Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Visual Culture Studies'

Voilà plus d'une génération que les visual studies ont entrepris de bousculer procédures scientifiques et organigrammes universitaires, dans le monde anglo-américain d’abord, puis à l’échelle planétaire. Jouant la porosité des champs du savoir, ce courant de recherches fonctionne à la manière d’une interface où s’échangent et se combinent les charges théoriques et critiques de l’histoire de l’art, du post-structuralisme, des études culturelles et autres area studies, offrant un lieu de convergence inédit pour des pensées dispersées. En embrassant l’imagerie démotique autant que savante, en déconstruisant l’axiologie tacite qui sous-tend de tels partages hiérarchiques, et en interrogeant l’idéologie de tout acte de connaissance, les visual studies assument depuis l’origine une position limite, entre discours savant, activité critique et engagement politique. S’ils peuvent apparaître comme une nouveauté radicale, les travaux groupés sous cette bannière sont symptomatiques d’un mouvement plus général de renouvellement des façons de penser les images et la dimension visuelle du sensible. Au moment où les visual studies bénéficient d’une première réception dans l’espace francophone, cette thèse s’attache à en restituer les fondements épistémologiques et les enjeux actuels, en montrant qu’elles ne forment pas un ensemble homogène d’approches ou de pratiques. Car non seulement il n’existe pas de visual studies « en général », mais ce terme unique recouvre trois niveaux de réalité sensiblement dissociés : une formation académique, une somme de travaux empiriques et théoriques, ainsi qu'un vaste métadiscours sur le champ qui nourrit sa propre mythologie. Par souci de clarté, le plan de la thèse désimbrique ces trois niveaux, et plutôt que de définir ce que sont les études visuelles, s’attache à expliquer ce qu’elles font. En se fondant sur l'étude suivie de textes précis, chacune des sections de la thèse envisage donc l'objet visual studies sous l'un de ses différents aspects : historique, théorique, académique, métathéorique, toutes cs dimensions étant coextensives de ce qui constitue les visual studies de façon globale
It's been more than a generation since visual studies started to shake up scientific procedures and academic organizational structures, in the Anglo-American world and on a global scale. Working between and across disciplines, this research trend behaves like an interface where art history, poststructuralism, cultural studies and other area studies can meet and combine their critical strengths. By embracing both demotic and scholarly imageries, laying bare the axiology underlying such divisions, and challenging the ideology pertaining to knowledge itself, visual studies take on many guises, either as a scientific discourse, a critical activity or a form of political commitment. However, though often claiming a form of radical novelty, visual studies’ concerns should rather be considered part of a broader shift in the study of the function of images and visuality in contemporary sciences and societies.As visual studies are starting to work their way in the french scientific landscape, this dissertation will expose their epistemological grounds and current stakes, calling attention to the fact that they do not cohere into a consistent set of shared approaches or practices. First, visual studies « in general » do not exist. Second, the term encompasses three aspects only partly overlapping : an academic formation, a body of empirical and theoretical works, and a thriving metadiscourse endlessly feeding the field’s self-mythology. For the sake of clarity, the dissertation will offer to break down these three components. What’s more, rather than trying to define what visual studies actually are, it endeavors to explain what they do. Mostly based on the close reading of a series of texts, each section of the dissertation hence offers to look at visual studies from a specific viewpoint — historical, theoretical, academic or metatheoretical — all aspects constitutive of visual studies as such

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Miami University, Dept. of Educational Leadership, 2003.
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For a long time, Roman ideal sculptures have primarily been studied within the tradition of Kopienkritik. Owing to some of the theoretical assumptions tied to this practice, several important aspects of Roman visual culture have been neglected as the overall aim of such research has been to gain new knowledge regarding assumed Classical and Hellenistic models. This thesis is a collection of three studies on Roman ideal sculpture. The articles share three general aims: 1. To show that the practice of Kopienkritik has, so far, not produced convincing interpretations of the sculpture types and motifs discussed. 2. To show that aspects of the methodology tied to the practice of Kopienkritik (thorough examination and comparison of physical forms in sculptures) can, and should, be used to gain insights other than those concerning hypothetical Classical and Hellenistic model images. 3. To present new interpretations of the sculpture types and motifs studied, interpretations which emphasize their role and importance within Roman visual culture. The first article shows that reputed, post-Antique restorations may have an unexpected—and unwanted—impact on the study of ancient sculptures. This is examined by tracing the impact that a restored motif ("Satyrs with cymbals") has had on the study of an ancient sculpture type: the satyr ascribed to the two-figure group "The invitation to the dance". The second article presents and interprets a sculpture type which had previously gone unnoticed—The satyrs of "The Palazzo Massimo-type". The type is interpreted as a variant of "The Marsyas in the forum", a motif that was well known within the Roman cultural context. The third article examines how, and why, two motifs known from Classical models were changed in an eclectic fashion once they had been incorporated into Roman visual culture. The motifs concerned are kalathiskos dancers, which were transformed into Victoriae, and pyrrhic dancers, which were also reinterpreted as mythological figures—the curetes.

At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 1: Accepted. Paper 3: Accepted.

Vernacular Posthumanism: Visual Culture and Material Imagination uses a theory of image vernaculars in order to explore the ways in which contemporary visual culture both reflects on and constructs 21st century cultural attitudes toward the human and the nonhuman. This project argues that visual culture manifests a vernacular posthumanism that expresses a fundamental contradiction: the desire to transcend the human while at the same time reasserting the importance of the flesh and the materiality of lived experience. This contradiction is based in a biodeterminist desire, one that fantasizes about reducing all actants, both human and nonhuman, to functions of code. Within this framework, actants become fundamentally exchangeable, able to be combined, manipulated, and understood as variations of digital code. Visual culture – and its expression of vernacular posthumanism – thus functions as a reflection on contemporary conceptualizations of the human, a rehearsal of the posthuman, and a staging ground for encounters between the human and the nonhuman. Each chapter of this project begins in the field of film studies and then moves out toward a broader analysis of visual culture and nonhumanist theory. This project relies on the theories and methodologies of phenomenology, materialism, posthumanism, object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, film and media studies, and visual culture studies. Visual objects analyzed include: the films of Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, and Krzysztof Kieślowski; Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997); the film 300 (2006); the TV series Planet Earth (2006); DNA portraits, the art of Damien Hirst; Body Worlds; human migration maps; and remote surgical machinery.

This thesis addresses relationships between art, aesthetics and men’s association football, and seeks to frame the latter as a source and locus of aesthetic variation and dissensus, in opposition to its typical presentation as a source of fleeting and purely physical pleasures. Its focus is the contemporary scene of global elite football, whose roots I argue can most effectively be traced back to the creation of the English Premier League and the UEFA Champions League in 1992. Through four chapters encompassing multiple case studies, I examine some of the aesthetic conceptions that are embedded within contemporary discourses around football, before analysing artworks and aesthetic practices that reproduce the game in various forms. Throughout the study, I am interested in bringing into focus the border-line between the cultural fields of art and football. I frame all of the objects, practices and artefacts that I analyse as sites of inter-section between these two rival sets of discursive formations, as well as offering theoretical and methodological reflections on the cultural dynamics that lead to these formations being considered as distinct fields in the first place. My principal research questions can be expressed as follows: what intellectual processes come into play when objects in the field of contemporary football approach the field of contemporary art and vice-versa, and what forces are active in each field that prevent this rapprochement from achieving total fulfilment?In order to approach these questions, my thesis is effectively divided into two halves. In the first half I use concepts derived from the study of art and visual cultures to bring to light some of the aesthetic debates that occur within football’s interpretative community. In chapter one I consider the manner in which aesthetics and sporting ethics become intertwined around the controversial issue of “diving”, while in chapter two I demonstrate the ways in which the animated highlight GIF holds in suspension notions of novelty, boredom and individual genius. In the second half of the thesis I analyse a number of artistic projects which address football – Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s film Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait, Maider López’s participatory performance Polder Cup and Craig Coulthard’s landscape intervention Forest Pitch, among others – by reading their aesthetic propositions against some of those that are rooted in the game itself. Addressing the functions that these works apply to the popular expressive content that already adheres to football can, I argue, be instructive in considering the cultural politics of contemporary art more generally. Finally, I conclude that contemporary football is a prominent site of complex aesthetic negotiations that warrants greater attention from the inter-discipline of visual studies.

