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The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955) is the result of the collaboration between the photographer Roy DeCarava and writer Langston Hughes. Both authors were Harlemites, DeCarava was born in Harlem and Langston Hughes made Harlem his home after moving from Missouri to New York City. This essay intends to explore the ways in which The Sweet Flypaper of Life depicts a representation of the neighbourhood of Harlem at a time when the Civil Rights Movement was just beginning. It will look at the power that DeCarava’s photographs and Hughes’ text have on creating a specific visuality of African American life, based on the Harlem community, rendering itself to be seen as a family album. The essay will firstly focus on contextualizing the creation and publication of The Sweet Flypaper of Life and afterwards offer a reading of the book using the family album metaphor as a form of agency in the acknowledgment of the African American community, focusing its representation in the aestheticization of beauty, thus distancing itself from the social and racial issues that were usually exposed.

This essay discusses the significance of visual images in sound studies. The field of sound studies allows us to focus on hearing and soundscapes in cultural experiences and has challenged the primacy of vision as a framework for social analysis. This issue's cover shows Japanese Emperor Hirohito examining Type 90 Air Sound Detectors (also known as "war tubas") in 1936. From the mid-1930s to the early 1940s, these acoustic locators featured not only in experts' books but also in air-defense and military textbooks and in popular Japanese magazines. Magazines for young people highlighted their visuality rather than their actual functioning, mechanisms, and technicality. This essay demonstrates that the acoustic locator's visuality was instrumental for public relations, while its auditory function served practical military purposes. The image suggests that visuals play a vital role in studying the complex ecologies of sound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

