Introduction to Visual Culture

Course Description

This course surveys all aspects of the circulation and reception of images and examines a wide variety of visual media, from photography and film to smartphones and video, from newspapers and magazines to blogs and memes, from painting and sculpture to the built environment and infrastructure. Students will learn visual competency and media literacy; will consider the impact of branding and advertising; will think about how science and medicine use the visual, and how the power of the visual has been deployed in politics and culture throughout history.

We will consider how conscious and unconscious desires elicit particular responses to media and imagery; how difference and otherness (race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and religion) are inscribed visually, and how the visual is entangled in both the oppression and liberation of humans, animals and nature. We will also give close attention to how the visual organizes information, creates spectacle, and operates in surveillance systems, as well as how the visual participates in the administration of society, through its deployment by nation-states and institutions. We will study how ideology is visualized in different communities, cultures, and nations; how societies view and naturalize self-perceptions and worldviews; and how symbolic constructions determine participation in the world and the formation of our own identities.

The tools of the discipline of Visual Culture offer techniques for understanding collective visual practices that can help make meaning of the world we live in.

Learning Objectives:

• an understanding of the discipline of visual culture/visual studies, it’s basic vocabulary and methods, and its interdisciplinary nature
• an ability to recognize different visual media and their technical underpinnings and effects
• an ability to recognize historical, political, social and cultural contexts of visual media and their ideological underpinnings and effects
• an understanding of how vision, visuality and representation relate to social and political power, identity, and difference
• an ability to critically analyze images using the methods and concepts of visual studies, and to communicate this analysis through written, oral and visual presentation

Instructors