Art History
Ph.D.
This dissertation examines the differing responses to modernity in the visual culture of Madrid from 1926-1936. I trace the debates generated by the anticipation, apprehension, or expectations to the ongoing processes of modernization. My work is guided by the understanding that the metropolis is both a physical and psychological space, and that the resulting visual culture is imbued with those experiences of Madrid. Thus, the questions and concerns of the period are instilled in the visual arts, regardless if the city is explicitly represented in them or not. Although Madrid was not a model of industrialization, the city’s inhabitants acknowledged and reacted to the attempts to modernize the city as well as the ongoing political and social transformations. My study examines diverse media alongside the popular press of the period. By examining individual works of art alongside periodicals, my dissertation reveals the relationship between the thriving popular culture, the elite culture, and an emergent mass culture. In the first chapter, I introduce how these different kinds of culture have been defined, as well as Madrid’s current place within art historical scholarship. In the second chapter, I look at how the construction of the Gran Vía avenue was presented in the press to investigate the social effects of the reorganization of Madrid’s center. The third chapter analyzes the development of the public persona of writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna and how he used his image as an advertisement for modernity. In the fourth chapter, I examine the film Esencia de verbena, directed by Ernesto Giménez Caballero. The film pictured Madrid’s traditions but also invoked Surrealist aesthetics. By bringing together ideas of international modernity and local folklore Giménez Caballero showed how popular culture was a useful resource for the local avant-garde. In the final chapter, I focus on the sculpture of artist Alberto Sánchez to demonstrate how his seemingly depoliticized artworks actually engaged in a critical discourse about the economic and social conditions resulting from modernization. This dissertation challenge the current understanding of the distinctions between the popular, elite, and mass cultures in Spain. Such categories cannot fully express the complexity of the visual culture of Madrid in the 1920s and 1930s. Instead, I argue that Madrid’s inhabitants negotiated and mediated modernity by blurring the boundaries and exploring the interconnections between these different cultures.
Temple University--Theses

Vision has often been a central concern of feminist studies of science, medicine and technology. In cultural or social feminist analysis, the male gaze and the ways in which technoscience accommodates, and in effect organizes the watching of women, has been an important part of the feminist interrogation of the gender and power relations that produce the subjects and the objects of science. This attention is due to the intimate, and power-saturated, merge of processes of seeing and processes of knowing. Inherent in the notion of vision, there is always a politics to ways of seeing, ordering and observing, of organising the knowledge of the world. Historically, this can be exemplified by the eighteen-century Swedish “father” of biological classification, Linnaeus. Taking a leap away from Christian assumptions, Linnaeus placed human beings in a taxonomic order of nature together with other animals.

ISBN 91-87792-49-4 not valid for this book.

Radiant Exposure analyzes how American painting, photography, cinema, and graphic design creatively visualized X-rays to represent the body under forms of invasive scrutiny. I will historicize a variety of works produced between 1895 and the present, which consist of actual X-ray photographs and artistic simulations of their visual effects. Visual culture scholars and art historians have identified the X-ray as an important development in modern experience, perception, and the visual arts, but they have situated the X-ray's aesthetic bearing in the first thirty years after Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of the X-ray. I argue that since their invention, X-rays have persisted in the realm of the corporeal spectacle, as a source of aesthetic captivation and a method of social control. My goals are to generate a new language for articulating the rich significance and specific influence of X-rays in American consciousness, through formal and historical analyses of visual culture that draw from X-rays' technological effects or appropriate them in different ways. More broadly, this project reveals how the subjectivity of American identity has projected onto the anonymous irradiated body in the visual arts, whether idealized or pathologized, made culturally visible or cloaked in invisibility. as Americans have become more transparent under modern surveillance, the X-rayed body in art and visual culture has become entangled with ideas about identity and power.

The traditional notion of the Male Gaze, first conceptualized by feminist film critic Laura Mulvey in 1975, focused on the objectification of women through depictions structured to gratify a male heterosexual perspective. In this chapter we will revisit this concept and investigate how that gaze may have shifted away from a primarily heterosexual perspective to a socially dominant male perspective (maleness here referring to dominance rather than specific gender, just as “whiteness” might refer to privilege rather than race). With gender roles in an increasingly global and mobile society becoming more fluid and complex, opening up visibility to LGBTQ communities, along with a substantial post-feminist backlash, we will consider how the male gaze is shifting and how subsets of objectifying “gazes” might overlap. I will explore whether the traditional heterosexual male gaze has shifted due to power backlashes and other developments. New gaze developments may take the form of the “bromance” as well as athletics and advertising. Included in an investigation of this “dominant gaze” will be an exploration into the possibility of a lesbian and transgender gaze – does each subculture have the propensity to fall into this pattern of objectified looking and if so, where is the evidence and what are the implications? That evidence will be explored through photography, film, dance, and other visual media as this subject is expanded through the emergence of variant sexualities and gender identities.

This dissertation analyzes three case studies located within the cultural landscape of India in order to explore the multifarious forces at work within the construction of Indian identity. It uses the lens of identity to excavate the interactions between the past and the present and the east and the west within the rapidly changing cultural scene in India. I analyze how diverse Indian identities are represented on the Indian version of the reality TV show Big Brother, I study the ways in which Indian youth playing rock music imagine themselves and explore how employees at Indian call centers negotiate an imposed western accent and cultural garb with their Indianness. Through these studies my project claims that the tensions between the remnants of a colonial past and a globalizing present must be centrally foregrounded in any attempt to understand the ongoing changes within contemporary Indian culture. I show this tension to be at work within the interstitial sites that each of my case studies represents and within which a stable conception of an "Indian" identity becomes increasingly shaky. I show that while the exercise of power and the assertion of agency are crucial components within global cultural flows, the binary is eventually a false one since the two must invariably occur together. It is the ability of power to morph itself in order to better appropriate its counter and become hegemonic that explains the processes of global cultural flows today. I show that in the case of India this morphing crucially relies on certain vestigial structures of colonial rule and in so doing seek to introduce a differentiation of history within theories of cultural globalization.

This dissertation argues that the figure of the crowd in literature and visual culture constitutes a crucial component in the emergence and construction of the cultural, political, and historical values of modern China. From Lu Xun’s momentous recollection of the lantern slide that compelled him use literature as a means to heal the souls of the Chinese people to Zhang Yimou’s spectacular staging of the crowd at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the numerous ways the crowd has been written and pictured not only demonstrates its utility as a motif, but also asserts a mode of literary and visual imagination and even critical inquiry. Although the question of how a work of art or literature stands in relation to the masses has long been a preoccupation of writers, artists, critics, and policymakers in China, this dissertation sees crowd representation as a narrative or visual act that compels us to reconsider the conventional categories that would relegate the crowd as strictly synecdochic for the politically reified nation. To that end, I focus on how concepts such as crowd and mass are under constant revision, laying bare the negotiations and struggles entailed in the process of defining China collectively. Chapter One investigates the role of the crowd in the self-construction of the modern intellectual through two themes, the public warning (shizhong) in the case of Lu Xun, and the idea of superfluity (duoyu) in Qu Qiubai. Chapter Two considers the term “massification” (dazhonghua) as a narrative technique of writing the crowd into being, and in particular the volatile means of its manifestation through violence, death, and annihilation. Chapter Three inquires into the reciprocal relationship between crowd and image in two films (Big Road and Prairie Fire) as well as propaganda art from the 1930s and the Cultural Revolution, with a special focus of the technological means of exhibiting the crowd. Chapter Four positions filmmaker Zhang Yimou’s use of the crowd within the context of the “red legacy” of revolutionary history and technological visuality to argue that efforts to define the Chinese masses remain an ongoing concern.
East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior
Este trabalho discute a cultura e a identidade roraimense e alguns desdobramentos, a partir do processo de hibridação representada na obra de arte do artista plástico, Jorge Augusto Cardoso. Para tanto, utilizamos fundamentos teórico-metodológicos oriundos dos Estudos Culturais para abarcar Cultura, Identidade, Linguagem Visual, Arte Regional, Regionalismo, Regionalidade, Hibridação e epresentação, visando analisar o processo de constituição identitária de Roraima, além de compreender seus elementos envolvidos neste processo, nos quais possibilitaram visualizar as formas de ser roraimense, revelados no cenário imagético do artista, permeados de diferenças e conflitos. Sob este prisma, diversas formas de representações simbólicas valorizadas no espaço regional, criadas pelo artista, foram estudadas, e novas concepções foram extraídas, ao mesmo tempo, gerando novas leituras. Dessa maneira, esta análise traz possibilidades de identidades desenvolvidas no sistema de representação contida na obra, na qual espaços foram criados e construídos, possibilitando aos sujeitos, posicionar-se e construir novas identidades; apropriar e reconstruir identidades para seu uso.
This paper discusses Roraima`s culture and identity and some developments from the hybridization process represented in the art work of the artist, Jorge Augusto Cardoso. For this purpose, we used theoretical and methodological foundations from Cultural Studies to cover Culture, Identity, Visual Language, Regional Art, Regionalism, Regionality, Hybridization and Representation in order to analyze the process of identity formation of Roraima, and to understand its elements involved in this process, which allowed us to view the forms of "being" Roraima, revealed in the artist imagery scenery, riddled by conflicts and differences. In this light, various forms of symbolic representations valued in the region, created by artist, were studied, and new concepts were extracted at the same time generating new readings. Thus, this analysis gives possibilities of identity developed in the system of representation contained in the work, in which spaces were designed and built, enabling subjects to position themselves and to build new identities; to appropriate and to reconstruct identities for their use.