G. Ph. Harsdörffer's story collection Der Geschichtspiegel (1654) directly addresses the epistemological concept of visuality. Harsdörffer combines stories with emblems and in an appendix presents twenty-five exercises on catoptrics, that is, the branch of optics dealing with reflection and mirroring. Some of the stories present typical interpretations assessing virtues and vices; these cases are illustrated by particularly despicable crimes such as rape, infanticide, and cannibalism. In contrast, the other stories deal with baroque natural history, e.g. entomology, nautical science, botany, alchemy, and number theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how smartphone videos produced by migrants during border crossings challenge Eurocentric visualizations of borders. Implementing video analysis and iconographic interpretation, I explore three interrelated aspects of the smartphone videos: (1) By circulating videos via digital platforms, migrants create a countervisuality of border crossing that destabilizes the visual politics that shape current border regimes. (2) Unlike journalistic, humanitarian, or surveillance-oriented visual images produced from above, from a safe distance, from rescue or patrol ships, migrants' smartphone footage puts their own narratives at the center of visualization. (3) Whereas Eurocentric visualizations of migration and borders aim to elicit affects and emotions such as pity, empathy, fear, or panic, migrants' smartphone videos depict emotions such as joy and happiness after successful border crossings. These affective visualizations of individual migration stories confound binary representations of migrants as either victims or invaders. I argue that the shaky smartphone videos with their wandering focus and disordered mode of vision create a productive vantage point for seeing and sensing a world that is unimaginable for the normative, focused lens that structures views projected by journalism, humanitarian appeals, political mobilization, and surveillance technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflecting on an archive of screen shots captured during the early months of the coronavirus quarantine, we describe the affective and narrative dimensions of audiencing several COVID-era performances in an effort to understand the imaginative landscapes that unfold between viewers and objects in these epoch-specific remote and virtual encounters. Writing through our notes, our memories, and our archive of images of livestreamed digital works, we investigate how existential questions and circumstantial aesthetics drive artistic production and influence reception. These existential questions and circumstantial aesthetics invite an uncanny attention to the non-human in these performances, which, in turn, reveals some of the limits of anthropocentric theoretical paradigms of theatrical reception and visuality. As part of the writing through process, we have included throughout the article examples of screen shot imagery that we have captured and modified through a combination of drawing, watercolor and digital techniques. The images are presented inside the space of the text as a mechanism to reflect, echo and extend the ideas in the writing. The images are also present to provide contemplative space for visual provocation regarding the relationship between the intimacy of notetaking, the aporetic qualities of memorializing, and the complicated and fragile nature of externalizing interior thoughts and observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pseudo-Demosthenes' Erōtikos is often regarded as a generic exercise in erotic discourse, resulting in few analyses of the text. I offer a reappraisal of the speech, arguing that this overlooked work creatively incorporates, and at times reorients, fourth-century and even earlier discourses on erōs. The text, I show, offers us important insights into conversations around embodied beauty and visuality in circulation at its time. I then read the text in relation to its brief treatment in Foucault's History of Sexuality , suggesting that the Erōtikos ' subtle attentiveness to the beloved's bios could be put into conversation with Foucault's notion of the aesthetics of existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses popular geographical imageries of the European migrant crisis. It focuses on visualities that shaped discussions about the event among Czech Facebook users with anti-immigration attitudes. The paper elaborates on the co-production of migrants' visibility and visualities that depict them in certain ways. Visuality influences visibility and shapes what it means for people (who are represented by images) to be visible in certain ways when seen by another people (who observe and consume the images). Here, we analyse how cartographic visualizations and the practice of montage of images produce meanings and affects that make migrants either visible only as abusers of the Czech social welfare system (linking migrants in a racist way to the Roma minority) or visible only as dehumanized raging Muslim invaders that resemble more machine-like beings. These interpretations are explained with references to historical specificities of the Czech context. A user-made, film-like sci-fi video of the crisis is also analysed carefully to demonstrate its imaginary of a collapsing Western Europe, where raging invaders dominate. Presenting migrants' visuality as invaders links these racist and Islamophobic attitudes to migrants' visibility as enemies and targets to be killed, not pitiable human beings to be helped. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Internacional de la Imagen is the property of Common Ground Research Networks and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Foco (Interdisciplinary Studies Journal) is the property of Revista Foco and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of Languages for Specific Purposes is the property of University of Oradea, Faculty of Economic Sciences and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Cultural Revolution (1966-76), which occurred 17 years after the founding of the People's Republic of China, saw the production of the filmic Revolutionary Model Operas or RMOs, comprised of eight films within this period. The RMOs, which were actually operas filmed in 35mm, precluded all other film genres during the period. Political factors, issues, and developments in the Cultural Revolution, especially in the early 1960s, contributed to and inflected these films: they became the predominant popular cultural form through which the Cultural Revolution, as a set of discursive regimes, was articulated. Mao Zedong believed that the Chinese Communist Party was departing from orthodox Marxism and needed to move rapidly from socialism to Communism through a continuous and intensive "proletarianization" of the consciousness of the Chinese people. He felt that Chinese social institutions and fields had been infiltrated by bourgeois elements, and this had caused China to deviate from socialism and take a capitalist orientation. Consequently, the film medium, considered a powerful propaganda tool, took on the role of the main ideological apparatus of the Cultural Revolution. The prime mover in this use of film was Mao's wife Jiang Qing, who had been a film actress in Shanghai in the 1930s. She directly involved herself in the process of safeguarding the political stance of the film industry. Thus, in the Cultural Revolution, feature film production was suspended while only the so-called "eight RMOs" ("Ba da yangbanxi") were filmed. Owing to the official denunciation of Jiang in the post-Mao era, her role in the productions of the RMO films was often overlooked by existing research. This article gives a historical reassessment of Jiang's status and function by tracing her previous professional and political experiences in the circle of art and literature, and by exploring her dominant role in shaping the visuality of the RMO films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This forum article critically examines the politics of visual representation in urban informality, interrogating the genealogies and contemporary manifestations of what we term the "slum gaze." Drawing on postcolonial theory, feminist visual studies, and critical urban geography, we trace how colonial visualities continue to shape aesthetic constructions of urban marginality through "poverty porn" and spectacles of abjection. We argue that dominant visual regimes not only reflect but actively produce urban informality as a pathologized state of being, rationalizing dispossessive planning interventions while obscuring subaltern spatial knowledges and practices. The article unpacks the contradictory role of visuality in urban planning and policymaking, where GIS mappings and documentary photography paradoxically render informal settlements simultaneously hyper-visible and illegible to state bureaucracies. Against reductive visual grammars inherited from colonial modernity, we advocate for participatory visual methodologies that amplify resident-driven representational practices. By centering community-based visual epistemologies, we gesture toward more emancipatory modes of seeing and narrating the heterogeneous spaces of urban informality. Ultimately, this intervention calls for a paradigmatic shift in how urban scholars and practitioners engage visually with marginalized communities. We contend that cultivating critical visual literacies attuned to the politics of representation is essential for imagining and enacting more just urban futures. This requires moving beyond simplistic denunciations of "poverty porn" toward a praxis of critical visuality that unsettles universalizing gazes while legitimizing plural ways of seeing, knowing, and inhabiting the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies JournalTranslation | Volume 2 | Issue 1

