All posts filed under: Announcements

InVisible Culture has a new home!

You can find our latest articles at https://www.invisibleculturejournal.com/ In the 25 years since InVisible Culture was founded, the online journal has taken few different forms. In 2012 IVC moved from its original website to WordPress. In 2022 we moved to a new site hosted on PubPub, a platform designed for open access journals. Beginning with Issue #34, new issues will be published at https://www.invisibleculturejournal.com/. All of our archives can be found there as well, or viewed in their original form here.

InVisible Culture‘s Statement on Racial Injustice

In light of the widespread and ongoing protests sparked by the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and countless others, InVisible Culture would like to announce its support of Black Lives Matter and all organizations and movements that combat anti-Black racism. We are and will remain committed to the various forms this action takes. Not only do we advocate justice for those who have lost their lives and livelihoods at the hands of white supremacy, but we also seek a complete dismantling of the hegemonic structures that facilitate this. As a journal dedicated to the study of visual culture and its archives we recognize the legacy of racist police violence in centuries of slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy. As an academic journal, we also recognize our own responsibility to critically address and actively work against the white supremacy culture of academia. The Black Lives Matter movement has pursued this goal to an unmatched degree and reminded the world of the ways anti-Black racism is a pervasive force undermining everyday life. As a …

InVisible Culture’s COVID-19 Response

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused major disruptions in the lives of the readers, contributors, and editors of InVisible Culture. As a graduate student-run journal, we are sympathetic to the impacts of these challenging times on our contributors. Writing, researching, and all other aspects of living our daily lives are being compromised and restructured in the face of these new pressures. We recognize that readers, contributors, and our board alike need to prioritize care for ourselves in other ways right now. In the midst of this crisis, the editorial board of InVisible Culture has decided to amend our regular work practices. We believe that maintaining them would cause unnecessary pressure on our contributors and the editorial board during these difficulties. Given the precariousness of this moment, it would be unethical to expect the same workflow to carry on. Thus, while our forthcoming issues are still scheduled for release, IVC has postponed their launch dates. In this same vein, IVC will not be soliciting new material until further notice; however, we encourage all those who are interested …

Call For Papers: Issue 32, Rest and the Rest, Aesthetics of Idleness

For its thirty-second issue, InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture invites scholarly articles and creative works that address the aesthetics of idleness. This issue will also feature an introduction by and an interview with Jean Ma. Idleness suggests slack and stasis. It evokes empty, wasted time, and thus the dangers of being useless. It even recalls the religious notion that there is something satanic about not being occupied with work. But what are the aesthetics of idleness? In what ways does being idle function as a cultural or artistic practice? How can we theorize idleness, and perhaps do so idly? Or does treating idleness as a site of cultural analysis and critical theory undo the danger of it? Idleness covers a wide range of activities in the past few centuries: to name a few, resting and sleeping, leisurely activities outside of capitalist production, and even spiritual and mental sloth that is counter to societal good. As primordial functions, sleep and rest not only let us regenerate, but they also, through dreaming, give us …

Call For Papers: Issue 30, Poetics of Play

For its thirtieth issue, InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture invites scholarly articles and creative works that address the poetics and politics of video games. 20 years ago Janet H. Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck and Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature began a conversation to theorize the aesthetics of video games. Since these foundational texts, game studies has sustained an interrogation of political questions concerning games, such as issues of representation and the configuration of online game spaces. Video games intersect with industrial practices, embodied experiences, as well as visual and ludic designs, all of which have specific political implications. For this issue we encourage contributors to consider two or more of these factors together, exploring “how games make complex meanings across history, bodies, hardware, and code.”1 This issue of InVisible Culture takes a cultural studies approach toward video games in that the formal aesthetics always register aspects of the culture that they emerge from. We think of games as an open category that includes a broad range of media, from …

Call For Papers: Issue 29, “Beyond Love”

