Search

This study investigates the first films made by a female director, Kangdrun (T: Gangs sgron, གངས་ྒྲསྒྲོན་, Gangzhen, 岗珍, b. 1995) belonging to the Post-2000s Inland Tibet Class (ITC) generation. Following the experience of the Sinophone-Tibetan filmmaker Kangdrun in a Chinese language education environment, her films, and Tibetan cultural communities, this study discusses Kangdrun's visual strategies for telling stories from the perspectives of children and youth through a feminine camera eye. The Chinese language education and Tibetan cultural community relations have reshaped the ethnic awareness of the post-2000s ITC generation regarding what can be called 'a safe Chinese Tibetan citizenship'. This study contributes to a new understanding of modern Tibetan authors' generational relationships, the expressive styles of the female Sinophone-Tibetan filmmaker, and how affective visuality mediates the cultural, political, and gender identity formation of female artists of the post-2000s ITC generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes a reflective approach to an overlooked area of ethical discussion in archival and cultural heritage studies: the ethical practice of how to relate to children's and young people's own donations of archival material when used in research. This is an ethics that must often balance between a children's rights rhetoric and formal research ethics. The empirical material consists of one drawing donated to the Swedish Archive of Children's Art and two photographs donated to a museum collection in the aftermath of the 2017 terrorist attack in Stockholm. These pictures have all, in one way or another, required ethical pauses and halts for the authors due to doubts, dilemmas, and emotional turmoil. Methodologically, the idea is to hold space for the ethical dilemmas that arise, in order to analyze how ethics is enacted in practice. Aspects such as access, copyright, anonymization, naming, and the relationship between archival metadata and research data are analyzed from and with a youth perspective. The analyzes show the intricate interplay of different norms, values, and ethics that are enacted when pictures are donated by young people to heritage institutions and then used in research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the connection between visuality, territoriality, and the production of geographical knowledge in the Qing empire during the latter half of the nineteenth century. I examine a series of incidents in which German and British surveying ships entered Chinese waters under the pretense of conducting hydrographic research, as well as the drawings, maps, and surveys that resulted from them. Whereas European diplomats argued that the ships were collecting information for the advancement of science and free market trade that would benefit all parties, Chinese officials perceived them as forms of military aggression and territorial encroachment. Drawing from the fields of visual culture, history of science, and colonial history, this article examines the processes through which images were created and the settings under which they operated to reveal the speculative nature of imperial visuality, especially as it was distributed across the shifting boundary between land and sea. • Emphasizes the role of the visual archives in imperial history. • Analyzes the connections between cartography and imperialism. • Offers a visual studies approach to the study of maps and mapping. • Discusses the transimperial nature of governance in late-Qing China. • Presents a lesser-known case study of German imperialism in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines images taken inside El Salvador's prisons and released in April 2020, just as the then-new president, Nayib Bukele, was making drastic changes to Salvadoran social policy and further concentrating power in the presidency and military. It investigates the social qualities of these staged images, of nude prisoners forced into large blocks, and what affective resonances the Bukele administration is exploiting and producing through them. The author argues that these images focalize the trauma and anxiety of years of dispersed violence in El Salvador and grant their audiences conditional access to the death making they perform while also threatening them with inclusion. The article proposes that attendant affective responses and media circulation constitute a form of infrastructure essential to rationalizing the expanding carceral project in El Salvador, which has seen its prison population more than double, and to the eroticization of that project's structural and personal violence, of which these images are an extreme and informative example. It proposes these images are in dialogue with other archives of sexualized carceral violence and a history of the representation of El Salvador through death, while also indicative of new techniques of image production and circulation in settings of confinement in the twenty-first century. Using theories of hierarchies of the flesh and being from Black studies, as well as the critical geography work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, the author argues that, within the space of the images, disease, chaos, and criminalized land and body converge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I argue that the entanglements between visuality and automation need to be situated and analysed as part of the abstraction of labour and the labour process in capitalism. The striving to standardise, control and optimise the labour process is the original drive behind the operationalisations of visuality in service of capitalist industrial technology. This includes contemporary AI systems, which, despite their increasing complexity, can and should be traced back to the division of labour (Pasquinelli, 2023). My work focuses on the process diagram and its uses in low-code and no-code tools for robotic process automation (RPA), where it is instrumentalised as a