As an attempt to critically engage with the contemporary visual experience, this paper in three parts explores the horizontal, vertical, and virtual viewpoints. Its main purpose is to question the virtual realm as a place where technology allows for various visual experiences including new, digital and oblique perspectives on both horizontality and verticality. Various visual examples are taken from: selfie-taking, augmented and virtual realities (“Part One: Vir(tu)al Horizon(tal)”); architectural landscapes, aerial views, panoramas (“Part Two: The Vertical Gaze”); the photographic works of Sebastião Salgado, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, and Terry Boddie (“Part Three: Oblique Strategies”).

This article contributes to the research program of “visual turn” in International Relations (IR). It specifically engages Ronald Bleiker's methodological proposal which is rooted in assemblage thinking and calls for a comprehensive and pluralistic understanding of the relationship between visuality and politics. In this framework, semiotics should play a prominent role in attending to the role of images in (co)constituting the international politics. However, we show that Bleiker’s conceptualization of semiotics and its concepts is rather vague. The text therefore discusses how we can approach semiotics in a more rigorous way, and how the concepts of 'symbolism' and 'symbolic signs' can be understood from a semiotic perspective inspired mostly by work of Charles S. Peirce. The text thus offers theoretically sophisticated answer to Bleiker’s call for semiotically informed visual analysis. We illustrate our arguments by discussing scholarship on the politics of jihadist videos.

This paper presents an exploratory study on the design and control of patriotic images in Venezuela during the government of presidents Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías (1999-2013) and Nicolás Maduro Moros (2013 to the present). The aim is to recognize, identify and classify the visual objects that make up Venezuela's scopic regime, unravelling the iconographic plan the state developed for its implementation. Having searched for and retrieved 240 photographs from the virtual domain, the paper shows that Chavist governments have gained ground for their ideology by way of a renewed patriotic iconography within the urban visual space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manuscripts and notes by Michel Foucault on the visual arts recently deposited at the Bibliothèque Nationale reveal a reliance on canonical oil paintings by the 'old masters'; a respect for the primary sources in the history of European art; an understanding of the necessity of research in both literary and visual sources, particularly self-portraits; and a sense of the value that a certain philosophical milieu – beginning with Sade and Nietzsche and expanding to his near contemporaries, Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski – could offer to an understanding of paintings. The essay argues that Pierre Klossowski's monumental drawing La Nef des fous (1990) provides an essential key for understanding the place of Hieronymus Bosch's painting of the same title in History of Madness and the centrality of theories of similitude to Foucault's thinking about visuality ca. 1960–74. The later significance of the figure of the artist for Foucault can be traced to these earlier writings on painting and madness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the centrality of the visual to modern day life, this article introduces a visually informed approach to critical discursive psychology that facilitates the study of visual materials. We argue that the visual is a site where the social world is actively built and maintained, similar to what has been reasoned more generally about language use, and that critical discursive psychology can offer a rigorous approach to examining visual materials that can productively deepen our understanding of psychological concepts. As such, we integrate a consideration of visuality into critical discursive psychology theory, including a conceptualization of visual discourse and visual interpretative repertoires, provide tools for close readings of visual materials and guidance regarding how to employ these tools, and outline the process of identifying visual interpretative repertoires. We further connect these concepts to our previous experience carrying out this approach to inform future inquiries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay we outline five constellations of poetic and visual practices, starting with the dictatorship in Chile (1973-1990), but connecting them with works from previous decades. Without wanting to be exhaustive, our intention is to show how poetry and related practices have shaped a creative response of counterattack and antithesis, as well as resistant ways of life through art at different times and areas of Chile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