Urban Education
Ph.D.
Hidden curriculum scholars have long since recognized the function of the visual in shaping the educational experiences of youth. Scholars have noted that the hidden curriculum of schooling has functioned as a primary socialization mechanism to reproduce capitalism, the state, gender, racial, and class-based inequalities. Today, urban high school spaces present both invisible and visible curricula that are shaped not only by the many images that comprise a school's visual culture, but also by the wider visual landscape. This is of particular import for working-class young Black women who are often framed and seen as social and economic problems within the discourse on urban schools/urban school failure. This discourse teaches. It is taught in and through the everyday visual texts, spaces, and places young Black women navigate to the point that the discourse linking Black femaleness, poverty, and failure becomes natural/normal. It is normalized to the point that it becomes "hidden in plain sight." The simultaneous transparency and invisibility of knowledge presents urban educators concerned about the Black girl and other youth of color with three intersecting problems. First, the educative role of the visual has been underexplored in the research literature on urban schools/urban schooling. Second, within the context of urban schools, we do not know enough about if and or how the educative role of the visual shapes young Black women's relationship with teaching and learning. Third, we do not know if or how the contentious relationship between visual learning inside and visual learning outside of school shapes young Black women's relationship with education as a formal institution and or a process. Given these three intersecting problems, this dissertation project centers on examining the educative impacts of place, visual culture, and design in an effort to fill the gap in the scholarship regarding this portion of the educational experiences of young Black women. Using visual ethnography and discourse analysis as primary methods, I engage a group of five primary student participants who attend a non-traditional, design-focused science and technology magnet school where they are one of the largest student cohorts. Einstein 2.0 is an instance of a progressive, non-normative, small learning community that is attentive to the power of the visual in shaping the teaching and learning experiences, especially for youth of color. In this way, it is a case that can help us better understand the challenges, opportunities, and complexities of harnessing the visual in the urban school context. In this study I argue that by creating a safe and emotionally engaging environment that rejects using punitive disciplinary frameworks and pseudo-factory/pseudo-prison design, Einstein's visual and school culture gave rise to an increased sense of emotional readiness for both producing and receiving knowledge that stands in sharp contrast to the more traditional ways urban schools often approach managing and controlling its student(s') body(ies). Given the increased role of the visual in shaping teaching and learning for youth in the 21st century urban context and the persistent link between young Black women and urban educational/societal failure, having the emotional readiness to deal with these challenges is crucial to their self-definitions (Collins, 2000) and internal motivation to reject and or exceed societal expectations. Using Einstein's approach to visual and organizational culture as a model, I make specific recommendations for educators tasked with or concerned about creating engaging school spaces for young Black women and other youth of color. These recommendations demand further attention to the ways that the visual, spatial, and emotional interact to contour the educational experiences and consumption practices of youth in urban America today.
Temple University--Theses

A Compreensão Crítica das Imagens como Competência das Artes Visuais: Uma Aproximação aos Estudos da Cultura Visual. O conceito de cultura visual não tem uma definição sistematizada entre os investigadores, por ser um campo de estudos em contínua transformação e por esse motivo Smith (em Hernández 2013:78), sugere que se devem pensar os estudos da cultura visual como uma “metodologia viva”. Foi Hernández (em Sardelich 2006:214), que adicionou a expressão compreensão crítica na sua abordagem à cultura visual, considerando que possui uma ampla oferta de referentes e conduz o campo de estudo para os seus significados culturais, vinculando-se à noção de mediação de representações, valores e identidades. A escolha deste tema parece redundante, pois muitos já o escolheram para as suas teses, no entanto, a minha escolha deve-se ao facto de muitos investigadores proporem a implementação de modelos pedagógicos baseados nos estudos da cultura visual e na prática não se assistir a essa mobilização por parte dos professores, limitados pelos currículos oficiais. Os modelos pedagógicos das artes visuais deverão ir além das abordagens clássicas previstas e os estudos da cultura visual, refere Sardelich (2006:204), vêm colocar novas questões e dilemas de investigação, como o porquê da importância da cultura visual no contexto escolar? Se não será mais uma expressão para confundir os professores ou que professores poderão desenvolver atividades neste âmbito? Questões como estas podem levar os professores mais atentos a utilizar os currículos oficiais como uma referência e não como um documento a seguir integralmente, encontrando novos objetivos, conteúdos e estratégias metodológicas; ABSTRACT: The Critical Understanding of Images as a Competence of Visual Arts: An Approach to the Studies of Visual Culture. The definition of the concept of visual culture is not systematized amongst the investigators, because it is a field of study in continuous transformation and for that reason Smith (2008), quoted by Hernández (2013, p.78) suggests that one must think of visual culture studies as a “living methodology”. It was Hernández (2000), quoted by Sardelich (2006, p.214) who added the expression critical understanding on his approach to visual culture, considering that it has a vast offer of referentials and that it leads the field of study to its cultural meanings. Also entailing this expression to the notion of mediation of representations, values and identities. This theme may seem redundant, for many have chosen it for their own thesis previously, nevertheless, I am aware that many investigators propose pedagogical models based on studies of visual culture but when it comes to real practice teachers are not able to implement it, since they find themselves restrained by the official curricula. The pedagogical models of visual arts should go beyond their expected classical approaches and the studies of visual culture, as Sardelich mentions (2006, p.204), create new questions and investigation dilemmas, such as why is visual culture so important to school context? Is it another expression to confuse teachers or can teachers develop activities according to this theme? These questions may lead attentive teachers to use the official curriculum as a reference and not as a fixed document, while trying to find new goals, contents and methodological strategies.

The dissertation presents a cultural analysis of contemporary art collecting and art production with an illustration of patterns that overlap in collecting and art production practices in contemporary art. The illustrated visual network shows how institutions, local context, social strategies and prestige overlap in their influences on art production as a cause for collecting contemporary art. Economic exchange, reputation, a perception of time, and the personal and emotional understanding of objects and material are four patterns that illustrate reasons for collecting contemporary art in conclusion. This analysis is based on a visualisation of the structured field data that was generated in a participatory field study in the New York art world, consisting of semi-structured interviews between 2013 – 2015. Limitations in usability and interface design, and the need for a sufficient visualisation tool for qualitative data analysis, drew the focus of this study to the development of a new data visualisation software. After a peer-reviewed process, the software Entity Mapper was selected for use in this thesis to visually analyse the collected and structured data. The analysis takes location, size, hierarchy and movement of the structured data in the visual map into consideration for concluding theoretical statements.

This dissertation brings critical visual culture studies to bear on mediatized representations of borders and migration in U.S. and Mexican contexts. In particular, this study examines how the human price of the North American Free Trade Agreement is represented and/or disappeared in popular visual culture. I deploy an eclectic methodological framework whose elements emerge from the confluence of Border Studies, Visual Cultural Studies and theorizations of neoliberalism in order to study how television, print media and narrative and documentary film serve as sites for both the visual constitution and critical contestation of neoliberal agendas. For example, I view objects of visual culture such as the Border Wars television program, Backpacker magazine and films Sin dejar huella and AbUSed: The Postville Raid as powerful and privileged sites for the analysis of political discourses.

This thesis sets out to probe the complex artistic contacts between Italy and Cyprus in the visual arts during the High and Late Middle Ages. The Introduction provides a critical review of the subject. Chapter I maps out the various types of links (with respect to trade, religion, warfare, art, culture) between Italy and Cyprus in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Chapters II and III examine the multifaceted artistic negotiations between southern Italy (mainly Apulia) and Cyprus in the thirteenth century, by closely examining a cluster of frescoes and panel paintings. Through a set of historical, cultural and artistic (stylistic and iconographic) approaches, these chapters aim to supersede the somewhat limited style-oriented analyses of previous contributions to this area of study. The hitherto unverified and convoluted relations between the two regions are revisited and affirmed within a new conceptual framework. Chapters IV and V investigate fourteenth-century cross-currents as seen in two cases that have formerly occupied a marginal position in discussions of intercultural exchanges between Italy and Cyprus. The first is the transplantation and manifestation of the cult of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Cyprus, and the second, the hybrid series of icons created by Italian painters working on the island. Both cases are appraised as a record of historical realities and not as the by-products of casual encounters. The thesis historicises these contacts and in doing so, contributes to a broader understanding of cultural transmission and convergence in the Medieval Mediterranean.

Adaptation Studies suffers from a deficiency in the study of black, brown, yellow, and red adaptive texts, adaptive actors, and their practices. Adaptive Acts intervenes in this Eurocentric discourse as a study of adaptation with a (queer) POC perspective. My dissertation reveals that artists of color (re)create texts via dynamic modes of adaptation such as hyper-literary allusion, the use of meta-narratives as framing devices, and on-site collaborative re-writes that speak to/from specific cultural discourses that Eurocentric models alone cannot account for. I examine multi-ethnic American adaptations to delineate the role of adaptation in the continuance of stories that contest dominant culture from marginalized perspectives. And I offer deep adaptive readings of multi-ethnic adaptations in order to answer questions such as: what happens when adaptations are created to remember, to heal, and to disrupt? How does adaptation, as a centuries-old mode of cultural production, bring to the center the voices of the doubly marginalized, particularly queers of color? The texts I examine as “adaptive acts” are radical, queer, push the boundaries of adaptation, and have not, up to this point, been given the adaptive attention I believe they merit. David Henry Hwang’s 1988 Tony award-winning play, M. Butterfly, is an adaptive critique of the textual history of Butterfly and questions the assumptions of the Orientalism that underpins the story, which causes his play to intersect with Pierre Loti’s 1887 novella, Madame Chrysanthéme, at a point of imperial queerness. Rodney Evans, whose 2004 film, Brother to Brother, is the first full-length film to tell the story of the black queer roots at the genesis of the Harlem Renaissance, uses adaptation as a story(re)telling mode that focalizes the “gay rebel of the Harlem Renaissance,” Richard Bruce Nugent (1906-1987), to Signify on issues of canonization, gate-keeping, mythologizing, and intracultural marginalization. My discussion of Sherman Alexie’s debut film, The Business of Fancydancing, is informed by my own work as an adaptive actor and showcases the power of adaptation in the activation of Native continuance as an inclusive adaptive practice that offers an opportunity for women and queers of color to amend the Spokane/Coeur d'Alene writer-director’s creative authority. Adaptive acts are not only documents, but they document movements, decisions, and sociocultural action. Adaptation Studies must take seriously the power and possibilities of “adaptive acts” and “adaptive actors” from the margins if the field is to expand—adapt—in response to this diversity of adaptive potential.

