The session recording will be archived on the site until June 25th, 2023

This session was streamed but not recorded

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Description:

NOTE: This session will be streamed, but not recorded.


…Living in a time where the parameters of making and circulating images are rapidly changing and evolving, this session sets out to encourage a discussion about how Geography is engaging with the complex and heterogeneous visual landscape of the moment. As a discipline that both produces visual material and takes it as a site of study, we are interested in holding a space for critical visual work currently taking place in the discipline—including turning to visual material as a site of inquiry as well as approaching visual work as a primary mode of knowledge production (Drucker, 2014).

As Geography graduate students, we have found ourselves excited, and our work enriched by, interdisciplinary visual methodological approaches. Our research has brought us into conversation with art and art history, film theory, critical design and architecture, Black studies, visual culture, critical forensic practice, media studies, comic studies, digital humanities, and more. This has led us to ask: How can we approach images on their own complex and shifting terms? Moving away from simplistic understandings of them as either truthful or deceptive, we are instead interested in approaches to images that explore the “unspoken relations” that inform their rich contexts—“the sonic, haptic, historical, and affective backgrounds and foregrounds” through which we interpret them (Campt, 2017).

And further: How is geography engaging with other-than-Cartesian visualizations of space (Bergmann and Lally, 2021)? How do we reckon with a contemporary digital visual landscape in which traditional boundaries between image makers, circulators, and consumers have shifted/changed/dissolved? What methods and interpretive tools can we bring to the visual? How might this methodological inquiry reflect back on how we approach the archival image and archival methods? How might our geographical thinking inform new visual methodological approaches and forms of knowledge production?

This session is an invitation to explore what can be done with images, and to enrich understandings of how geographic thought approaches the visual. We seek to encourage transdisciplinary conversation and connection between geographers whose work looks at or produces visual material as a primary site of research and/or those interested in thinking about new possibilities for visual methodologies in the discipline. We welcome submissions that take creative and non-traditional approaches to conference presentations, and encourage those whose research practice might take artistic and/or more-than-academic formats to share their work and process.

Works Cited
Bergmann, L., & Lally, N. (2021). For geographical imagination systems. Annals of the
American Association of Geographers, 111(1), 26-35.
Campt, Tina. Listening to Images. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
Drucker, Johanna. Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Non-Presenting Participants