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The climate crisis has inspired youth-led activism across the world and young people now lead global campaigns and political protest on climate justice. However, aside from news media coverage of youth activism and the attendant focus on young people’s hand-drawn protest placards, relatively little is known about young people’s views on the actions needed to respond to the climate crisis or how they imagine environmentally-sustainable futures. This visual essay addresses that lacuna by exploring young people’s ideas about local climate actions. The images selected for consideration were created using Minecraft, the 3D block-building visualisation game, at workshops held in Ireland. Young people and their families were invited to create environmentally-sustainable futures at Minecraft workshops. Exploring these 3D designs as images, the essay documents young people’s visual representations of desirable climate actions and reflects on these Minecraft images to shed light on how young people envision alternative climate futures. These collective visions, or climate imaginaries, are powerful indicators of what young people imagine is possible in the future. In doing so, they present an alternative to the mainstream news and entertainment media preoccupation with dystopian constructions of the climate crisis. They also highlight the power of Minecraft as a visual medium to open up new ways of seeing nature and of envisioning nature-society relations. The selected images were also exhibited as part of the CLIMATE Look Lab 2022 held at the Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool. The gallery invited researchers, community groups and artists to use the gallery as a lab space to engage visitors with our changing environment and to explore how images can change the visual narrative on climate change.

Ai Weiwei positions himself first and foremost as a thinker, driven by curiosity and even selfishness, and not shying away from ridicule. Through immersion and direct response to different, unfamiliar conditions, he aims to defamiliarize pre-set thinking, not letting himself be trapped by rationality and led by simplified, predetermined conclusions about the world. Despite the self-proclaimed selfishness at their core, Ai’s artistic acts become selfless through resonance, inviting the viewer into his thought experiments with the world, which he engages with as if the world were a readymade. This conversation departed from the transnational film Tree (2021), where Ai meticulously documents the work of Brazilian and Chinese artisans in creating his 32-metre iron sculpture Pequi Tree (2018–2020). We began with political curiosity as a creative driver for the artist, the influence of Duchamp and Warhol, and the choice of the audiovisual medium to reflect reality. The conversation branched out to consider aesthetics, tying the issue of aestheticization to Ai’s role as a public intellectual, from an earlier refusal of aesthetics or ‘beautification’ in the interest of unmediated transparency to the realization that new aesthetics are needed for new publics.

Tourism in national parks is on the rise and contributes to shaping notions of the non-human world (often depicted as ‘nature’). One country that is currently facing a shift towards an enhanced emphasis on tourism in its national parks is Sweden. This article aims to unravel, illuminate, and problematize ways of seeing the non-human world in tourists’ Instagram posts about Swedish national parks, and also to consider the productive effects these might have on the relationship between humans and the non-human world. In a discursive and visual cultural analysis, representations of the non-human world, how they are situated in historically inherited ways of seeing, and what implications they might have for how humans approach and understand the non-human world are traced and reflected upon. These representations construct ways of seeing the non-human world as a sublime, desolate, and physically challenging treasury of unique character. In this way, a romantic tourist gaze is constructed, which approaches the national parks as isolated enclaves and commodified havens that offer tourists an escape from humanity, grand views, and seclusion. The main implication of this tourist gaze is a sustaining of the approach to the human world and the non-human world as separated.

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An exhaustive analysis of the very last words drafted by one of the most powerful noblewomen of the fifteenth century, Duchess Aldonza de Mendoza (d. 1435), reveals that her project to transform the Hieronymite monastery of Lupiana into a pantheon might have been connected to the birth of a child outside her marriage, more precisely, to a son who had remained hidden until the moment of Aldonza’s death. The aim of this study is to offer a new reading of the Duchess’s mausoleum, a pantheon planned to showcase her lineage by focusing exclusively on the female line. Further, this paper rediscovers two panels of the lost main altarpiece of the monastery of Lupiana commissioned by Aldonza de Mendoza and proposes an allegorical portrait of the Duchess represented as the wife of Pontius Pilate. Aldonza’s project reveals itself as crucial for understanding the self-fashioning mechanisms employed by late medieval women, as well as the ways in which visual culture was used in the shaping of female memorial programmes.

This study examines the complicated role that works of art play in colonial remembrance, and the ways in which they sustain stereotypes, biases and power relations over the passage of time. It takes as its case study Thomas Rowlandson’s hand-coloured etching, Rachel Pringle of Barbadoes (1796), which has been used as visual evidence for the fragmented biography of an Afro- Caribbean entrepreneur, mythologised as a brothel-keeper servicing the British navy, against the backdrop of slavery. Since the story of Rachael Pringle Polgreen (c.1753–1791) is well known, I focus on an analysis of the artwork and its unusual composition, speculating reasons for its appearance in London’s print culture. Tracing the spectral afterlives of this print, I also argue that the image functions as a colonial keepsake, treasured as evidence of intimate connection between metropole and (post) colony.

