The “Visual Studies Attitude”: Theories and Practices of Visual Culture Today.

During the 2011 Stone Summer Theory Institute, entitled “Farewell to Visual Studies”, Michael Ann Holly observed that when asked by her undergraduate students what visual culture studies were, she would answer: “It isn’t a discipline; it isn’t a field. It just names a problematic. It shakes up complacency. No objects are excluded. Visual studies names an attitude in relation to visual things, rather than a department.”

Such a simple and slightly provocative explanation of visual culture studies has two advantages: on the one hand, it is an effective way of avoiding the pitfalls of the institutional and disciplinary disputes that so often take over the debate around visual culture studies; on the other hand, it allows us to account for a multitude of heterogeneous references, related to different traditions and ways of thinking about the visual. This issue of the journal Revista de Comunicação e linguagens is inviting submissions of original papers on “the visual studies attitude” today. We welcome both theoretical and case-study articles in English and Portuguese engaging with (among others):

- Photography;
- Film, moving-images and time-based media;
- New media;
- Scientific, technical and medical imagery;
- Debates around the power and agency of images;
- Practices of looking and modes of spectatorship;
- The “pictorial” or “iconic” turn;
- Debates about the value of the image in modern and post-modern culture; iconoclasm, iconophobia, and different media’s contribution to the (perceived) proliferation of images ;
- Images and literary texts.


Please send your article proposals, consisting of an abstract no longer than 200 words and a brief biographical note to:
teresa.castro@univ-paris3.fr
margarida.medeiros@fcsh.unl.pt

Deadline for article proposals: April 15th 2015

Authors will be notified by the end of April if their article proposals have been accepted.

Deadline for completed articles: June 30th 2015
Papers should be no more than 6000 words (including notes and bibliography).