The conference will feature plenary addresses by scholars in anthropology, art history, communication studies, gender studies, and other disciplines, as well as concurrent presentations.

The study of visual culture increasingly foregrounds two significant assumptions. The first is that, contrary to the hermeneutics of suspicion characterizing both ideology critique and theories of the public sphere, visual images can provide important resources for democratic politics."Visual democracy" goes beyond instrumental use by elites and documentary witness by the press to also include diverse actors, media, practices, audiences, and functions. The second assumption is that visual images are the leading edge of technologies and practices of circulation that are becoming increasingly characteristic of all media use in a global communications environment. These circuits can be large and small, public and private, legal and pirated, stable and ephemeral, serious and comic; as images circulate within and across social networks, political identity, agency, and solidarity can be gained and lost.

This conference will explore these assumptions and related claims about the role of visual practices in political cultures around the globe.