Looking Back to Move Forward: Photography, Memory and Antiracist Futures

This panel aims to explore the importance of documentary photography, memorial, creative and prefigurative practices in recovering the knowledge that emerged from the struggles of the past and the knowledge rooted in experiences and legacies of engagement and activism. Diverse hopes, desires and dreams can take shape when looking back to collective struggles over the meaning of liberation in our turbulent times of resurgent authoritarianism, racism and xenophobia, colonial nostalgia and global fascism. This session also recognises that temporal linearity and notions of progress are neither neutral nor universal and encourages engagement with decolonial critiques of the coloniality of time.

We welcome presentations (concerning theoretical reflections, empirical research, case studies, creative and artistic research practices) that investigate how visual sociology explores the following question:

• How can documentary photography serve as a portal for collective reflexivity contesting linear temporality, colonial nostalgia and persistent coloniality?
• How can memorial and creative practices be used as tools for resisting and contesting imposed representations of identities and experiences of the global majority?

This session adopts an approach that looks at past struggles and current racial discrimination through the lens of global and visual sociology that open pathways towards critical and radical imaginations of the future. It provides an opportunity to explore how visual sociology can address seemingly disparate historical and geographical events while revealing their commonality, and invites reflections on how visual practices can unsettle dominant temporal and epistemic regimes that have historically marginalised groups, indigenous peoples and global majority ways of knowing.