For its twenty-ninth issue, InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture invites scholarly articles and creative works that address the complex and multiple meanings of love. According to Freud, “it is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.” Is love beyond us? Whether it connotes a delusion, state, obsession, rupture, failure, family, intimacy, or self, love eludes and mystifies. Mutable, primordial, and accumulable, it persists as a permanent horizon, accessible to everyone. In recent events the demand for love has emerged again and again, echoing the the failed and cyclical nature of past desires. Even as past desires are fulfilled–either by the state, the family, physically, spiritually–the hope for love remains, its forms and conceptions ever changing. For IVC 29, we invite contributors to explore visual representations and contestations of the concept of love. What does love look like? How is it displayed? What are the conditions and/or/of possibilities for love? Where do …

Call For Papers: Issue 28, Contending with Crisis

For its twenty-eighth issue, InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture invites scholarly articles and creative works that address the complex and multiple meanings of contending with crisis. Defined by the global uncertainty of a world afflicted by varied and ambiguously interrelated states of emergency, the present can be seen as a critical historical conjuncture characterized by crisis. In the context of its worldwide occurrence, crisis refers irreducibly to a multitude of circumstances, events, and thematizations: military conflict, debt crises, issues of political representation, the mass migration and displacement of refugees, increasing ecological disruptions. Such ruptures in the social demand constant attention from individuals and communities, constituting a need for committed artististic and scholarly engagements with questions of what it means to be in crisis and how to deal with it. Following Lauren Berlant’s understanding of crisis as “an emergency in the reproduction of life, a transition that has not found its genres for moving on,” we encourage authors to contemplate the fluidity/liminality of crisis, exploring both its emancipatory and repressive potentials. As an …

Call For Papers: Issue 27, Speculative Visions

For its twenty-seventh issue, InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture invites scholarly articles and creative works that address the complex and multiple meanings of speculative visions. The last decade has seen a rise in popularity among science fiction, fantasy, and horror. These genres encourage the capacity to imagine post-human bodies, extraordinary worlds, techno-utopias, and claustrophobic spaces of violence. In their reliance upon the imagination, these speculative visions provide a space to consider contradictions and a carnivalesque interaction between popular culture and critical theory. For Issue 27, we would like contributors to consider a range of questions produced by both historical and contemporary science fiction, fantasy, and horror across all visual media. How are objects transcribed and/or adapted from one medium to another? How do the limitations and possibilities of a medium structure works? How have these genres endured over time beyond their originary forms? How have technological advances altered the literalization of these imagined worlds? We welcome papers and artworks that further the various understandings of speculative visions. Please send completed papers (with …

Call for Papers: Issue 26, Border Crossings

For its twenty-sixth issue, InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture invites scholarly articles and creative works that address the complex and multiple meanings of border crossings. In September 2015, a photograph shocked the world by showing the body of a small boy lying facedown on a beach in Bodrum, Turkey. Later identified as Aylan Kurdi from Syria, he and other members of his family perished in a failed attempt to flee to Canada. The image became the focal point of the on-going refugee struggles, confronting us with the power of images, their affective potential, and the politics of representation. IVC Issue 26 seeks to examine how border crossings can challenge the stable, ontological distribution of power, capital, and resources along constructed lines of demarcation. In considering the crossing of a border, we must first understand what constitutes a border and how it performs in the visual field. Globalization tries to dissolve borders through the decentralization of power, yet at the same time, it immanently and symbolically re-inscribes national borders through the unequal distribution …

Call for Papers: Issue 25, Security and Visibility

For its twenty-fifth issue, InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture invites scholarly articles and creative works that explore the concept of security and visual culture. For almost two decades, both scholarly and public interests in matters of national security and the corresponding surveillance of public space have increased immensely. Notions of visibility figure prominently in these discussions. The expanding academic fields of Security and Surveillance Studies have successfully engaged with the multiple layers connecting (national) security, surveillance, and the visual. Focusing on present-day phenomena, sociologists, political scientists, and culture and media scholars have already developed an integrative perspective when it comes to relating issues surrounding security to the field of visibility. Consequently, newer research on security has focused on decentralized practices of security, encompassing much more than just “official” government agencies and their mediaries. For this issue, we seek to engage a historical perspective on issues of security and visibility through a close reading of texts in contemporary social sciences and cultural studies. With a special insert edited by scholars Barbara Lüthi and …