Current research on visual media and the far right creates two expectations: that memes play an increasingly salient role in the far right’s digital visual culture, and that the visual and particip...

In the autumn of 2019, Brown University hosted a major exhibition by the world renowned Haitian, Miami-based artist Edouard Duval-Carrie (b. 1954), curated by Brown’s Professor of Humanities and Af...

Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. In this article, we tackle critical and socially engaged issues on Arctic visual culture (AVC) education in Finland, which are, in this article, considered culturally sensitive topics in Finnish art education. The article emerges from research interests in (1) place-specific issues in art teacher education, as they relate to the critical study of AVC, and (2) Arctic art and Sámi art and craft, the current development and discussion in Finnish contexts, and their importance to art teacher education. Our approach is drawn from the field of Finnish art education and previous knowledge of culturally sensitive, socially engaged art education approaches practiced in two Finnish universities. Through this collaboration, we further develop research and practices related to the topic. The context of the collaboration is a 3-year multidisciplinary and nationwide project, Arctic Reformative and Exploratory Teaching Profession, funded by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture.

Studies of law and visual culture address important aspects of symbols of justice,1 the courtroom venue itself,2 and how representations of harm, justice and violence possess a transformative power...

Rather than simply the visual, my work primarily engages with the spatial: architecture, cities and landscapes. Architecture has never fit comfortably or been entirely welcome in visual culture/stu...

Tracing its manifestation across three phases in her biography — marriage, separation and funeral — this article considers the image of Maria Clementina Sobieska (1702–35). Examining the objects an...

Histories of visual culture continue to argue that slaveholders envisioned themselves as planter-cavaliers, set apart from modern values and identities. In light of recent scholarship demonstrating...

Contemporary society is characterized by intense mobility and the prevalence of visual culture, where representations are more important than experience. In that context, images are central to the ...

The Worcestershire poet William Shenstone was not only an innovative landscape gardener, creating a spectacular, intermedially conceived and much visited ferme ornee, The Leasowes, he was also the ...

Magazines represent a site for cultural contestation, reconciliation, and alienation in visual culture. Adopting social semiotics and cultural discourse perspectives, this study examines the visual...

We are in the midst of a global turn to the drone. Responding to the ‘unmanning’ of contemporary warfare, interdisciplinary scholarship has interrogated the human operators and non-human actors underpinning the drone, and their wide-ranging ethical, geopolitical, and legal implications. A key facet of extant drone debates surrounds drone vision – both as it operationally visualizes and is fetishized. While comparatively nascent, scholars have begun to explore how drones are instead visualized across particular media. In this article I identify two lacuna within extant drone scholarship: first a lack of attentiveness to small military drones, which while comprising the majority of global military arsenals remain comparatively absent from scholarly analysis; and second, a need to attend to a greater diversity of visual representations of the drone. In response, this article explores promotional visualizations of small military drones as they are ethnographically-encountered at a key site through which their usage is compelled and their functioning enabled – the defence tradeshow. In so doing, I identify three central frames through which the drone is repeatedly represented therein. I argue that these frames both engage and employ visual conventions associated with ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’ in order to ‘naturalize’ and normalize the drone in as-yet unaccounted ways. Approaching the drone through the current, yet under-examined, visual milieu of the defence environments in which it is promoted, the article contributes to both interdisciplinary drone scholarship, and literatures exploring the visual cultures of militarism more widely.

(2021). Post-Apartheid Same-Sex Sexualities: Restless Identities in Literary and Visual Culture. Communicatio: Vol. 47, No. 1, pp. 143-147.

When we think about image and visual culture in general, the name Marie-Jose Mondzain comes to mind. In this interview, she discusses the origin and efficacy of image and image making as they run t...

In recent years, scholars of North Africa have turned their attention to the region’s complex ethnoracial interactions, hierarchies, and enduring inequalities. Such attention has been motivated by ...

Mounted annually at the Ideal Home Exhibition, a series of fire safety displays produced by the London County Council (LCC) in 1958–63 crystallized some of the key contradictions of the postwar con...

Public and academic debates about sexualisation suggest that selfies taken by women of their own bodies, for display on Instagram, are sexualising and harming them. This paper reports on a “compare...

Graffiti culture has expanded rapidly since its inception in the 1970s, and is now an established practice. Graffiti is part of the visual culture of many societies, and constitutes the visible par...

Militarized perception is always leaking into public culture, from the aerial prospect of balloon flight to the soldier’s helmet camera. Increasingly, the mode of militarized perception most powerf...