form of labour abstraction for the automation of white-collar work. I show how visuality can help us trace the transformation between the techniques of labour abstraction in early scientific management, on the one hand, and data and algorithms as a particular type of abstract labour, on the other hand. Building on Jathan Sadowski's (2019) point that data is manufactured through the agency of labour as a 'recorded abstraction of the world created and valorised by people using technology' (ibid.:2), I argue that the process diagram serves as a vantage point through which this process of abstraction and the role of visuality in enabling and obscuring this process can be investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the various modes of visualities and visual production in Kashmir. It begins with mapping the existing state visualities that use hypervisibilization, victimization, criminalization, and depoliticization as modalities to represent Kashmir. In recent years, long-standing counternarratives to these representations have met with increasing repression, engendering a visual stagnancy. Earlier, countervisuals by photojournalists confronted state visualities by directing the gaze toward Kashmiri bodies. This essay argues that the repeated production and circulation of these realistic images have also reached a point of visual fatigue. At this juncture of a seeming visual impossibility, the essay proposes creative configurations and visual imaginaries through artistic visioning as a means to continue the work of visual production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is devoted to the problem of human identity in the modern socio‐cultural space. This problem is actualized in the middle of the 20th – early 21st centuries, when the development of technologies, including information and communication ones, became a trigger that changed the idea of identity formation and its further implementation as a static and/or dynamic construction. Using philosophical, hermeneutic and comparative analysis methods, the authors have revealed that identity ceases to be static and in the post‐industrial (post‐ technical) society it becomes fluid, diffuse and modeled. At the same time, the dominant locus of identity perception and its transmission becomes external, visual, which is associated with transaestheticization, capitalization of the image and lifestyle, marketing and symbolic strategies, initially applicable to the product, and then moving to the representative and communicative plane of human existence. The authors come to the conclusion that it is through the visual that the actualization of a person’s identity occurs both for oneself and for another/others (presentative level).

Constructed from the 1930s onward, the Pan-American Highway was envisioned as a massive artery connecting the American continents. In addition to its practical uses, the road also served as a reflection of the often-conflicting aspirations and self-representations of the United States on the one hand and the Latin American countries on the other. This article explores how the power relations and conflicting aspirations and goals embedded in the Pan-American Highway were constituted through, and given expression in, the thousands of photographs taken during the road’s construction in Central America between 1930 and 1960. The article draws on two corpora. The first belongs to the US Bureau of Public Roads, and is housed in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. The second actually comprises two separate corpora, both initially belonging to two Costa Rican men who were involved in the construction of the road and archived in the Costa Rican National Archive. Considering photographs taken by agents of various nationalities, ethnicities, and classes enables us to extricate the road from its consideration as a US initiative and underscores its Latin American and transnational framing. While acknowledging the US imperialism inherent in the PAHW initiative, the article brings to the fore the complexities within the dichotomy of an imperial visuality vs. countervisuality that is based on a division between US American images vs. Latin American ones, in favour of a more nuanced examination of relations of power that takes into account inter-Latin American relations of power and coloniality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "An Eye for an Eye: Dickinson’s Vision and Emerson’s Visuality" explores the relationship between Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendentalist ideas and Emily Dickinson's embodied visual experiences of nature. While Emerson's concept of the transparent eyeball symbolizes a union with nature and individual autonomy, Dickinson's poetry challenges this notion by focusing on personal encounters with nature. The article delves into how gender roles and imperialist ideology influenced their distinct perspectives on nature, highlighting Dickinson's critique of masculine dominance in American Romanticism. Through a comparison of visuality and vision, the article sheds light on the divergent approaches of Emerson and Dickinson towards nature and self-expression. [Extracted from the article]

