[ecrea] CFP: 2nd International Symposium on Visual Culture: Resistance and Reinvention in Visual Culture

rrvc.bahcesehir.edu.tr <http://rrvc.bahcesehir.edu.tr>

CFP: 2nd International Symposium on Visual Culture: Resistance and 
Reinvention in Visual Culture

*Keynote speakers: *

John Tagg, Professor of Art History and Comparative Literature, 
Binghamton University, SUNY;

Sean Cubitt, Professor of Film and Television, Goldsmiths College, 
University of London

The second, biennial international symposium on visual culture to be 
held at Bahçeşehir University in the heart of Istanbul invites proposals 
for contributions from scholars, researchers, critics and practitioners 
on questions and topics concerning resistance and reinvention.

Aiming to review, reassess and refine accounts of resistance, political 
and psychic, as they pertain to an understanding of oppressive or 
repressive normative, dominant or hegemonic forms or formations of power 
in and across polities and social life, as well as in and across visual 
culture, we particularly wish to invite contributions which seek to 
identify relations between resistance and reinvention: resistance to 
norms of visual culture -- of effects or senses of meaning, style, 
technique, genre, site, space, media, spectatorship, narrative, 
interacting or producing -- that enable, solicit, provoke or otherwise 
entrain reinvention, in and beyond visual culture.

Resistance involves different agents and senses of agency: groups or 
individuals; but also psychic agencies drawn into different relations by 
novel or complex visual, hybrid or multi-media work. Contributions may 
thus seek to analyze and assess work, objects, uses of media or genre 
that invoke or provoke socio-political resistance. Retracing resistance 
to resistance may be part of this in so far as political resistance 
needs to aim at what preoccupies its field/s of concern, releasing new 
ways of acting, thinking, feeling or imagining.

Visual cultural objects may also be said to resist: sustaining and 
promoting the meanings of particular causes, sometimes in complicity 
with the worst, they may also be understood to generate excessive or 
subversive senses. Apparent conformity to traditions may harbour the 
germ of their reinvention. Indeed, traditions and senses of identity may 
be imagined to necessitate their more or less narrow resistance and 
reiterating reinvention. Far from being exclusively the activities of 
minorities, resistance and reinvention may be understood to involve all 
of us implicated in visual culture today, with enquiries into their 
operative relations of wide-ranging significance.

The international symposium in visual culture will exclude no type of 
object made to be viewed, and is not restricted to type of authorship 
(artist, designer, filmmaker, videographer etc) or sense of disciplinary 
belonging (history and theory of art, film, photography and/or video, 
design, media or new media studies, political theory, philosophy, 
anthropology, ethnography, disability studies etc). Papers that reassess 
the work of theorists of and for resistance and/or reinvention in 
relation to particular visual work are encouraged.

Please send abstracts of not more than 300 words for papers of 20 
minutes to (resistanceandreinvention /at/ gmail.com) <http://mail.com> by 31st 
July 2013, indicating which of the following possible sessions the paper 
would likely be suitable for:

Norms and traditions;
Media and genres;
Identities and institutions;
Reinventions of the visual;
Practices and theories of resistance

Please provide your name, title, institutional affiliation (if any), 
postal and email addresses in a separate section at the head of your 
proposal. All proposals will be assessed by blind peer review.

We are pleased to respond to enquiries before the deadline above, and we 
look forward to welcoming you to (or back to) Bahçeşehir University, 
Istanbul, a city of a significant complexity of traditions, and thus of 
resistance and reinvention.


Lewis Johnson and Tolga Hepdinçler
Department of Photography and Video
Bahçeşehir University, Istanbul, Turkey
(resistanceandreinvention /at/ gmail.com) <http://mail.com>