Visual Culture

Catalog description

FNRT 776 is a graduate-level counterpart to FNRT-476. As such, students enrolled under the 776 number will be required to read the otherwise recommended reading; meet with the professor outside of class for an additional weekly discussion; and produce a final project that connects with their thesis work. Following current debate in the Journal of Visual Culture and calls for upcoming conferences on Visual Culture, graduate students will approach images as sites of gesture and as agents of intellectual productivity. Visual Culture studies recognize the predominance of visual forms of media, communication, and information in the contemporary world, investigating both “high" cultural forms such as fine art, design, and architecture and popular "low" cultural forms associated with mass media and communications. Visual Culture studies represents a turn in the discourse of the visual, which had focused on content-based, critical readings of images, and has since broadened its approach to additionally question the ways in which our consumption and production of images and image based technologies are structured. Analyzing images from a social-historical perspective, visual culture asks: what are the effects of images? Can the visual be properly investigated with traditional methodologies, which have been based on language, not imagery? How do images visualize social difference? How are images viewed by varied audiences? How are images embedded in a wider culture and how do they circulate?