[ecrea] Call for Videos - the visuality of security

Call for Videos on Visuality of Security
Audiovisual Thinking Issue #2012:6


The Visuality of Security
- using audiovisual research methods to investigate the role of images in international security.

Guest editor: Rune Saugmann, University of (Copenhagenrsa /at/ ifs.ku.dk)<mailto:(rsa /at/ ifs.ku.dk)>

During the last few decades, visuality and visual media has become paramount in the practices that make up international security. The instant release of video and still images from the killing of Osama Bin Laden, the constitution of WikiLeaks as a global actor through its release of a classified US military video in april 2010, the role played by videos in both the 2009 Iranian post-election crisis and the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’ are but the most recent examples. Concomitantly, questions relating to visuality have gradually become a major concern of contemporary scholarship on security.

This Special Issue of Audiovisual Thinking calls for videos analyzing international security practices, intending to spark a debate on how the images and visual practices that makes up a major part of our experience of international relations look if we analyze them visually, rather than verbally.

As visuality has taken center stage – helped by profound changes in the media landscape that have greatly expanded the circulability of visuals as well as the range of actors capable of producing visuals – the irreducability of visuals to words have become an ever more pertinent problem for IR research and teaching.

Visual analysis, whether still or moving, must confront the same crucial questions that make images a pertinent problematique of international security scholarship. It has to deal with the ’surplus of meaning’ in images compared to verbal interpretations of them and with images’ ‘promiscuity’ and openness to interpretation (Barthes 1977).

Seeking to investigate visuality from within its own modality, this special issue is an attempt to sensitise IR to the visual as a form of knowledge, and open up for debates about how this particular modality of the sensible not only determines what is visible and what is not; but also how authority and truth-claims comes about, are compared and evaluated; with deep implications for who can have a voice and be heard and who cannot.

The call asks scholars to e.g.

- engage with the ‘language’ or ‘code’ of the visual, to interrogate hiding and showing in IR,

- to engage the economy and grammar of visual articulation and production of knowledge,

-to shine a critical light on visual security practices,

- to highlight how visuality can work as a method of studying international relations rather than only as an object of study – and in doing so seeking to expose how scholars can benefit from visual ‘literacy’ when dealing with visuality and visual media in international relations.


THIS CALL IS NOW OPEN - and closes 15th December 2012.

What is Audiovisual Thinking?
Audiovisual Thinking is a peer reviewed academic online journal and pioneering forum where academics and educators can articulate, conceptualize and disseminate their research about audiovisual culture through video.
International in scope and multidisciplinary in approach, the purpose of Audiovisual Thinking is to develop and promote academic thinking in and about all aspects of audiovisuality and audiovisual culture. Advised by a board of leading academics and thinkers in the fields of audiovisuality, communication and the media and hosted by Copenhagen University, the journal seeks to set the standard for academic audiovisual essays now and in the future. We study, teach and research the moving image, media and audiovisuality, yet we rarely mediate in these same forms and media. Audiovisual Thinking hopes to change this.

Video submissions are welcome from all fields of study and, as one would expect, the main criteria for submissions are that the discussion and thinking are conveyed through audiovisual means.
 Please visit us onwww.audiovisualthinking.org<http://www.audiovisualthinking.org/>  to watch academic videos and submit your own.




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