“Visual rhetoric”
is an emergent key term being used to describe the attention being devoted to
the symbolic and performative dimensions of visual culture, including everything
from cartography to photography and from architecture and interior design to
public memorials and museums. This conference will focus attention on a range
of themes and topics animated by the question: What might it mean to think of
visual culture through the lens(es) of rhetoric? Participants
will address topics such as the relationship between visual rhetoric and collective
memory, social controversy and dissent, political style and representation,
postmodern media communities, and race, gender, and identity politics. Those
with an interest in teaching visual rhetoric will have ample opportunity to
identify important pedagogical starting points and strategies and will be provided
with bibliographies and resource materials for getting started in this new area
of knowledge and understanding.
Keynote speakers
for the conference will be W.
J. T. Mitchell, the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor
in English Language and Literature and Art History at the University of Chicago,
and Barbie
Zelizer, Professor of Communication in the Annenberg School of Communication
at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Mitchell has dedicated much of
his career to the study of the relationship between imagery and ideology in
numerous articles, edited volumes, and books, including most prominently Iconology:
Image, Text, and Ideology and Picture Theory (U of Chicago P).
Professor Zelizer’s work focuses on the relationship between the mass media
and collective memory. Her most recent book, Remembering To Forget: Holocaust
Memory Through the Camera’s Eye (U of Chicago P) received the NCA’s
Diamond Anniversary Book Award. In addition to the keynote addresses, the
conference program includes: four plenary presentations, four sessions of competitively
selected papers, seminars on a range of topics related to the exploration of
visual conception of rhetoric, and a closing roundtable discussion.
-
Carole
Blair,
Professor of American Studies, University of California, Davis
-
Hanno
Hardt,
John F. Murray Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication, University
of Iowa
-
Steven
Mailloux,
Professor of English, University of California, Irvine
-
Ramona
Liera Schwictenberg,
Professor of Women’s Studies and Culture Studies at Wichita State University
- Postmodern
Media Communities
(Ron Burnett, Emily Carr Institute of Art
and Design, Vancouver)
- Reading
the American Landscape: Photography, Place, and Identity
(Kevin Deluca, U of Georgia and Anne
Demo, Vanderbilt)
- Visualizing
Whiteness: Between the Global and the Local (Thomas
Nakayama, Arizona State and Raka Shome,
Arizona State University (West Campus)
- Iconic
Photography and Public Culture
(John Louis Lucaites, Indiana and Robert
Hariman, Drake)
- Visual
Rhetoric of Witnessing: Representation and Cultural Trauma
(A. Susan Owen, U of Puget Sound and Peter
Ehrenhaus, Pacific Lutheran)
- Material
Memory: Exhibitionary Rhetorics and Politics (Barbara
Biesecker, U of Iowa and Kenneth Cmiel,
U of Iowa)
- The
Socio-imaging of Politics (Bruce Gronbeck,
U of Iowa and James P. McDaniel, U of Colorado)
- The
Visual Politics and Poetics of Native American Perfomance (Oscar
Giner, Arizona State and William Trapani,
U of Iowa).
For further information
contact: lucaites@indiana.edu or Barbara-Biesecker@uiowa.edu
Home
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March 3, 2005
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