Parallax: Changing Perspectives in Visual Culture

a 2008-2009 Series of Public Conferences

The series is made possible by a grant from the Anonymous Fund.

Queer Theory, Visual Culture

September 2008
Coming over a decade after the field-defining publications of the early to mid 1990s, this symposium will critically revisit the questions of the queer theorization of visual culture, the deep critique within queer theory of certain modes of visibility, and the transformative promise of critical/visual tactics of queering. In particular, this conference will explore how the term queer works against the more defined categories of identity such as gay, lesbian, and “straight,” and, instead, hints at those “unspeakable” categories of identity that remain in tension with, but somehow beyond, strict taxonomy and stable representation.

Co-sponsored by LGBT Studies and the Department of Art History.

Photography and the Technologies of Empire and Race

November 2008
This conference will convene scholars and practitioners distributed across the disciplines on campus to discuss the ways in which we implement, interrogate, and intersect photography with studies of empire and race. The conference will provide a timely intervention in the wake of a watershed period in the history of U.S. empire in which photographs (particularly the Abu Ghraib prison photographs) challenge our understanding of the powers of photographic images. The conference's research colloquium will advance an exchange of ideas on theory, practice and research methods in the study of photography as a technology of empire and race and also within a comparative global scope and broad temporal sweep that will allow consideration of the diversity of local practice and historical change.

Co-sponsored by the Global Studies Program and the Departments of Afro-American Studies, Art History and Languages and Cultures of Asia.

Perception

February 2009
The developing program in Visual Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is committed to fostering research collaborations and dialogue that connect the analysis and practice of the visual across the humanities, arts, social sciences, and sciences. This conference on “Perspective” represents a fundamental part of our initiative to further the links between disciplines around common interest in the role of visual representation in scientific practice. The conference is dedicated to the question of how we might reconcile and combine research in the neuroscience and physiology of perception with historical, critical, and theoretical work premised on the socially, historically, and culturally constructed and variable nature of perception.

Co-sponsored by the Eye Research Institute, the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences and the Department of Art History.

Worlding Visual Culture: Transnational Feminism and the Visual

April 2009
This conference is dedicated to bringing into contact three important strands of transnational feminist work on the visual, namely questions of political representation and public praxis within transnational feminist theorizing and critique, the extension of transnational feminist theory to the analysis of the global flows of visual media, and visual culture studies work (scholarship and exhibitions) on transnational feminist film, performance, and visual art.

Co-sponsored by the Women's Studies Program and the Department of Art History.

Visual Culture event archive
Co-sponsored event archive