The growing presence of everyday visual materials, such as social media images and videos, raises new questions around the ways in which identities are made visible in contemporary contexts. 'Visually informed' critical discursive psychology can be productively leveraged to analyze the diverse intersections of visuality and gender in daily life. To guide future inquiries in this domain, a brief overview of discourse analysis, discursive psychology, and (visually informed) critical discursive psychology is provided. Applying this methodology to the study of gender, an explicit conceptualization of visual gender displays is detailed alongside complementary analytic objectives suitable for future inquiries. Lastly, three categories of visual features are outlined that could be attended to during close examinations of visual data, using extracts from a previous study to illustrate key points. To that end, scholars can visually investigate 'micro' level gender displays as they relate to 'macro' systems of inequality- grounded in a critical discursive psychology framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview, filmmaker and scholar Simone Brioni talks about the two most recent documentaries which he wrote, Maka (Moutamid 2023) and Oltre i bordi (Beyond the Frame) (Brioni and Sandrini 2023), which share reflections about the visual representation of Africans in media and Italy's colonial legacy. He discusses the similarities and differences between these films and the documentaries he made in 2012 with/about writers Kaha Mohamed Aden and Ribka Sibhatu, respectively, called La quarta via (The Fourth Road) (Brioni et al. 2012b) and Aulò (Brioni et al. 2012a). In particular, Brioni focuses on the collaborative process with director Elia Moutamid and protagonist Geneviève Makaping to make the documentary Maka. Brioni also talks about how the dialogue from which the documentaries have emerged has progressively become the theme of the film themselves. Other topics of the interview include the use of the documentary to produce academic research, the impact of COVID-19 on the making of the films and the circulation and distribution of the films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Kei Miller's The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion through the lens of visuality and multisensory poetic performance. Reenacting the tradition of map critique in postcolonial poetry, Miller both decries the map's instrumentality to colonial dominance and reflects on the map's utility in creating and communicating spatial knowledge. The two purposes are intensively manifested in his deployment of the visual vis-à-vis other senses. Enmeshing its capacious trope of visuality within a synesthetic poetic texture, Cartographer both revolts against the visual scheme associated with colonial cartographic regulation and erasure, and refashions the eye into a crucial means to affirm and empower underprivileged peoples and cultures. Ultimately, Cartographer illustrates how poetry conducts postcolonial critique through animating and cultivating the senses in a way that gestures beyond the binary of domination and resistance. Miller's cartographic inquiry materializes in a geopoetics actively foregrounding its multisensory engagement, which begets "eye errant" as a paradigm of geo-cultural knowledge that negotiates rather than imposes, recognizes rather than misrepresents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that understanding the power of TikTok's visual discourse is a crucial part of conceptualising the character, inspiration, and ambition of Iran's Gen-Z-led uprising, both at home and across the diaspora. TikTok is a social media platform that depends on visuality. As such, it creates its own specific forms of messaging. This paper seeks to apply an innovative methodology of 'Visual Discourse Tracing' to the Iranian protests. It uses this carefully devised, process-driven method, to highlight the core ways in which TikTok has amplified the message of the Iranian protests, connecting to the grassroots movement and to the longer history of Iranian women's struggle for freedom. Visuality and social media have been crucial in shaping the character of these contemporary protests, necessitating proper theorisation when understanding the wider Iranian protest movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International actors routinely demonstrate their military-technological capabilities through spectacular visual performances such as weapons tests, exercises and exhibitions. These public spectacles are internationally observed through the widespread circulation of images that visually represent the practice of demonstration in myriad ways. In this article, I conduct a case study of Russian demonstrations of uncrewed military vehicles during the Zapad 2021 military exercise, to illustrate that capability demonstrations do not merely have rational and linear effects on the strategic calculus of actors, but rather that they are a coherent set of international visual practices shaping how onlookers perceive war, violence and the tools of military force. I argue that the visual patterns and themes observable in the images of military demonstrations establish commonsensical perceptions of the necessity of using (algorithmically mediated) military force in the conduct of international politics, and the normality of employing ever-evolving, technologically advanced instruments of violence. Moreover, I contend that these perceptions are reinforced by the contexts in which the practices of production, circulation and consumption of the images take place. As such, this article develops a theoretical framework that allows for the systematic study of military capability demonstrations as an important visual site of international politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is an identity? What do we really see and what is just a delusion (hayal)? Ancient Egyptians used the same word (iwen) to denote both the concept of color and the concept of being. For this ancient people, the word color meant people, beings and character at the same time. In order to give the Deity some extra strength and to emphasize its enigma, they used to say that this deity has a strange and indeterminate color. We have been poisoned by political anthropology for a long time. Red-haired people have been called “damn reds” since the Middle Ages, Chinese people are called “little yellows” nowadays etc. We are afraid of those we call small and green and who are “somewhere outside the planet”. Almost all authors of the comics choose the colors that will represent the negative characters in the story. In digital era, both color and being gain some new identities. What is humanity and how many shades does it have today?

