Building and Integrating Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives of Visual Research

Over the past several decades, a growing number of disciplines have moved to foreground the visual in their scholarly practices. However, the importance of bringing these various perspectives, experiences and insights together has seldom been acknowledged by these dispersed communities of visual practitioners and theoreticians. This has resulted in a very splintered visual landscape and a less than productive proliferation of concepts and terms to refer to often very similar aspects or ideas. As concern with the visual has gradually gained prominence in scholarly practices and discourses, it often appears that more effort is spent highlighting not only what is distinctive about such fields as visual communication, visual studies, visual sociology, visual anthropology, visual culture, media studies, visual cultural studies, visual research methods etc. but also advancing briefs for particular theories and methodologies within those fields, often to the detriment of other approaches. Besides becoming more integrated, the study of the visual and the study through and by the visual should become more inclusive as well as integrated in terms of subject areas, disciplinary angles, media, modes and sensory experiences.

This panel invites contributions that try to transcend the often narrowly defined borders between different visual schools and subdisciplines and instead move towards integrating and accumulating insights and approaches from different fields of expertise.