Rhetorical studies has traditionally separated the mental images of rhetorical vision from other forms of visual rhetoric. This essay seeks to ease this distinction and show how visual culture comp...

Large painted panorama displays offered Latter-day Saints ways of capturing the spirit of Joseph Smith, who was appearing to church members immediately following his assassination in 1844. Although...

Ten 1904 postcards, marketing the Odelin Le Rustique stove, spin a fanciful, magical tale, an early example of branded storytelling, within the little–studied medium of Belle Epoque advertising pos...

This article explores photographs that the 1930s Parisian Yiddish communist daily newspaper Naye prese used to depict the Spanish Civil War. I show how Naye prese sidestepped use of the now famous ...

Bisexual men operate within a paradox of social stereotypes and public invisibility. Despite the prevalence of bi-erasure and the difficulties surrounding bisexual visualization, men’s bisexuality ...

Museums and their painstakingly curated constructions of history are increasingly being scrutinised for their heteronormative, androcentric and decisively white biases, often through museum interventions. Based on an understanding of museal hospitality as the constantly-shifting laws that regulate access to Britain’s prestigious exhibition spaces (and the intersections of these spaces with issues of race and gender), this article posits that Sonia Boyce’s Six Acts (2018) can be understood as a neo-Victorian intervention that critiques and forces us to acknowledge the conditions of Britain’s museal hospitality. In conceptualising the museum space as a host, based on Immanuel Kant’s and, particularly, Jacques Derrida’s notion of hospitality, this article argues that Six Acts addresses and modulates the relationship between host and guest, and interrelatedly, re-conceptualises the Victorian art gallery as a neo-Victorian museum (as an institutional space that self-consciously and reflexively engages with the gendered and racialised subtexts of Victorian visual arts). Boyce’s artwork performs epistemic labour, helping us to continually unlearn both the Victorian ideological biases that still suffuse contemporary discourses on heritage and art, on artistic merit as a law of hospitality, and a distorted imagination of a historically white Victorian Britain.

The late twentieth century visual turn established the study of visual culture as central to the humanities and social sciences. Yet there is no consensus over the scope of the field that has come ...

The rise of Visual Studies in the American academy during the 1990s is part of an after-effect of the institutionalisation of Cultural Studies in the United States. It specifically implies a decent...

In this article, I build on previous scholarship about Black identities, masculinities, and sexualities within Black visual culture and how their content and concepts reverberate within a larger wh...

In 1900, two spectacles of technological progress, artistic invention, and political ambition were unveiled in Paris: The universal exposition and Line 1 of the Paris Metro. This essay considers sc...

(Gareth Edwards, 2010) illustrates the collusion in contemporary visual culture between the digital and the cosmopolitan. Starting from a pivotal moment in the film in which the wonders of the bord...

Hong Kong as an international city has long held the title of ‘Pearl of the Orient’, known for its gleaming night view. The Hong Kong Tourist Association often featured local neon signs as promotio...

The way we view the landscape is socially constructed and influenced by media. Images from paintings to digital photographs influence how Americans see mountains and reproduce a collective vision. ...

Party-political posters, banners and hoardings mark the everyday urban landscape of Bangladesh. They have become pervasive visual and material expressions of everyday politics in an environment whe...

This paper discusses technologies of power and technologies of self in relation to race and gender in youth digital media production. We query how girls of color use feminist filmmaking to tell the...

Derived from the standards of feminist qualitative research, this methodological reflection develops ‘the public is personal’ as a mode of critical awareness for visual culture researchers working ...

Not only does the ontological turn not necessarily imply a turn away from semiotics but that rethought as systems of mediation, semiotics are both a necessary aspect of ontological analysis and nec...

The integration of archaeology into the study of the Middle Ages has long encouraged historians to think about the materiality of the past and, in some cases, to consider the spatial contexts in wh...

There are several military museums located across the prairie provinces of Canada that memorialise the country’s involvement in war. Drawing from fieldwork, we explore the representational devices ...

This article considers two compilations containing photographs of undressed women. The first is an album in the standard definition, “compiled by a painter for figure studies” in the 1890s. The sec...

Since the nineteenth century significant attention has been given to the role of architects and sculptors in the modern cemeteries of Paris. This is particularly true of places such as Pere-Lachais...

The present paper analyses the reform of the National Museum of Colombia between 1880 and 1886. It argues that during this period, the museum developed a visual project that joined the nation-build...

The marketing of Scottish literary titles the Perth firm of Robert Morison and Son issued from 1786 to 1795 was underpinned by specially commissioned paratextual apparatuses such as author memoirs,...

Interpersonal communication depends to a large extent on the human face, with its many sensory organs, easily recognizable features and expression capacities. This is clearly evidenced by the abund...