By focusing on the changes to the industrial landscape that can be identified visually and within the materiality of the built environment, this paper discusses the transformation of the industrial landscape and its meaning that has been produced by the human agency that has emerged in damaged industrial places after the restoration of Lithuania's independence and post-Soviet deindustrialisation. It shows that there is a sense of emptiness related to the ruination and abandonment of the industrial landscape in people's experiences and memories of Soviet industrial districts. However, it is evident that such emptiness is a transitional stage that creates the conditions for the emergence of new beginnings. The paper reveals that the industrial districts today are active places in which various individual economic activities and economic structures have emerged. The research is based on the two Lithuanian former Soviet industrial cities of Alytus and Marijampolė. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade there has been significant increase in artist residencies that provide opportunities for artists to travel internationally, in order to immerse themselves in a place and develop their artistic practice. This essay reflects on a case study of an artist residency program in Berlin, in which 10 international artists were invited to live in a refugee accommodation centre for a month each. Drawing on fieldwork notes, sketches, interviews with participants and the residency facilitators, I reflect on my unease and tensions that this form of creative mobility produces in relation to the visualities of migration. Questions around the role of mobility and exchange for artists, as well as applied mobilities researchers, pose ethical considerations about the privileges of movement and the visualities that such mobility produces. I suggest that the international artist residency model reinforces hierarchies and the injustices of cultural mobilities that are entwined and embedded in elite mobility practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Arte, Individuo y Sociedad is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid 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.)

An Ugly Word is an important and timely work: it takes a frightening picture of our times, using interviews and a opportune sociological and critical race theory-based analysis of them to reveal how race thinking imbues perceptions, ideas, and conceptions of racialized Otherness in the mind of young white Italians. It fills a gap in flourishing research on Italian racism that in the last ten years has focused mostly on racist and colonial archives and how they are reproduced in Italian culture, society, and politics. My contribution to the debate opened by the journal on the book focuses on the pervasiveness of race in Italy, on my critique of categorization circulating within the international debate on race, and concludes advocating the importance of maintaining the concept of race and exploring its visual reproduction in Italian and European critical literature, to see racism and fight against it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Diseño y Comunicación is the property of Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Diseno y Comunicacion 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.)

Before 1900, in the Czech lands of the Habsburg Monarchy, the lean body of an athlete became a representation of strength, health, and beauty. Through Sokol gymnastics, the body of every Czech man was to be shaped into the form of the somatic mythotype Apollo. After 1900, in circuses, variety shows, and strength sports clubs, a new ideal man embodying somatic mythotype Hercules appeared: the strongman, who transformed a lightly muscled Apollonian shape into a modern Herculean form bulking massive shredded musculature. Strongman Gustav Frištenský in particular, whose body was eroticized, photogenized, nationalized, and racialized, embodied a mobilizing sports star who strengthened the Czech national community. Frištenský's body was shaped by Hellenistic idealism, which gave rise to his adherence to the somatic mythotype of Hercules. This subsequently gave birth to 'musculinity', a new kind of hegemonic masculinity. The perception of Frištenský's body was influenced by a physical resemblance to the Estonian wrestler Georg Lurich, by practices of othering, and the myth of white male supremacy. The steel and statuesque aesthetic of Frištenský's body and the voyeurism of the masses then undermined traditional middle-class prudery and patriarchal control over the distribution of visual pleasure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reflects on the current significance of philological studies and attempts to develop a concept of literary studies that accounts for the visual and material forms of the observed and analyzed objects more comprehensively. To illustrate the potential that lies ahead for philology, the author draws on art history and its engagement with the socalled pictorial turn. The author argues that philology would benefit greatly if it became iconophilia as well, meaning if it could recognize the intrinsic entanglements of language/ textuality and visuality that arise from technological and social transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Odeere is the property of Edicoes UESB 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.)

