Deadline: Apr 15, 2015

During the 2011 Stone Summer Theory Institute, entitled “Farewell to
Visual Studies”, Michael Ann Holly observed that when asked by her
undergraduate students what visual culture studies were, she would
answer: “It isn’t a discipline; it isn’t a field. It just names a
problematic. It shakes up complacency. No objects are excluded. Visual
studies names an attitude in relation to visual things, rather than a
department.”

Such a simple and slightly provocative explanation of visual culture
studies has two advantages: on the one hand, it is an effective way of
avoiding the pitfalls of the institutional and disciplinary disputes
that so often take over the debate around visual culture studies; on
the other hand, it allows us to account for a multitude of
heterogeneous references, related to different traditions and ways of
thinking about the visual. This issue of the journal Revista de
Comunicação e linguagens is inviting submissions of original papers on
“the visual studies attitude” today. We welcome both theoretical and
case-study articles in English and Portuguese engaging with (among
others):

- Photography;
- Film, moving-images and time-based media;
- New media;
- Scientific, technical and medical imagery;
- Debates around the power and agency of images;
- Practices of looking and modes of spectatorship;
- The “pictorial” or “iconic” turn;
- Debates about the value of the image in modern and post-modern
culture; iconoclasm, iconophobia, and different media’s contribution to
the (perceived) proliferation of images ;
- Images and literary texts.

Please send your article proposals, consisting of an abstract no longer
than 200 words and a brief biographical note to:
teresa.castro@univ-paris3.fr
margarida.medeiros@fcsh.unl.pt

Deadline for article proposals: April 15th 2015

Authors will be notified by the end of March if their article proposals
have been accepted.

Deadline for completed articles: June 30th 2015
Papers should be no more than 6000 words