C.P. Pow became a significant part of my own academic journey from soon after I joined the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 1999. Our academic inspirations, interests and identities overlapped, and we had opportunities to co-teach and co-write. I use these overlaps and collaborations as a way into reflecting on Pow's work, mainly during the period up to when he received tenure at NUS in 2011. I focus on two substantive themes. The first has to do with how and why Pow approached the landscape of Singapore beyond the visual or the 'seen'. The second theme concerns the origins, development and consolidation of Pow's contributions to examining urban Asia in ways that unsettle Anglo-American-derived generalizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to present some analyses about the way of looking at and using art to teach mathematics, implied by the act of visualization and visuality, which put specific ways of learning into operation. To this end, a workshop that used paintings by Mozambican artists is used and was carried out with Mozambican students in a Licentiate course in Mathematics Teaching. The analysis undertaken here is carried out in two movements: in the first one, mathematical thinking is put into practice with Mozambican paintings: symmetry, hyperbole, and parabola. In the second, attention is drawn to truths about the teaching of mathematics with art, for example, the statement that artworks as support contextualizing the learning of mathematics. Finally, we conclude by alluding to a decolonial ethos, which highlights a critical and continuous attitude, aligning itself with an exercise of making visualities visible to put art into practice with mathematics for teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Lubelski Rocznik Pedagogiczny is the property of Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the role of visuality in both the imposition of settler colonial authority and its contestation. As a specific case study, I discuss a group of images made by photographer Gar Lunney under the auspices of the National Film Board of Canada's Still Photography Division (NFB) during the historic 1956 Arctic tour conducted by then Canadian Governor General Vincent Massey. I argue that these images thematize visuality itself and, as such, expose the colonized North American Arctic of the 1950s as a field of racialized visuality. In the first part of the essay, I closely read Lunney's 1956 images and their histories, with particular attention to indications of the gaze. In the second part of the essay, I turn to recent decolonizing strategies for approaching the colonial photograph, again using Lunney's photographs of the 1956 tour as a case study. I identify two key decolonizing strategies: first, attention to the agency of the sitter in the photograph and, second, recent Inuit re-narrativizations and remediations of images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Estudios del Hábitat is the property of Universidad Nacional de La Plata and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