In this article, I analyse three series of portraits by the Canadian Cree artist Kent Monkman (2008-2022), as examples of radical resurgence and countervisuality. Monkman is known for his irreverent treatment of the European canon and representation of Canadian history. I first focus on two series which Monkman painted in 2008, as a response to the 19th century traditions of “portraits of Indians” and of “portraits of Indian warriors,” which Canadian painter Paul Kane and American painter George Catlin were famous for. With these 2008 series—acrylics and watercolours—which all include direct allusions to 19th century paintings, Monkman exposes the prevailing vision of Indigenous peoples as a vanishing race. These series also expose European visions of Indigenous sexuality by depicting two-spirit figures. Finally, I examine a recent series entitled wâsê-acâhkosak (Shining Stars) (2020-2022), as an instance of radical resistance since Monkman paints the portraits of contemporary Indigenous heroes who are part of an artistic and intellectual renaissance, within a larger political and cultural context of resurgence.

The telescope was invented during the early seventeenth century in Europe and introduced to China during the Ming dynasty. This article discusses how the telescope shattered the epistemological understanding of vision in China in the late Ming to the mid-Qing dynasty. The telescope revolutionized not only scientific ways of seeing but also changed many aspects of culture and the philosophical understanding of vision itself. I endeavour to explain the visual perception afforded by telescope, and discuss the social aspects of that vision and the multiplicity of applications of the telescope in China through scientific books, records of imperial workshops, poetry, novels, and paintings. I argue that telescope not only helped the Chinese to imagine how to visually conquer space but also how to overcome the limits of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Arte, Individuo y Sociedad is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid 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 focuses on Mike Flanagan's Haunting series and brings the pervasive background ghost to the foreground of analysis by studying that which is, as expressed by young Nell in The Haunting of Hill House, 'right here the whole time' and yet cannot be seen. Using Jacques Derrida's seminal notion of 'spectre' and its related 'visor effect' concept to build textual analyses of both The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, this study demonstrates the ways in which the background ghost both reflects and challenges conventional horror dynamics of visuality and spectacularity. Such dynamics extend beyond the story space and involve the implied and near-sighted spectator, at once imperfect ghost-hunter and hunted by the background ghost. Such pervasive mechanics of haunting allow Flanagan to create a space of highly contemporary terror oozing from the screen to the implied viewer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While practices of visibility, visuality, and visualization have long impacted migration, recently the drone's-eye view has become part of the iconology and iconography of mobility. With the European "migration crisis" of 2015, varieties of drones were used by states to securitize borders, by NGOs to increase accountability and to aid migrants, and by independent drone photojournalists to document the event. This article discusses how the politics of drone use involves understanding the homologies between militarism, securitization, and humanitarianism in the history of the aerial view, and why drone ethics are intertwined with drone aesthetics. Focusing on the photojournalism of Rasmus Degnbol and Rocco Rorandelli, it argues that, while humanitarian drone images are becoming increasingly mundane and unremarkable in news media, there is an aporia immanent to such images, which require confrontation with histories of racialization and colonialism. It seeks to cultivate "aesthetic literacy" in drone journalism by addressing the way humanitarian events are being revisualized through remote technologies that are underpinned by histories of targeting and racialization in which "the human" is often hardly visible at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The improbable popularity of the “Kuflis” series by András Dániel raises questions about its causes. What makes this absurd and unlikely fairy-tale world captivating for both a five-year-old and an adult art historian or literature scholar? The “Kuflis” universe is unlike the conventional fairy-tale realm. Its main characters are amorphous, the plot is entirely arbitrary, and the illustrations deliberately defy the traditional beauty ideals of children’s books. Moreover, the moral lessons, or rather the lack thereof, go against the norm, as acknowledged even by the characters within the stories themselves. The series manages to engage the interests of both young children and adults, challenging conventional storytelling norms and aesthetic expectations. The author analyses patterns of the dialogue between text and visuality in the series, that may answer some of the questions discussed above. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study explores the (re)negotiated visuality of television journalism during the first wave of the epidemic in Slovenia and on this basis examines the visibility of the COVID-19 crisis. Institutionalised procedures and relations of production together with the conventional visual-aural news form are analysed by assessing journalism's (cl)aims of bringing relevant events and disputes to public attention, uncovering hidden social realities, and enabling people to engage in public life. By combining qualitative interviews with journalists and editors of public television and the leading commercial broadcaster with ethnographic content analysis of the lead news packages, the study reveals "not as neat television like before the epidemic", albeit a detailed analysis of the mechanisms for ensuring veracity in the newscasts showed "business as usual" in television journalism. Although the two newsrooms (cl)aimed to be performing in line with the journalism's normative foundations, chiefly monitoring disputes, deviances and changes, making them visible for people in their public engagements and encounters with power, the study points to the emergence of "kaleidoscopic vision". Namely, television journalism provided a shifted, fractured and scrambled vision of the COVID-19 crisis defined by competing, conflicting and dysfunctional narratives articulated in the contradictory (dis)connect within the journalism–power–citizenry nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writing and visuality are inextricably linked, and not only in non-alphabetic writing systems. How can we look at writing from a semiotic point of view, in order to render its complexity as a multidimensional object between transcription and representation, between notation and image? On the one hand, it may be useful to retrace the path already taken by the history of writing systems and the linguistic, philosophical and anthropological traditions on the subject, trying to reflect on writing as a "semiotic place"; on the other hand, it is possible to draw attention to the constant short-circuits and frequent contaminations that exist between image and writing, in graphics and calligraphy, as well as in poetry and the visual arts, and to try to describe their underlying dynamics.