This project develops extant theories of political affect and relational identification and affinity formation by tracing how the visual images of an understudied archive--American superhero comic books--work to build multiple, alternative, fitful, inchoate, and sometimes radically creative spaces for visions of the political to take shape and develop over time. By analyzing and interpreting the generic superhero phenomenon of origin stories in comic books and by mapping the formal and narrative techniques used to construct origin stories, I show how received understandings of power, order, justice, violence, whiteness, masculinity, and heteronormativity often linger outside of language in an analytically untapped relational space between bodies--the space of political affect. Visual images of superheroes thus do more than take up space within political sign-systems; I argue them as material engines of affect, as engines of potential and usefully critical political identities and affinities. Superhero comic books, a cultural form often disregarded as childish or even ideologically dangerous, are thus recovered in this project as theoretically complex, offering speculative feminisms, anti-racism, and queer temporalities that link these popular objects of visual culture to ongoing traditions of utopianism and foundational revisionism within American political culture.

Religion
Ph.D.
Liberation in White and Black studies, respectively, Washington Memorial Chapel (WMC) and The Church of the Advocate (COA), which are two Episcopal parishes in the Diocese of Pennsylvania. This dissertation investigates the ways that the visual culture of these spaces represents and affects the religious, racial and national self-understanding of these churches and their ongoing operations by offering particular and opposing narrative interpretations of American history. These "sacred spaces" visually describe the United States (implicitly and explicitly) in terms of race and violence in narratives that set them in fundamental opposition to each other, and set a trajectory for each parishes' life that has determined a great deal of its activities over time. I develop this thesis by situating each congregation and its development in the context of the entire history of both the Episcopal Church and Philadelphia as related to race, violence and patriotism. WMC is what historian of religions scholar Jonathan Z. Smith calls a "locative" space and tries to persuade all Americans to patriotically covenant with images of heroic "White" freedom struggle. COA is what Smith calls a "utopian" space and tries to compel its visitors to covenant with a subversive critique of the United States in terms of the parallels between biblical Israel and the African American freedom struggle. My analysis draws especially on the theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu and David Morgan. A major focus of Pierre Bourdieu's work in both Language and Symbolic Power, and The Logic of Practice is the power of group-making. Group-creating power is often exercised through representations that create a seemingly objective sense of group identity and a social world that is perceived as "natural." David Morgan writes that religious visual culture functions as this sort of political practice through the organization of memory among those who are drawn to "covenant" with images. The Introduction of my dissertation lays out the theoretical approaches informing the visual culture analysis of these Episcopal Churches and raises the significant questions. Three main chapters provide: 1) an historical background of patriotism, race and violence in the Episcopal Church and in Philadelphia in particular, and 2-3) a thorough analysis of the history and visual culture of each space in context. A great deal of my analysis will be interpretive "readings" of the visual culture of the aforementioned churches in their larger contexts to explain how the visual culture represents social classifications to affect the constituents religious, racial and national self-understanding, and their ongoing operations by offering particular and opposing narrative interpretations of American history. The project concludes by summarizing the ways that the analysis of these spaces explicates the thesis with thoughts about the implications for the disciplines involved and further research.
Temple University--Theses

The interrelated topics of food, eating, nutrition, and diet continue to represent growing areas of interest in communication studies and related disciplines. Food is essential to our existence, and the images we use to communicate about food are important to public culture. In this project, I conduct a visual rhetorical analysis of the food pyramids created by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the 1992 Food Guide Pyramid and the 2005 MyPyramid, to explore how these iconic images negotiate the competing interests of the food industry, nutritionists, and the general public. As icons circulate, they become subjected to various forms of appropriation which includes copying, imitating, and satirizing the original image. Therefore, I study a collection of appropriated food pyramids created by different groups and individuals to identify the salient features of the food pyramid icon. As a group these images encourage viewers to believe that an abundance of food always exists by highlighting products over processes. Viewing the earth as endlessly abundant aligns with a cornucopian perspective on the environment which implicitly supports the status quo in the U.S. industrial food system. I conclude by offering ideas of appropriated food pyramids that visually challenge this problematic ideology. The USDA food pyramids and their visual appropriations provide an important space for us to interrogate the rhetorical messages we consume in public culture.

This thesis updates John Berger's work of critical visual theory, Ways of Seeing, to accommodate emerging web 2.0 technologies and new social media platforms. It analyzes the symbols of wealth and status encoded in both 15th century oil paintings and contemporary Instagram posts and attempts to dissect how American celebrity culture complicates methods of self-promotion and upscale emulation.

- Thèse réalisée en cotutelle entre les Université de Montréal et Paris Ouest Nanterre la Défense. -Thèse construite à partir de logiciels libres et gratuits : Ubuntu, Lyx, LibreOffice, Zotero, The Gimp.
Notre enquête doctorale étudie l’illustration de la colonisation dans la presse satirique illustrée française entre 1829 et 1990. Cette thèse ambitionne d’éclairer un aspect méconnu de l’iconographie coloniale, à partir du dépouillement et de l’analyse de vingt-deux périodiques satiriques qui touchent diverses sensibilités éditoriales. Afin de confronter iconographie satirique et non satirique, deux journaux illustrés généralistes sérieux com- plètent le corpus. En suivant un parcours chronologique, il s’agira de présenter les axes caractéristiques de l’iconographie satirique coloniale. Pour comprendre la construction, le fonctionnement et le rôle des images expansionnistes issues des titres satiriques, cette recherche entend également définir le genre « presse satirique ». En analysant l’évolution historique, les caractéristiques populaires et les traits distinctifs de cette catégorie médiatique, nous mettrons en évidence les relations déterminantes qui existent entre le genre et les images coloniales.
This doctoral investigation studied satirical colonial iconography in the French satirical illustrated press between 1829 and 1990. From counting and analysis of twenty-two satirical periodicals, representing di erent editorial lines, this thesis aims to inform an unknown part of this colonial iconography. Two serious illustrated papers complement the general corpus to reintegrate results in the general fields of media images. For a diachronic, the aim should be to identify the major axes of the colonial satirical illustration. To understand the construction, operation and role of colonial imagery from satirical titles, this research also intends to define the genre "satirical press". By analyzing the historical evolution, popular features and the hallmark of this media class, we will highlight the crucial relationship between gender and colonial images.

Mujeres de papel examines the representation of female same-sex desire in Spanish literature and culture between 1868 and 1936, drawing on novels, popular sex manuals, sexological treatises, postcards, and illustrations. While scholars have productively attended to Post-Francoist literary and cinematographic expressions of non-normative sexualities, my dissertation sheds new light on its rich yet discontinuous prehistories. I argue that the figure of the “lesbian” is a convergence point for the ideas, beliefs and anxieties of Spanish modernity. From the will to know and categorize to erotic fantasies, the “lesbian” constitutes a pervasive yet unstable trope, which resists and at the same time motivates its definition and control. Chapter one analyzes Francisco de Sales Mayo’s 1869 La Condesita (Memorias de una doncella), a work halfway between a private diary, an erotic novel, and a medical treatise, which features a provocative case of female homosexuality. The next two chapters grapple with literary, (pseudo)scientific, and visual artifacts of the so-called “sicalipsis,” or erotic wave that inundated Spanish culture between the late 19th century and the 1930s. Works studied in these sections include novels by Rafael Cansinos-Assens, Álvaro Retana, Artemio Precioso, and Felipe Trigo, popular sex manuals by Vicente Suárez Casañ and Ángel Martín de Lucenay, and visual erotica. Chapter four turns to the fiction of Feminist writer Carmen de Burgos in conjunction with the theories on “intersexuality” formulated by Gregorio Marañon, Spain’s most renowned scientist and public intellectual of the 1920s.
Romance Languages and Literatures

In a broad sense, cultures undergo a metamorphoses due to the external influences and systems impacting the evolution of internal identities. Conversely, Individuals within cultures react to those external influences and systems.The act of hacking a culture is an opportunity to challenge an existing or imported system in order to bring about change and improvement. An aspect of culture hacking is to create messages of satire or irony in order to criticize, or completely reject established systems within cultures. Post Arab spring, Egyptians practiced culture hacking by applying their cultural tools to external systems and influences, producing a process of ‘Egyptianization’. This investigation examines the MFA program’s culture at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar as a case study, and adapts those Egyptianized tools to hack the culture. The program has its own values, rituals, traditions, imported systems, influences and dominant symbols. The aim of this thesis is to generate customized hacking methodologies that identify cracks within this culture and develop an innovative framework to critically analyze them through visual representation.