When is film taken as evidence of the past and of truths in the world and when does the content become less significant than the practice of making images itself? The meaning of moving images change as the material and cultural logics and technologies of image production and circulation evolve. In legal and journalistic public discourse, recorded images are meant to be empirical evidence that can hold people accountable for their actions. Video camcorders and then mobile phone cameras democratized recording equipment which in many cases revealed abuses of power. But mobile technologies for recording and circulating film—as well as shifting genres for interpreting them—have also reshaped how audiences understand the veracity of what they see and hear. In shifting attention from content to context, cellphone filming becomes about circulation itself. Rather than a means for gathering evidence (epistemic) it is a sign of presence (ontologic). This has implications for legal cases of sex-gender and racial violence when visual evidence, rather than leading to successful prosecutions, creates defensive outrage amongst the powerful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article starts by considering how 'the talk' that black and non-black minority families give to their children comes as a duty to transfer the wisdom of how to be invisible forward through generations. It is not uncommon to think about being visible as a social good, but this is not quite so straightforward when one occupies a body deemed as 'other.' This article exposes this tension to explore how invisibility can be understood as an independent, complex, and nuanced social dynamic in its own right by considering literature that uses invisibility as an analytical lens, providing a synthesis of that literature to offer a preliminary multidimensional model of invisibility to extend extant tools for sociological study. This literature considers race, gender, sexuality, various presentations of power, and different social systems to demonstrate a model that identifies how the intersection of power, affect, presence, and voice fluidly transfigure across time and space to create an overall social construct of invisibility. This suggests that deeper development of a multidimensional construct of invisibility can provide a reasoned and valuable additional lens to address a range of social dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Chinese poets of the early medieval period have long been credited with the development of shanshui 山水 (landscape) poetry, the precursors of the prosody they employed merit further scrutiny. This article argues that an ancient poetics of visual augury informed early medieval shanshui lyricism and that similar iterations of nature writing emerged earlier than is often recognized. By tracing the use of the divinatory utterance yangfu 仰俯 (looking up and looking down) in earlier depictions of the natural world, the author reconsiders the visual poetics of later shanshui literature alongside texts that use analogous mantic terminology. This study concludes that, while China's first "nature poets" constructed imagery, lyrics, and personae that appear distinct if not even contradictory to one another, the poets relied on a common visual prosody derived from preestablished mantic approaches to the natural world and its representation. In so doing, this article also further highlights the underappreciated prosodic and ideological indebtedness of later shanshui poets to the authors of the Eastern Han and provides insight into the correlations that ran between diverse forms of linguistic visuality and the poetic explorations of the natural world in early China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers a matter of current issue: studying ekphrasis within one piece of literature. The problem of a controversial approach to the definition of ekphrasis underpins the article. The prospective interdisciplinary solution of this problem is connected with the interpretation of the image of the artist Picasso by the playwright O. Bogaev. The intermedial component, the key image of Minotaur, and individual references to paintings are taken into account.

Although the sights and scenes produced are often ones of radical, dazzling estrangement, Medbh McGuckian’s poetry is primarily an art of the eye. The acts of looking and relooking, visualising and envisioning, motivate a great many of McGuckian’s expansive body of poems. By no means the exclusive sensory catalyst for her imagination, sight is nonetheless the central one. The pace of her poems is determined more by their arrangement of images and figures than they are by matters of sound, narrative, rhetoric, or rhythm. The intensely metamorphic quality of those images means that while a reader can rarely settle into a coherent lyric scene or argument, she can often get some purchase on McGuckian’s hermetic texts by tracking a poem’s morphing course of images. The Face of the Earth allows us to see McGuckian’s visual poetics with great clarity.

Since visuality in the (self-)representation of politicians and other influential figures has become an important part of political storytelling, we propose to use visual narrative analysis (VNA) as a systematic approach for its better understanding. VNA is particularly suited for this performative strand of interpretive analysis, as it does not study images in isolation but in the broader context of political narratives. By analysing different layers of communication (images, narratives, competing narratives) VNA enables us to identify internal contradictions that undermine political efforts of self-representation in contexts of global governance (e.g. multilateral diplomacy) and render them unstable and contestable. By analysing competing (self-)representations at a G7 meeting in 2018, we show how VNA can be applied fruitfully to the study of international politics and, second, how VNA can explain some of the reasons why one image became iconic (Angela Merkel as female leader of the liberal world), i.e. appealed to a wider audience, and others (focusing on Emmanuel Macron or Donald Trump) did not. While our article is primarily a demonstration of the methodological benefits of VNA for various research contexts in world politics, it also contributes to conceptual debates on the combination of visuality, narratives and emotions in changing practices of political storytelling.