AbstractThis methodological article introduces and evaluates the use of the ‘Goggle-box’ recording as an ethnographic data collection method. Simply put, the method means video-recording participants watching television within their own homes, as they experience the meanings and materialities that shape their belonging. I argue that the ‘Goggle-box’ recording provided a creative solution to exploring the mundanity of everyday life, which so often marks leisure experiences. This makes it a valuable method for researchers wishing to: explore the sensoriality of everyday leisure experiences, engage with the many interconnections involved in subjective belonging, and produce more substantiate and sustainable challenges to the privileged exclusivity certain subjectivities benefit from. Therefore, this article invites readers to foster their research imaginations, produce creative responses, and consider alternative ways of knowing in their own practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary critics often cast the English university novel as a traditionalist relic of the nineteenth century, one largely defensive of Oxbridge classics and masculinity. Yet the subgenre was a more subversive cultural nexus of sorts: an attempted reconciliation of novel form with the era's emerging and optically illusive technologies. These Bildungsromane , largely or exclusively set at universities, value letting undergraduates stare at and learn to enjoy outdoor vistas. In turn, they frequently compare those college landscapes to illusory devices like panoramas and magic lanterns. The fictions thus represent a struggle to bridge conventional Oxbridge education with innovative outdoor learning, and Romantic natural aesthetics with a visual subjectivism more akin to the early modernists. The essay begins by linking the so-called visual turn of nineteenth-century studies with the fewer book-length accounts of university fiction. The paper's second section then defines natural versus what I call illusory prospect gazing in English culture; where the former involved staring at outdoor vistas for pleasure, the latter offered this through indoor and often unsettlingly virtual landscapes. Finally, the essay turns to university novels, which combine both forms of prospect gazing for students' educative benefits. While earlier fictions liken college grounds to panoramas, later ones grow fascinated with photographic, phantasmagoric, and kaleidoscopic vistas. We can begin to re-evaluate the university novel, then, as one of the era's new optical technologies: it taught undergraduate characters and readers alike to visually enjoy and distrust their surroundings, and to confront the Romantic legacies and dizzying futures of novel form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary art has insistently turned to the experience of migration with a view to making us see, and possibly to making us indirectly experience and reflect on the embodied politics of migration. The documentary mode has featured prominently in art's attempt at accounting for the reality of global migration. Other strategies have privileged a combination of allegory and empiricist experientiality, artists thus aiming at triggering an embodied thought experiment and pondering the brutal and tragic truth of migration. In order to analyze such thought experiments and the experiential contract they elaborate, the essay first turns to exhibitions that have explored the complex aesthetic experience entailed in a collective reflection on mass migration: Persona Grata, the 2019 show jointly imagined by MAC VAL and the Musée de l'histoire de l'immigration in Paris, and When Home Won't Let You Stay: Migration Through Contemporary Art, a show that toured, between 2019 and 2021, from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University. Building on the analysis of some of the works featuring in these two shows (works by Ben, Kader Attia, or Mona Hatoum), the essay then focuses on the works of Adel Abdessemed (Hope, 2011) and Enrique Ramírez (Les Incertains, 2012–2020), two artists who imagine spectatorial experience as the locus of a political self-reflexive confrontation with the "necropolitics" (Achille Mbembe) of global migration or forced exile. In the shows and works here explored, visual experimentation harnesses the sensorial to a rehistoricizing of the gaze. Art thus becomes the contested site of an embodied unhinging of spectatorship endowed with a renewed, if paradoxical, sense of collective political accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, the notion of "the people behind the scenes" is used to build a bridge between the cognitive framework of film studies and migration research to describe those who are discursively categorized as "illegal" or "irregular" migrants and whose lives are exploited in the workforce and at risk in "Fortress Europe". As a natural southern border of the Schengen area, the Mediterranean region sometimes offers fleeting encounters between "illegal" migrants excluded by this border regime and foreign travellers courted by the tourism industry. These ephemeral juxtapositions of people