events: Visual studies today: The power of images
Abstracts
Krešimir Purgar
After Pictorial Turn – Visual Studies as Academic Discipline
This conference would like to offer a multifaceted perspective on the status of visual studies today, not only through meta-theoretical approach that deals with discipline itself, but also by taking into consideration its relations to singular visual phenomena, including arts, moving images, design, fashion and performance. Two decades after the topic of eminently visual experiences of everyday life has entered more prominently the discourse of humanities in general, we gather here scholarly insights from around the world to discuss the actual positions of many different contributors and contributions in the all-pervading realm of the visual. We would like to see what has changed within visual studies after the discipline itself made huge steps in conquering space within university curricula and after having gained considerable degree of respect in the last twenty years. Moreover, despite basing its effect on singular intellectual insights, the conference would also like to investigate the potentialities of visual studies behind theoretical discourse in a strict sense, or, more directly, it would like to uncover the power of visual theory as a means to better understand images of and in our world to find out, eventually, if any political or social agenda are to be found in visual studies at all.