This thesis examines Spanish representations of Muslim and Jewish cultures in Morocco during the colonial campaigns in the Rif (1909-1927) in relation to constructions of Spanish identity during this period. It focuses on visual and textual narratives in the press (colonial photojournalism) and on three literary texts: Carmen de Burgos' En la guerra (1909), Ernesto Giménez Caballero's Notas marruecas de un soldado (1923) and Arturo Barea's La ruta (1943). The analysis undertaken centres on the use of the motifs of the body and the city and references to the medieval Castilian ballad tradition, the Romancero, by writers and photographers to explore the cultural relationship between Spain and North Africa. The chapters explore the delineation of boundaries between Spanish and Moroccan cultures by contemporary commentators and the power structures that underpin those boundaries, considering the different hierarchies that are established in Spain's relationship with Moroccan Muslims and Jews. Chapter 1 concerns the socio-historical context of the colonial campaigns and highlights the significance of the question of Spain's identity in relation to Morocco during this period. Chapter 2 compares representations of cultural and ethnic affinity between Spain and Morocco, arguing that beyond merely serving as a tool of colonial domination, they are harnessed in some cases to support the colonial venture, in others to challenge it, and yet in others to explore the pre-modern origins of the Spanish nation. In many of the examples examined, a process of self-Orientalisation is observed, where the 'Orientalist' and colonialist gaze is turned back on Spain as well as on Morocco. Chapter 3 examines representations of Muslim and Jewish alterity, arguing that these assertions of difference reveal Spanish anxieties about non-difference from North Africa, cultural regression, national fragmentation, and Spain's ability to dominate the protectorate. I conclude that these anxieties provide the fundamental underpinning to Spanish constructions of Morocco during the Rif War, and that this self-awareness about non-difference and failures of domination unsettles the predominant paradigm of discourse analysis within colonial studies.

Mixed Race Antecedents: Black Hybridity in Cultural Production, 1960-1989 looks at how cultural producers of African descent in the U.S. from the 1960s through the 1980s conceptualized racial and cultural hybridity. I analyze writers and artists who were grappling with how to think about their multiple heritages while simultaneously considering the political implications of their racial hybridity. Before the Census Movement of the 1990s narrowed the discussion of racial hybridity to boxes on government forms, these playwrights, authors, and visual artists were thinking about hybridity in a different register. They explored connections between personal and political identities, the relationships between experiences and art, and the significance of having multiple racial/ethnic heritages when race in America was still very much operating under the auspices of the one-drop rule. Their creative explorations during this time distinguishes them as mixed race antecedents, those who were looking for the political and aesthetic uses of black hybridity during the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s and Gay Liberation, and their corollary art movements. I draw from critical race theory, performance studies, autobiography studies, and cultural studies to understand the complex relationship artists and writers had to the social movements that defined their historical moment while asserting their own conceptions of how racial hybridity functions for those of African descent in the U.S. In so doing, this project challenges the predominant narrative of critical mixed race studies by arguing that mixed race identity formations were emerging in American culture during and after the civil rights era, not just during the Census Movement. Particularly, I focus on the possibility of racial and cultural hybridity not replacing blackness, like what a post-racial world would ask us to do, but instead, prompting further exploration and expansion of blackness.

My dissertation argues that comics’ unique formal properties are particularly suited toward exploring and representing the complex nature of identity. Just as the comics form is broadly defined by a peculiar tension between word and image, so identity can be conceived as a constant negotiation between abstract (“unrepresentable”) concepts that define identity and an individual’s attempts to represent that identity. Due to its formal negotiation of word and image, the comics form is thus uniquely suited to address the problems of identity and its representation. I begin this project by examining the relationship between word and image in comics. Some comics scholars have argued verbal and visual signification are hybridized, while others go so far as to claim the distinction between word and image is unsustainable. Still others reject these claims, arguing comics’ hybridity necessitates a strict separation of word from image. I argue that words and images in comics function on a spectrum in which the line between word and image must be able to be hybridized and distinct at the same time. This definition of the word/image relationship can describe the most straightforward, illustrative comics as well as the most experimental comics texts; it also provides the methodological framework for my project. In this dissertation, I examine the representation of gendered identity in Gilbert Hernandez's Love and Rockets stories and Junot Díaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, arguing both authors’ injunction that the reader look at the mothers in their works is evidence of their demand that we understand the women as whole, ambivalent subjects. I explore the way the Gene Yang and Sonny Liew’s graphic novel The Shadow Hero addresses the repressive and racist history of superhero comics. In doing so, Yang and Liew’s text reveals the ways superhero texts constantly negotiate the genre’s conservative instinct to protect the status quo and its revolutionary vision for a better world. Finally, I contend Greg Rucka and J. H. Williams III's Batwoman: Elegy reveals at least one intrinsically progressive theme in superhero genre: its performative and inherently queer conception of identity.

A “Lenda do Boi Bumba” é um conto brasileiro, cujo primeiro registo escrito data de 1840, que ganha contornos diferentes em cada região do país retratando, de um modo simbólico e alegórico, configurações sociais do período colonial, e revelando a relação de poder entre escravos e senhores, bem como as crenças religiosas da época. A nossa investigação artística, teórica e prática tem como vectores principais as artes visuais, a história e os estudos pós-coloniais, e autores como Maria Manuela Ribeiro Sánchez, Darcy Ribeiro, Maria Laura Viveiros de Castro Cavalcanti e Amálio Pinheiro e artistas como Vik Muniz e José Borges. Tendo como objecto de estudo a “Lenda do Boi Bumba”, a questão central desta investigação é saber de que forma esta lenda exprime de um modo geral os valores, normas e desejos íntimos e universais das pessoas, e em particular serviu para materializar os ensejos e os medos dos negros e indígenas no âmbito do contexto colonial brasileiro. Interessa-nos também compreender, as origens e configurações artísticas que esta lenda tomou nas obras de artesãos e artistas brasileiros desde os finais do século XX à actualidade, cativando as pessoas para a importância das lendas populares enquanto arquivos das memórias, desejos e sonhos colectivos. Esta pesquisa, vai permitir alcançar o nosso objectivo principal, isto é, contribuir com um novo olhar sobre a “Lenda do Boi Bumba” através da arte da colagem realizada segundo o princípio dos 4 Rs da sustentabilidade; Abstract: The “Legend of King Bumba” is a Brazilian tale, whose first written record dates from 1840, which gains different contours in each region of the country portraying, in a symbolic and allegorical way, social configurations of the colonial period, and revealing the power relationship between slaves and lords, as well as the religious beliefs of the time. Our artistic, theoretical and practical research has as main vectors the visual arts, history and postcolonial studies, and authors such as Maria Manuela Ribeiro Sánchez, Darcy Ribeiro, Maria Laura Viveiros de Castro Cavalcanti and Amálio Pinheiro and artists as Vik Muniz and J. Borges. Having as object of study the "Legend of Boi Bumba", the central question of this investigation is how this legend generally expresses the values, norms, and universal desires of the people, and in particular served to materialize the opportunities and fears of blacks and native people within the context of the Brazilian colonial context. It is also interesting to understand the origins and artistic configurations that this legend has taken in the works of Brazilian artisans and artists from the end of the 20th century to the present, captivating people to the importance of popular legends as archives of collective memories, desires and dreams. This research will allow us to reach our main objective, that is, to contribute with a new look on the "Legend of Boi Bumba" through the art of collage carried out according to the 4 Rs principle of sustainability.

This dissertation is wrapped up in a comparison of book and museum, which raises questions about the visual technology of the printed page itself: a black and white space. Articles and histories on paper production of the nineteenth century stress the necessity of bleaching wood pulp or rags in order to produce “beautiful,” “polished,” “virginal,” “clean” white paper. Bleaching paper to create a normalized, aestheticized whiteness, upon which to craft the cultural capital of the book, largely anticipates the later use of whiteness in the modern art gallery, where whiteness becomes a “neutral” or “objective” or “normal” color upon which to hang visual art or print words. In certain contexts, especially during Reconstruction and later during the Harlem Renaissance, authors saw the black and white contrast of the printed page as a symbol of racial segregation—whiteness and blackness following strictly ordered patterns. This dissertation thus investigates the shifting symbolism of black text on a white visual field between 1880 and 1940. Several of the subjects of my dissertation have been largely overlooked by critics, (Celia Thaxter, Simon Pokagon, Melvin Tolson), although previous studies have examined the way books of modernist poetry become display spaces—the white space of each page like a wall or frame which affords the lyric poem similar attention to modernist visual art, and imitating styles of display made famous by Alfred Stieglitz in his galleries. Poets thus become curators as well as authors. My dissertation expands these studies to include works written before the modernist period (Thaxter and Pokagon), and after it (William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, and Tolson), as well as analyze alternate material technologies of book production that vastly impact the visual experience of reading. Moreover, I also consider the political reasons for these material changes to the book, including racial representation, so that my work simultaneously explores both the aesthetics and politics of printed text.

