that are used to store, retrieve, and analyze those images and the information associated with them. Focusing on the implications of technology for processes and practices brings into view the permeable nature of boundaries between such disciplines as art history, media studies, museum studies, and archiving. As such, this text will appeal to a broad academic audience, including art historians interested in the digital; media studies scholars; digital humanities scholars interested in expanding beyond textual scholarship; as well as new students in any of these fields.