Launching InVisible Culture Issue 21: Pursuit

InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal of Visual Culture (IVC), published through the University of Rochester’s graduate program in Visual and Cultural Studies, is pleased to announce the launch of Issue 21: “Pursuit.” For this issue, we invited scholars and artists to explore ways pursuit manifests at both the individual and collective levels. What we received revealed the dual nature and contradictory inner-logic of pursuit: its focused trajectory coupled with its tendency to turn back on itself, operating in ways circuitous, surprising, vexing, and destructive. Authors Janet Wolff, Joel Gn Hong Zhan, Christopher Schubert and Timothy Welsh, Carolyn L. Kane, Diego Costa, artists Adam Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz and Anton Hand, Erin Johnson, Paul Qaysi, Clint Enns, Walter Forsberg contributed articles and works of art that address at least two distinct but interrelated forms of pursuit which we are perpetually undertaking: technological pursuit and spatial pursuit. Issue 21: Pursuit (Fall 2014) IVC is a student run interdisciplinary journal published online twice a year in an open access format. Through peer-reviewed articles, creative works, and reviews of books, films, and exhibitions, our …

CFP InVisible Culture, Issue 24: Vulnerability

“Vulnerability” – Issue 24 (Download PDF) For its twenty-fourth issue, InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture invites scholarly articles and creative works that explore the concept of vulnerability. Almost two weeks after Thomas Eric Duncan’s plane landed in Dallas from Liberia in late September, the Centers for Disease Control announced the first case of Ebola in the United States. News feeds immediately jumped at the report, the Dow Jones plunged 266 points and petitions to ban flights from Ebola-stricken countries have since been circulating across social media platforms. From ISIS to the crisis in Ukraine to employment security, the media’s pronouncement of threats posed by vulnerabilities (and certain invisibilities) are ubiquitous. It is worth considering, however, what the stakes are in maintaining such rhetoric, and whether it is possible to imagine alternatives. As urgency slips into a normative state of being, for Issue 24, we would like contributors to explore the various meanings of vulnerability. Are there critical practices which uniquely encourage or discourage vulnerability? Can we imagine vulnerability as a position of …

Al-Mutanabbi Street: Start The Conversation

Right now al-Mutanabbi street starts somewhere on a small street in Gaza, and in Damascus, on a small street in Beijing, a small street in Tehran. It starts in Baghdad, Beirut, and Cairo, it starts in Dublin, Calgary, Halifax, London, Exeter, and Bristol, and here in San Francisco, Santa Fe, Boston, Los Angeles, Omaha, New York City, Washington D.C.,Cambridge, Mass. or Detroit, Michigan. It starts at the Rochester Central Library, and at Goddard College in Vermont. It starts wherever someone gathers their thoughts to write towards the truth, or where someone sits down and opens a book to read. Wherever the free exchange of ideas is suppressed or attacked, wherever writers and artists are silenced, or risk their lives to speak the truth through their work, there will be a place for them on al-Mutanabbi Street. – Beau Beausoleil, July 2014 In March 2007, a suicide bomber exploded his car in Al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad, Iraq, killing thirty people and injuring more than a hundred. The street, named after Abu at-Tayyib Al-Mutanabbi, a renowned classical …

CFP InVisible Culture, Issue 23: Blueprints

“Blueprints” – Issue 23 (Download PDF) For its twenty-third issue, InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture invites scholarly articles and creative works that consider the multiple valences of the topic: blueprints. In his theoretical manifesto, Toward An Architecture, Le Corbusier wrote, “The plan is the generator. Without plan there can be neither grandeur of aim and expression, nor rhythm, nor mass, nor coherence. . . . The plan is what determines everything; it is the decisive moment.” The plan or blueprint is the primary tool of the architect’s and the drafter’s trades—a technical document that bridges creative impulse and constructive labor, intent and execution, virtuality and materiality. Taking shape as a conversation among concept, form, and representation, a blueprint insistently nudges its spectator’s gaze outside its frame. It is understood as a necessary stage on the way to something larger, something grander, something more, and is usually seen not as a self-contained object, but as prescription directed toward a particular outcome. Yet a blueprint may also be the terminus of the unrealized and …