La culture visuelle contemporaine ne peut pas être comprise sans avoir à l'esprit l'enjeu entre les conditions socio-économiques, les avancées technologiques et les opérations artistiques au cours des deux derniers siècles. C'est en considérant cet enjeu, qu'on s'interroge: Quels sont les rapports entre l'image technique, la parole et le réel? Quels sont les liens entre les différents dispositifs qui composent l'ensemble médiatique actuel? Comment peut-on décrire l'interaction entre les opérations de l'art, le commerce social des images et les valeurs fondatrices de l'institution esthétique (art / pas de l'art, haut / bas, auteur / récepteur, original / copie ...)? Ce questionnement prend une direction plus précise, par le biais de l'étude des images et des usages de la carte postale illustrée au cours des trois premières décennies du XXème siècle et des années 80, 90 et 2000. Concomitante à l'avènement de la photographie et à l'émergence d'un réseau postal de communication mondiale, la carte postale illustrée sera également analysée à partir d'une recollection de ses appropriations artistiques. Malgré l'étendue de l'archive scientifique dédiée à l'iconographie collective, notamment concernant des champs épistémologiques tels que la sociologie de l'imaginaire et les visual cultural studies, pour ne citer que deux exemples récents, il est à notre avis fort nécessaire de relire la théorie de l'image, tout en tenant compte des différents aspects du processus d'appareillement technique de l'image, qui s'ébauche au cours du siècle. XIX avec la photographie et le cinéma, et qui se poursuit aujourd'hui avec les réalités virtuelles et les ambiances numériques de la Web 2.0 ... La présente étude considère ce trajet à partir de deux notions fondamentales : l'idée de récréation et la conception de remédiation. L'image récréative traduit la reconnaissance de la nature paradoxale de l'image et de la technique : celles-ci seraient, d'une part, des entités douées d'"une sensibilité tirée à la manivelle" (Moisés Martins Lemos , 2011), qui se manifesterait sous les formes de l'aliénation et de l'automatisation ; d'autre part, l'image et la technique, une fois appropriées par des tactiques de réinvention, de recomposition et de réparation, deviendraient des instances favorables à l'expérience et à l'affirmation de notre condition historique. À son tour, la notion de remédiation, terminologie suggérée par Bolter et Grusin (2000), présuppose une affirmation de l'interdépendance des medias contemporains ; ceux-ci seraient un ensemble solidaire uni par des liens de collaboration non chronologiques, contraires au schéma séquentiel qui oppose les nouveaux aux vieux médias. Une culture traversée par la récréation et la remédiation est également, comme l'a constaté l'œuvre visionnaire de Walter Benjamin (1991, 1992), une culture où se troublent les frontières entre les statuts de l'auteur et du récepteur, de l'originel et de la copie, de l'high et du low, statuts normatifs artificiels destinés à légitimer le discours de l'institution esthétique. Absentes de notre traversée quotidienne et spontanée de la polymorphie des ambiances visuelles, les dichotomies mentionnées seraient l'objet de nombreuses dérisions artistiques, aujourd'hui paradoxalement assimilées par l'institution esthétique. La carte postale, autrefois protagoniste des grandes expositions universelles, et aujourd'hui omniprésente dans les espaces polyculturelles de l'art moderne et contemporain - dans leurs magasins, leurs salles d'exposition et leurs aires de loisir tels que les cafés, bars et restaurants -, revêt un intérêt particulier...

Tese doutoramento Ciências da Comunicação (área de especialização em Teoria da Cultura)
Compreendendo a cultura visual contemporânea como resultante do jogo vivido entre as condições socioeconómicas, os avanços tecnológicos e as operações artísticas ao longo dos últimos dois séculos, perguntamo-nos: Quais as relações entre a imagem, a palavra e o real daí decorrentes? Quais as ligações entre os diferentes dispositivos do atual contexto mediático? Como caraterizar a interação entre as operações artísticas, o comércio social de imagens e os valores fundadores da instituição estética (arte/não arte, high/low, autor/espetador, original/cópia...)? Esta problemática encontra uma direção mais precisa na análise das imagens e dos usos do postal ilustrado ao longo das três primeiras décadas do séc. XX e dos anos 80, 90 e 2000 e ainda na recoleção das apropriações artísticas deste média, inseparável do advento da fotografia e da instalação de uma rede postal de comunicação mundial. Consideramos que, embora o arquivo científico em torno da iconografia coletiva se torne progressivamente extenso, nomeadamente com a afirmação de domínios epistemológicos que vão da sociologia do imaginário aos visual cultural studies, para apenas citar dois recentes exemplos, este não dispensa e pelo contrário torna premente uma persistente revisão da teoria da imagem, que tenha em conta diferentes aspetos do processo de tecnologização da mesma, iniciado no séc. XIX com a fotografia e o cinema, e que prossegue hoje com as realidades digitais e os ambientes virtuais da Web 2.0.... A revisão deste trajeto é elaborada no nosso estudo a partir das ideias de recreação e de remediação. A imagem recreativa corresponde a uma conceção paradoxal da imagem e da técnica enquanto entidades que seriam, por um lado, vocacionadas para “uma sensibilidade puxada à manivela”, retomando a expressiva fórmula de Moisés de Lemos Martins (2011), através de formas de alienação e de automatização, e por outro lado, favoráveis ao exercício da experiência e à afirmação da condição histórica, através de táticas de reinvenção, de rearranjo e de conserto. A noção de remediação, terminologia sugerida por Bolter & Grusin (2000) pressupõe um entendimento do complexo mediático contemporâneo enquanto um todo interdependente, unido por relações de colaboração e de hibridação não cronológicas, que entra em rutura com o linear esquema sequencial que distingue novos e velhos média. Uma cultura atravessada por táticas de recreação e de remediação é ainda, como o entreviu o visionário pensamento de Walter Benjamin (1991, 1992), uma cultura onde se instabilizaram as fronteiras entre as posições de autor e de espetador, os estatutos de original e de cópia, de high e de low, categorias artificiais de caráter normativo que se destinariam a legitimar o discurso da instituição estética, mas que se manteriam ausentes no âmbito da nossa travessia espontânea e quotidiana de polimórficas atmosferas visuais e que seriam, de resto, alvo das mais heterogéneas derisões artísticas, paradoxalmente hoje assimiladas por essa mesma instituição estética. O postal ilustrado, outrora protagonista das exposições universais, hoje omnipresente nos grandes centros policulturais de arte moderna e contemporânea – nas suas lojas, nas suas salas e nos seus espaços de ócio, como cafetarias, bares e restaurantes – insere-se na nossa problemática de modo especialmente pertinente: objeto entre a arte e o comércio, com imagens e palavras, veículo da fotografia e parente próximo do cinema, o postal presta-se tanto à exploração de uma estereotipia dos afetos como se oferece às artimanhas, aos truques e às montagens dos seus usuários. Não obstante o mal-estar generalizado que paira sobre as ideias de cultura, de imagem e de arte desde o início do séc. XX com a crítica às indústrias culturais até à atualidade com os ataques à sociedade do espetáculo de Guy Debord e à sociedade do simulacro de Jean Baudrillard, propomo-nos seguir a simples mas trabalhosa máxima proposta por Michel Maffesoli (1998) de “dire oui à la vie”, mapeando os intervalos de ação, os fragmentos de experiência e os pedaços de história coletados pelos mais conhecidos e mais anónimos, pelos mais excepcionais e pelos mais banais recreadores da imagem e refazedores do real.
La culture visuelle contemporaine ne peut pas être comprise sans avoir à l’esprit l’enjeu entre les conditions socio-économiques, les avancées technologiques et les opérations artistiques au cours des deux derniers siècles. C’est en considérant cet enjeu, qu’on s’interroge: Quels sont les rapports entre l'image technique, la parole et le réel? Quels sont les liens entre les différents dispositifs qui composent l’ensemble médiatique actuel? Comment peut-on décrire l'interaction entre les opérations de l’art, le commerce social des images et les valeurs fondatrices de l’institution esthétique (art / pas de l'art, haut / bas, auteur / récepteur, original / copie ...)? Ce questionnement prend une direction plus précise, par le biais de l’étude des images et des usages de la carte postale illustrée au cours des trois premières décennies du XXème siècle et des années 80, 90 et 2000. Concomitante à l'avènement de la photographie et à l’émergence d'un réseau postal de communication mondiale, la carte postale illustrée sera également analysée à partir d’une recollection de ses appropriations artistiques. Malgré l’étendue de l’archive scientifique dédiée à l'iconographie collective, notamment concernant des champs épistémologiques tels que la sociologie de l'imaginaire et les visual cultural studies, pour ne citer que deux exemples récents, il est à notre avis fort nécessaire de relire la théorie de l'image, tout en tenant compte des différents aspects du processus d’appareillement technique de l’image, qui s’ébauche au cours du siècle. XIX avec la photographie et le cinéma, et qui se poursuit aujourd'hui avec les réalités virtuelles et les ambiances numériques de la Web 2.0 ... La présente étude considère ce trajet à partir de deux notions fondamentales : l’idée de récréation et la conception de remédiation. L'image récréative traduit la reconnaissance de la nature paradoxale de l’image et de la technique : celles-ci seraient, d’une part, des entités douées d’”une sensibilité tirée à la manivelle” (Moisés Martins Lemos , 2011), qui se manifesterait sous les formes de l'aliénation et de l'automatisation ; d'autre part, l’image et la technique, une fois appropriées par des tactiques de réinvention, de recomposition et de réparation, deviendraient des instances favorables à l'expérience et à l'affirmation de notre condition historique. À son tour, la notion de remédiation, terminologie suggérée par Bolter et Grusin (2000), présuppose une affirmation de l’interdépendance des medias contemporains ; ceux-ci seraient un ensemble solidaire uni par des liens de collaboration non chronologiques, contraires au schéma séquentiel qui oppose les nouveaux aux vieux médias. Une culture traversée par la récréation et la remédiation est également, comme l’a constaté l’oeuvre visionnaire de Walter Benjamin (1991, 1992), une culture où se troublent les frontières entre les statuts de l'auteur et du récepteur, de l’originel et de la copie, de l’high et du low, statuts normatifs artificiels destinés à légitimer le discours de l'institution esthétique. Absentes de notre traversée quotidienne et spontanée de la polymorphie des ambiances visuelles, les dichotomies mentionnées seraient l’objet de nombreuses dérisions artistiques, aujourd'hui paradoxalement assimilées par l’institution esthétique. La carte postale, autrefois protagoniste des grandes expositions universelles, et aujourd'hui omniprésente dans les espaces polyculturelles de l'art moderne et contemporain - dans leurs magasins, leurs salles d’exposition et leurs aires de loisir tels que les cafés, bars et restaurants -, revêt un intérêt particulier pour l’approfondissement de ce débat: objet entre l’art et le commerce, avec des images et des mots, vecteur de diffusion de la photographie et proche du cinéma, la carte postale illustrée se prête tantôt à l'exploration d'une stéréotypie d’affects tantôt à la concertation d’astuces et de ruses, à l’expérimentation de truquages et de montages de la part de ses utilisateurs. Nonobstant le malaise général qui pèse sur les idées de culture, d'art et d'image, depuis le début du XXème siècle avec les critiques qui visaient les industries culturelles, jusqu’à nos jours avec les attaques contre la société du spectacle de Guy Debord (2006) et la société du simulacre de Jean Baudrillard (1988), nous acceptons de suivre la maxime simple mais laborieuse proposée par Michel Maffesoli (1998) de “dire oui à la vie", en cartographiant les intervalles d'action, les fragments d'expérience et les morceaux d'histoire collectés par les plus connus et les plus anonymes, les plus rares et les plus banaux recréateurs de l’image et refaiseurs du réel.
Understanding contemporary visual culture as a result of the game between socio-economic conditions, technological advances and artistic operations over the past two centuries, we ask ourselves: What are the relationships between image, word and the reality? What are the connections between different devices of the current media context? and the interaction between operations artistic, images’ social commerce and the founding values of the aesthetic institution (art / non art, high / low, author / viewer, original / copy ...)? This broad issue finds a more accurate direction in the analysis of images and uses of the postcard over the first three decades of the century XX and 80, 90 and 2000 and also in the recollection of this artistic media appropriation, inseparable from the advent of photography and installation of a network of world postal communication. We believe that, although the scientific archive about the collective iconography progressively becomes more extensive, particularly with the affirmation of epistemological fields ranging from sociology of the imaginary to the visual cultural studies, just to mention two recent examples, this does not make it unnecessary, on the contrary, it makes it urgent to persistently review the theory of the image, which takes into account different aspects of the same technologization process, started in the century XIX with photography and film, and which continues today with the realities of digital and virtual environments web 2.0 ... The review of this path is drawn in our study with the support of the notions of recreation and remediation. The recreational image corresponds to a paradoxical conception of image and technique as entities that would be, on the one hand, aimed at "a sensitivity pulled by the crank," retaking the expressive formula of Moisés de Lemos Martins (2011), through forms of alienation and automation and, on the other hand, the favourable to the exercise of experience and the affirmation of the historical condition, through reinvention, rearrangement and repair tactics. The notion of remediation, terminology suggested by Bolter & Grusin (2000), requires an understanding of the complex contemporary media as an interdependent whole, united by non-chronological relationships of collaboration and hybridization, which rupture with the linear sequential scheme that distinguishes new and old media. A culture crossed by recreation and remediation tactics is also, as the visionary thought of Walter Benjamin (1991, 1992) glimpsed, a culture where the boundaries between the positions of author and viewer, the status of original and copy and high and low have been weakened, artificial normative categories that were intended to legitimize the discourse of aesthetic institution, but which would remain absent within our daily and spontaneous route of polymorphic visual atmospheres and would be, moreover, object of the most heterogeneous artistic derisions, paradoxically today assimilated by that aesthetics institution. The picture postcard, once the protagonist of universal expositions, today ubiquitous in major policultural centres of modern and contemporary art - in its stores, in their classrooms and in their leisure spaces, such as coffee shops, bars and restaurants - fits our problem in a very particular way: object between art and commerce, with pictures and words, photography vehicle, close relative of cinema, the postal lends itself both to the exploration of a stereotypy of affects and it also offers to tricks, the tricks and the assemblies of its users. Nevertheless the general malaise that hangs over the ideas of culture, art and picture from the beginning of the XX century with the critic to the cultural industries up to the present day with the attacks to the society of the spectacle of Guy Debord and the society of the simulacrum of Jean Baudrillard, we propose the following simple and laborious maximum suggested by Michel Maffesoli (1998), "dire oui à la vie", mapping the intervals of action, the fragments of experience and the pieces of history collected by the best known and most anonymous, for the most exceptional and the most banal recreators of the image and the remakers of the real.
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)
Programa Operacional Potencial Humano (POPH)
Quadro de Referência Estratégico Nacional (QREN)