Fire was an omnipresent element of premodern daily life, yet also an existential threat for urban communities. Drawing on a wide range of sources from contemporary eyewitness accounts to urban regulations from early modern Germany, this paper analyses town fires as multisensory events. It argues that urban dwellers’ senses were used to monitor the city space for potential outbreaks, alert the population to a fire, and move within a burning city. In connection with this, it discusses in which way urban spaces were constituted differently in an emergency situation. The contribution shows how positioning and movement shaped sensory perception and how perception, in turn, influenced the ways people perceived and used space. Town fires were not simply a time of disorder and sensory overload but situations when sensory and spatial ordering was tested and negotiated within political and social hierarchies.

This article contributes to the research program of "visual turn" in International Relations (IR). It specifically engages Roland Bleiker's methodological proposal which is rooted in assemblage thinking and calls for a comprehensive and pluralistic understanding of the relationship between visuality and politics. In this framework, semiotics should play a prominent role in attending to the role of images in (co)constituting the international politics. However, we show that Bleiker's conceptualization of semiotics and its concepts is rather vague. The text therefore discusses how we can approach semiotics in a more rigorous way, and how the concepts of 'symbolism' and 'symbolic signs' can be understood from a semiotic perspective inspired mostly by work of Charles S. Peirce. The text thus offers theoretically sophisticated answer to Bleiker's call for semiotically informed visual analysis. We illustrate our arguments by discussing scholarship on the politics of jihadist videos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to explicate the discourse on education in the 莊子 by reviewing several related cases presented in the text. Not only will this article show that this discourse is compatible with value pluralism, it will also demonstrate that these cases embody the idea of spontaneity and self-transformation. This analysis moreover sheds light on the principles and functions of "teaching without words." Through a reinterpretation of the phrase 用心若鏡 (using one's mind like a mirror), this article elaborates upon the text's advocacy of an open and tranquil state of mind, and focuses on how the analogy of a mirror can be adopted to indicate self-reflection in its pedagogical dimension. By exploring the definitions and implications of terms like 兩行 and 心齋, while also supplementing the lost passages in the "Attribute of Virtue Complete" section of the text, this article highlights the significance of emotions in interpersonal interactions, which are related to self-survey and action in nonaction. A perfect man can gain trust from others without harming or denying them. A steadfast heart can serve as a mirror as it allows the perfect man to set himself as a reference and guide others to focus on their emotions so that they too can achieve a tranquil state of mind. With such guidance, one could then use the perfect man to contemplate oneself. A motivation to transform oneself is thus generated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of MATRIZes is the property of Universidade de Sao Paulo, Programa de Pos Graduacao em Ciencias da Comunicacao and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of MATRIZes is the property of Universidade de Sao Paulo, Programa de Pos Graduacao em Ciencias da Comunicacao and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article argues that financial charts are something more than just useful tools that allow investors to analyze and detect investment opportunities. Namely, they are also expressive visual objects and performative agents. The former means that they are replete with different meanings and references and, as such, they are not only viewed in an informational manner, but also in other more expressive ways. The latter, in turn, means that financial charts are not so much passive representations of financial exchange as active actors that shape it. Moreover, as performative agents, financial charts not only shape this exchange, but also contribute to the constitution of financial markets themselves; to the very functioning and existence of these markets. All this shows that financial charts and, from a more general perspective, that which is visual, play a very important and complex role in capital markets, much more important and complex than is usually indicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Refraction. The word evokes notions of light, optics, wave transmission, energy, and oblique angles. It is used in the field of physics to refer to the way a wave changes direction upon contact with a new medium through which it is transmitted. For instance, when sound waves hit the surface of water, their frequency changes—you may have experienced this yourself, noticing how noises become muffled when you are submerged in a busy swimming pool. Or this might occur when light waves, travelling through the air, come into contact with a new medium. For instance, you may use a straw in a glass of water and notice the straw looks bent at the point where it crosses the threshold of the water’s surface. Taking this notion of bending and shifting waves, the inaugural issue of Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal asks how refraction can be a tool for critically engaging with ways of seeing.