with contrasting political and economic stakes create what we call "visual clashes", gathering in one frame antithetical human lived experiences of this maritime area. Drawing on Nicholas Mirzoeff's concept of the "right to look", which the visual culture theorist and activist uses as a bulwark against a dominant Western regime of visuality, this essay analyses a series of visual texts that bear witness to unwanted encounters by this dominant regime's visual system of classification and separation. The essay examines two press photographs and television images alongside Elleke Boehmer's short story "Synthetic Orange", and analyses a cartographic experiment and a film; each case opposes the authority of Western visuality and makes a claim for the autonomy of the right to look. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proposals for large-scale technical interventions into the Earth system to mitigate global warming – or climate engineering – have sparked considerable debate about their potential implications for international security and global governance. The article furthers this debate by bringing it into dialogue with the literature on visual global politics to develop a more 'imagistic' concept of climate engineering imaginaries. Based on a novel visual dataset, three major visual clusters in the public discourse on climate engineering are identified: images of the human–nature relationship, of climate engineering as tangible infrastructure, and of the actors involved in climate engineering projects. The analysis shows how images and other visuals do not only shape the dominant understanding of climate engineering but also competing imaginaries of future political orders in which such approaches might be deployed. Three main results of this analysis stand out. First, dominant ways of seeing climate engineering can further reinforce already dominant discursive frames by adding 'visual proof' to their underlying claims. Second, climate engineering visuality can also enable the politicisation of climate engineering by rendering concrete projects visible and hence contestable. Third, climate engineering images can paradoxically limit the scope of imagination as they often revolve around powerful visual icons and symbols of the past and present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the visual politics of complicity within war, conflict, and military occupation in International Relations (IR). By arguing that complicity is a social relation through which actors navigate violence while drawing on power and resources that are distributed unevenly, it explores the production, articulation, and reception of complicity within the Israeli television series Fauda , which addresses complicit behaviour under the Israeli occupation of Palestine. By building on Feminist IR's engagement with emotions, gender, and visual representations, this article provides a twofold contribution to the study of complicity in international politics. Firstly, the complicit entanglement between creators, distributors, and viewers of Fauda spotlights the cultural workers' role in shaping public knowledge of war, violence, and military occupation, particularly by creating and circulating cultural representations that facilitate the complicity of audiences with the violence that they consume through certain emotional logics (empathy, compassion, fear). Secondly, this article examines representations of complicity within Fauda to shed light on complicit actors' embodied experiences of navigating between different identities while caught in the middle of violence (perpetrator, victim, witness, bystander). To this end, this article develops our understanding of emotions, resistance, and domination in international politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The war in Syria has been communicated to global audiences through images of dead and injured children, decapitated and tortured bodies, and ruined cities. The article shows how news media coverage of the war's impact on the city of Aleppo invoked a Gothic tradition. Drawing on Kristeva and Freud's concepts of the abject and the uncanny, the article argues that the Gothic tradition can further International Relations research on the constitution of Selves and Others. The Gothic Other is constituted through the (Gothic) Self's repulsion, fascination, and desire, and the Gothic tradition revolves around an understanding of the invisible as an in-between space of fear and anticipation. The ability to recognise Gothic themes in an image depends on one's familiarity with the Gothic tradition, hence images are theorised as having a Gothic potentiality. The article focuses on how the Anglo-Saxon Gothic tradition enabled Western readers to identify Gothic themes in news coverage of the war in Aleppo. The article adopts a multimethod strategy including a content analysis of 457 images published by Western news media; a discourse analysis of news stories; an analysis of three Gothic, uncanny iconic motifs; and an author-created comic drawing on Gothic elements from the published photographs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]