Despite the rapid development in technology that enables metal music producers today to create “perfect” sound mixes, many bands, artists and producers choose to make their creations sound old or “retro”. A song is created for this study and mixed in two different ways, one with a more“retro” direction and the other with a more “modern” direction. Five respondents were then made to listen to both mixes and were interviewed on what they thought of each respective mix and why they think retro culture is so prevalent today. The data gathered from the interviews show that the respondents describe retro mixes as dirty, saturated and raw while they described modern mixes as clean, hi-fi and overly compressed. The respondents associate old sounding mixes to authenticity, genuinity and honesty but don’t describe modern mixes as fake or dishonest. The respondents comment that the streamlined nature of music production today leads to very uniform sounding mixes and the abundance of similar sounding mixes creates a demand for more honest, authentic and genuine music. The respondents claim that retro culture would not be possible without the aid of modern technology.

I am a collage artist working with multiple mediums such as paint, photography, video, audio, and performance. As a New Orleans’ native, I have a unique history that is unflattering, for my history echoes that of America’s historical misdeeds. I make sociopolitical art because I am of a historically oppressed people. I make art that celebrates my diverse culture that is a collage of Native American, African, and New Orleans’ French Creole.

En su libro Espectros de Marx (1995), Jacques Derrida se pregunta cómo aprender a vivir con los espectros que perviven en la cultura europea como una política de la memoria, de la herencia y de las generaciones. Para estudiar la figuración de los espectros del comunismo y del marxismo rechaza toda filosofía del ser y de aquellos que dicen saber lo que el mundo es, y conjura la «hauntología» [hantologie] como una herramienta crítica para desvelar las operaciones insidiosas de los sistemas hegemónicos de orden ontológico, teológico e ideológico. Su aproximación filosófica tiene como correlato un estudio sobre las tecnologías mediáticas que el capitalismo instaló en un mundo que ahora es global, y que el crítico inglés Mark Fisher retoma, en sus estudios sobre el movimiento nostálgico del cine y la música del post-thatcherismo, cuando abraza el giro espectral en el momento en que todo un mundo (socialdemócrata, Fordista, industrial) se volvió obsoleto, y en el que los contornos de un nuevo mundo (neoliberal, consumista, informático) empezaron mostrarse. De acuerdo con esta transformación, la tesis que sigue se interroga acerca de cuáles son los espectros políticos recurrentes en la cultura visual globalizada de nuestro presente y cuáles son las condiciones materiales de su retorno. Lejos de una comprensión del fantasma oscurantista como algo real, entendemos su presencia como un signo o una metáfora de la visión que actúa como una figura clarificadora con un potencial específicamente ético y político. En este sentido, y por consiguiente, presentamos el tropo «espectropolítica» como una hauntología visual de las formas del asedio fantasmal de la imagen tele-tecno-mediática y sus dispositivos de captura de la subjetividad humana; para dilucidar, cómo, desde el campo de las prácticas artísticas y escénicas actuales, se invocan ciertas formas de ver o visualidades críticas capaces de restituir el pasado y construir nuevos imaginarios, subjetividades y formaciones políticas en la configuración de mundos.
In his book Spectres of Marx (1995), Jacques Derrida questions how to learn to live with the spectres that survive in European culture as a politics of memory, legacy and generations. To study the figuration of the spectres of communism and Marxism, he rejects all philosophy of being and that of those who claim to know what the world is, and conjures up «hauntology» [hantologie] as a critical tool with which to unveil the insidious operations of hegemonic systems of an ontological, theological and ideological nature. His philosophical approach is correlative to a study on the media technologies that capitalism installed in a world that is now global and that British critic Mark Fisher picks up in his research into the nostalgic post-Thatcher movement in film and music, when he embraces the spectral turn at the moment when an entire world (social democratic, Fordist, industrial) became obsolete and in which the contours of a new world (neoliberal, consumerist, computerised) began to manifest. In accordance with this transformation, the following thesis analyses the recurring political spectres in the globalised visual culture of our present time as well as the material conditions of their return. Far from an understanding of the obscurantist spectre as something real, its presence is understood as a sign or a metaphor of the vision that acts as a clarifying figure with a specifically ethical and political potential. Therefore, in this sense, we present the «spectropolitics» trope as a visual hauntology of the forms of the spectral siege of the teletechnomedia image and its devices for capturing human subjectivity to elucidate how, from the field of visual and performing arts practices today, we invoke certain critical ways of seeing or visualities capable of constructing new imaginaries, subjectivities and political formations in the different worldings.