In the contemporary society, media heroes are one of the most influential reference groups, which determines our perception of our own life in terms of happiness, success, justice, well-being, or, on the contrary, in opposite terms. The article is a review of two books: Salakhieva-Talal T. Psychology in Cinema: How to Make Heroes and Stories . Moscow: Alpina non-fiction; 2019. 349 p.; and Lilti A. The Invention of Celebrity. Transl. from French by P.S. Kashtanova. Saint Petersburg: Ivan Limbakh Publishing House; 2018. 496 p. The author believes that such works are necessary to broaden the horizons of the sociologist focusing on the development of social representations of happiness, justice and well-being: these works explain psychological and visual (the first book) and historical and media (the second book) prerequisites and tools for creating heroes as role models.

This article is a close reading of The Worshiper of the Image (1898), a tragic fairytale by Richard Le Gallienne — a symbolist allegory, whose female character is a coming-to-life visual image. This character is distinguished by polymorphism which manifests itself both in the story’s plot and in the character’s mythical autobiography, namely, in her reincarnations over centuries. The visual hypostasis of this character is L’Inconnue de la Seine — a popular and mysterious kitsch object, the mask of a girl who allegedly drowned in Seine in the second half of the 19th century. The interaction of the Image with other characters is determined by the concept of contagion, i.e., immediate power contact which alternates with abstract allegorical interpretations of the Image (considered, for example, as the embodiment of Art or Beauty); in the course of the narrative, the contagious image gradually displaces the story’s living characters, including the wife of the main character who uncannily resembles and doubles the image. These narrative and visual collisions reflect a precarious position of the visual image in the decadent culture — a conflict between the visual image and narration: the narration fails to provide an exhaustive ekphrastic description of the image and evasively multiplies contradictory impressions of other characters about it instead.

With the development of visual communication in the present age, the analysis and reading of visual texts in order to decipher the meanings and express their meanings is of particular importance. Critical discourse analysis, as one of the approaches that considers both the context of the text and the social context of the text, has made it possible to study discourses in works of art. The purpose of this paper is to introduce visual discourse or visuality as a way to analyze images, and its theoretical framework is dedicated to reviewing the critical visual methodology, which is an integrated model of Rose and Fairclough methodology. In the process of analysis, the Mellat Bank's advertising campaign has been visually criticized in order to elucidate its visual discourse based on the textual components of the images and the fields of its representation. The structure of technology, the configuration of images, and the social effects of visual components are discussed in the sites of the text, discourse action, and social action. The findings of the research indicate that the discourse function of this campaign is to highlight the value of money as national and cultural capital and to promote empathy and patriotism in the audience, during which the Mellat Bank changes its identity from a financial institution to a cultural institution.

The standard academic publication is often not an effective way to trigger the sociological imagination. This essay discusses an alternative means to invite people to think sociologically: a webcomic. In a collaboration between a sociologist and a team of comic artists, we created a webcomic (www.erccomics.com) to highlight insights from a research project on the social shaping of beauty standards in the transnational modelling industry. In the making of this Beauty comic, three "translations" had to be done: from analytical to narrative, from verbal to visual and from conceptual to concrete. We discuss how these translations were done and what we learned from this, including broader implications of these translations for (social) science communication, the public relevance of sociological research, the usefulness of thinking in different modalities and the fraught relationship between standard academic modes of communication and the sociological imagination.

Literatures and organising show us how, in contemporary racial financial capitalism, housing is formed through dispossessive histories and geographies. Here, we query how these enter into play in the visual regimes through which housing is seen and experienced. For if the visual realm is as much a construct as any other housing matter, finding a grammar to tap into its workings might become handy when its violent outcomes come to the fore. What is reproduced in the visual regimes of housing? What is offered and taken anyway? What might never be seen, and by whom? The article offers a tentative analytical approach to questioning what we call dispossessed exposures: the (en)visioning of homely futures that are deprived, already in the social construct of seeing with the house, the possibility of radical care for and of habitation. These ideas are unpacked through reflection on two films: Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables and Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouihl’s Gagarine. We offer these reasonings as a contribution to ongoing conversations in the renewed field of housing justice scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]