Image/Text: Interplay, Context, Method (Visual Culture) (PCA 2025) (Popular Culture Association)
Call for papers: Visual Culture subject area, Popular Culure Association 2025
An inherently interdisciplinary field, visual culture studies investigates images, media, and art in the contexts of sharing, producing, consuming, saving, and communicating. What defines visual culture, perhaps, is its resistance to definition. WJT Mitchell’s (2002) landmark essay summed it up coherently when we proposed 8 “counter-theses,” two of which read as follows:
“Visual culture encourages reflection on the differences between art and non-art, visual and verbal signs, and rations between different sensory and semiotic modes.
“Visual culture is not limited to the study of images or media, but extends to everyday practices of seeing and showing, especially those that we take to be immediate and unmediated.”
Perhaps we can define visual culture by what it is not.
In such ways that visual culture aims to make art history more applicable to current trends and objects of study, it also aims to make the study of the languages, communication, and archives more relevant to contexts of the visual. Incorporating a variety of methodologies and branching into many adjacent areas of study, inquiry of this kind leads to insights into ways that people engage with the visible and perceptible, broadly defined, be it objects, multimedia, texts, art, etc.
This year’s Visual Culture area of the Popular Culture Association conference invites papers on the theme of Image/Text: Interplay, Contexts, and Methods. In addition to general papers investigating visual culture, we welcome studies on ways that images and texts coincide, support one another, or work against each other in the making of cultural meaning. “Sites” of visual culture to be explored include but are not limited to:
- GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums)
- Media archaeology
- Pedagogical contexts
- Periodicals
- Public and/or private venues
- Social media
- Theaters
- Visual perception
Papers on New Orleans visual culture are particularly welcome.
Submit abstracts to https://pcaaca.org/
Presenters must be members of the Popular Culture Association. The 2025 conference will be held in New Orleans, Apri 16-19.
For more information, context Ivy Roberts, Area Chair of Visual Culture, at ivroberts@scad.edu
Ivy Roberts