When discussing the professional aspects of the work of women teachers, it is usual to include the vocational factor as a main element. The question of vocational education incorporated progressively in the training period progresses. Teachers themselves talk about this as something that already appears in their childhood as an explicit desire to dedicate to teaching. With the project «Peruvian Women Teacher’s» we approach the opinions on this and other issues. The process of preparation of the project in Lima initiated includes interviews with twenty-one women. Most teachers insist on their vocational precocity, especially those who working in poverty environments. We use case studies incorporating video through Arts Based Research. Art Education try to make visible the identities of the female teaching group. It is a tribute, but also a professional claim. Participants are teachers of different ages and particular situations. We have again verified that the vocational component is present in personal narratives.
El proyecto «Mujeres Maestras de Perú» nos acerca a las opiniones de veintiun maestras peruanas. Las que trabajan en entornos menos favorecidos e insisten en su precocidad vocacional. Las maestras nos hablan de dicho factor vocacional como de algo que ya aparece en su infancia en tanto que deseo explícito de dedicarse a la docencia. Nuestra investigación parte de un enfoque cualitativo, mediante un estudio de caso al que incorporamos elementos de rango artístico (Investigación basada en las artes). Utilizamos grabaciones audiovisuales como instrumento de recogida de datos. Desde la educación artística, visibilizamos las identidades del colectivo docente como homenaje y reivindicación profesional.De las narrativas personales de mujeres de diversos estratos sociales, edades y situaciones particulares, recogidas a partir de entrevistas, surgen sus intereses y preocupaciones.
Quando surge a questão do trabalho de professores é comum falar do factor profissional como elemento de primeira ordem. Os professores dizem-nos do seu vocação como algo que já aparece na infância, como um desejo explícito de dedicar-se ão ensino. Com o projeto «Mulheres Professores do Peru» nos aproximamos os pontos de vista dos professores em esta e outras questões. Foi entrevistado vinte e um professores. A maioria deles insistem em sua precocidade profissional, especialmente aqueles que trabalham em ambientes desfavorecidos.Nossa pesquisa é qualitativa, use Pesquisa Baseada em Arts e estudo de caso.Educação artística deve tentar visíveis as questões de identidade do corpo docente.Este é um tributo, mas também uma reivindicação profissional. Ao realizar a coleta de dados no Peru, visitei várias escolas em Lima. Foram entrevistadas mulheres de diferentes origens sociais, idades e situações diversas. O viés profissional é muito presente em suas narrativas pessoais.

Since hitting mass markets in the 1920s, refrigerators have occupied a lovable corner not just in American kitchens but also in American culture. The story of humankind has always been the story of food, around which we congregate, negotiate power, and explore methods of control. As the U.S. transitioned to industrial, mechanical convenience in the twentieth century, refrigerators replaced hearths as household communication centers, and it has become commonplace to decorate refrigerator surfaces with photographs, keepsakes, lists, and other items of visual culture. As meaningful, expressive arrangements, the curatorial dimensions of such displays have called for their investigation. From January to June of 2013, the Other White Cube Project studied the cultural phenomenon by collecting photographs and questionnaires online at theotherwhitecube.com. From 200 submissions, the project connected activities at home with institutional roles at large. The educational effort performed post-museum theory, in which audiences and institutions share power, build community, and promote awareness. By equating museums with everyday spaces, curators with everyday people, and art with everyday objects, the Other White Cube Project approached three keys to learning in art museums - comfort, relevance, and readability. The project also examined the aesthetic, social, and practical barometers that direct daily choices, which shape consciousness and subsequent interactions with space. In that sense, everyone is a curator - of some kind and of some place.

This thesis examines the work of ordained clergymen, of all denominations, who were active photographers between 1839 and the beginning of World War One: its primary aim is to investigate the extent to which a relationship existed between the religious culture of the individual clergyman and the nature of his photographic activities. Ministers of 'the Black Art' makes a significant intervention in the study of the history of photography by addressing a major weakness in existing work. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the research draws on a wide range of primary and secondary sources such as printed books, sermons, religious pamphlets, parish and missionary newsletters, manuscript diaries, correspondence, notebooks, biographies and works of church history, as well as visual materials including original glass plate negatives, paper prints and lantern slides held in archival collections, postcards, camera catalogues, photographic ephemera and photographically-illustrated books. Through close readings of both textual and visual sources, my thesis argues that factors such as religious denomination, theological opinion and cultural identity helped to influence not only the photographs taken by these clergymen, but also the way in which these photographs were created and used. Conversely, patterns also emerge that provide insights into how different clergymen integrated their photographic activities within their wider religious life and pastoral duties. The relationship between religious culture and photographic aesthetics explored in my thesis contributes to a number of key questions in Victorian Studies, including the tension between clergy and professional scientists as they struggled over claims to authority, participation in debates about rural traditions and church restoration, questions about moral truth and objectivity, as well as the distinctive experience and approaches of Roman Catholic clergy. The research thus demonstrates the range of applications of clerical photography and the extent to which religious factors were significant. Almost 200 clergymen-photographers have been identified during this research, and biographical data is provided in an appendix. Ministers of the Black Art aims at filling a gap in scholarship caused by the absence of any substantial interdisciplinary research connecting the fields of photohistory and religious studies. While a few individual clergymen-photographers have been the subject of academic research - perhaps excessively in the case of Charles Dodgson - no attempt has been made to analyse their activities comprehensively. This thesis is therefore unique in both its far-ranging scope and the fact that the researcher has a background rooted in both theological studies and the history of photography. Ecclesiastical historians are generally as unfamiliar with the technical and aesthetic aspects of photography as photohistorians are with theological nuances and the complex variations of Victorian religious beliefs and practices. This thesis attempts to bridge this gulf, making novel connections between hitherto disparate fields of study. By bringing these religious factors to the foreground, a more nuanced understanding of Victorian visual culture emerges; by taking an independent line away from both the canonical historiography of photography and more recent approaches that depict photography as a means of social control and surveillance, this research will stimulate further discussion about how photography operates on the boundaries between private and public, amateur and professional, material and spiritual.

This dissertation traces a half-century of interactions between motion pictures and other visual media, using scenery as a node of meaning-making that affected key aspects of cinema as a medium: narrative, mode of documenting the natural world, propaganda tool, conduit of ‘ experience’ for American modernity. Exploring often-ignored aspects of visual culture like set design, moving panoramas and art exhibitions, it argues for the cross-disciplinary importance of landscape in debates around nationhood, empire, environmental blight and the relation between style and ideology, as they played out in the United States from the 1890s to the 1930s. As an inquiry, it takes its cue from concrete historical artifacts, artworks and their reception, bringing what is usually relegated to the backdrop (scenery) into the foreground of cultural history. An iconological approach is put forth that places the motion picture in the context of broader contemporaneous developments in American art. Depictions of the natural landscape had been the principal artistic means of crafting an identity for the “republic of nature” that the United States aspired to be long before the advent of cinema. To a major extent, cinema became the legitimate heir to photography and painting because of its attempt to realize the uneasy but productive co-existence of nature and artifice. Drawing from the methodology of visual studies and adopting a comparative, historically-grounded perspective, this cultural history focuses on the natural and urban landscape as a motif and a certain way of looking at the world that cuts across media and anchors cinema to late nineteenth and twentieth century visual culture in the U.S. It is thus an intervention in the visual rhetoric of space that looks for the afterlives of the nineteenth century popular obsession with nature, beyond the familiar trope of the Western genre in cinema. The impact that the early landscape photography of Eadweard Muybridge had for his subsequent experiments in chronophotography is examined by comparing the two phases of his career in technical and conceptual terms. The collaboration between railroad companies and movie studios for the promotion of Western scenery is as important to a history of landscape in early and silent America cinema as a consideration of the studios’ own layout ad their occasional function as amusement parks. Moving into the 1920s, “city symphonies” like Manhatta (1921) and documentaries of the American Southwest are placed against the background of Paul Strand’s photography and Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings, works that addressed the same issues and locales. F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise is examined as a complex “landscape text” with a collaborative visual authorship and Warren Newcombe’s Hollywood career as a effects technician and exhibiting painter is presented as a case were landscape catalyzed a crosspollination of cinematic and painterly aesthetics. This cultural history culminates with a survey of landscape’s status as a national theme (from a political, economic and artistic point of view) during the years of the Franklin Roosevelt administration in the 1930s, drawing from a variety of government-produced documentaries on themes like the dustbowl and New Deal agricultural revitalization efforts (as seen in Pare Lorentz’s The River, 1938). A major retrospective exhibition of American art staged in Paris in 1938 reveals the crucial importance attributed to landscape as a national motif around which various art forms, styles and periods in the cultural production of the United States were assembled and made intelligible for an international public.