Launching InVisible Culture Issue 20: “Ecologies”

Eddee Daniel, Grip in “Hard Ecology: Rethinking Nature,” in IVC 20. InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal of Visual Culture (IVC), published through the University of Rochester’s graduate program in Visual and Cultural Studies, is pleased to announce the launch of Issue 20: “Ecologies.” For this issue, we explored the “ecological” turn in contemporary visual culture. Furnishing an awareness of habitat, rooted in the Latin verb “it lives,” ecology refers to the dynamism of the natural world. But it also lends to an understanding of the dynamism of different kinds of environments, from the virtual to the visual. Authors Adam Levin, Roberta Buiani, Beatrice Choi and Hans Vermy contributed articles expanding upon these connotations, at the same time reshaping definitions of liveliness, agency, and subjectivity. Issue 20 also features three artworks by Cary Peppermint/Leila Nadir (EcoArtTech), Elçin Maraşlı, and Eddee Daniels that visualize and embody a spectrum of ecologies. Making use of IVC’s open access electronic format, these works take on several forms: artist interview, installation documentation, online book, and photo essay. Issue 20: Ecologies (Spring …

Launching InVisible Culture Issue 19: “Blind Spots”

Detail of Figure 1 in Cooper. InVisible Culture is pleased to announce the release of Issue 19, “Blind Spots.” As stated in the introduction, “Blind Spots” is “the inaugural offering of InVisible Culture‘s new editorial model, wherein theme-driven issues are ideated and produced collaboratively by an editorial board—a departure from the previous guest editor system. In the spirit of continued collaboration, we welcome you as readers of this particularly varied and rich issue of our journal, and enthusiastically invite your comments and feedback as a means of extending the frames of this conversation around visuality and its blind spots.” Thank you–enjoy: Issue 19: Blind Spots (Fall 2013)   InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to explorations of the material and political dimensions of cultural practices: the means by which cultural objects and communities are produced, the historical contexts in which they emerge, and the regimes of knowledge or modes of social interaction to which they contribute.

Announcement Concerning Film and Exhibition Reviews

IVC is expanding its reviews section! InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal of Visual Culture (IVC) now welcomes film and exhibition reviews from emerging and established scholars and critics in addition to book reviews. IVC accepts both contemporary and historical works of film criticism. Submissions that engage with current academic and popular discourses in film, media, visual and cultural studies and place particular aspects of film and filmmaking within broader social, political, and historical contexts are especially encouraged. For exhibition reviews, IVC invites work that addresses the organization, presentation, and curatorial rationale of a particular exhibition. Exhibition reviews should also consider how viewers engage with the exhibition, focusing on specific artworks and themes within the exhibition. Comparative reviews and critical essays on histories, theories, and practices of artmaking, exhibition, and curatorial models – i.e. biennials, retrospectives, social practice in the public sphere, politics of display, etc. – are also welcomed.All submissions should be between 1000 and 1500 words, and should follow IVC style guidelines. Only original, previously unpublished submissions will be considered. For more information and for IVC’s reviews call for submissions, please visit the contribute section of our …

InVisible Culture Blog

We are happy to announce that InVisible Culture will feature an interactive blog. This new feature will present up-to-date, non-peer reviewed content, including exhibition, film, and book reviews that will reflect the current issue as well offer a forum for considering the state of visual culture. Our editorial board will contribute content, but we also invite short form, 1500-word submissions from our readers all of which will complement our peer-reviewed articles and essays. Interested in contributing? Please use our contact form.

Launching InVisible Culture Issue 17: “‘Where Do You Want Me to Start?’ Producing History through Mad Men”

InVisible Culture, published through the University of Rochester’s graduate program in Visual and Cultural Studies, is pleased to announce the release of Issue 17, “’Where Do You Want Me to Start?’ Producing History through Mad Men.” Guest edited by Amanda Graham and Erin Leary, the issue is the first to showcase InVisible Culture’s new platform, aesthetic, and interactive features. The release also coincides with the premiere of the fifth season of the critically acclaimed series. As with any contemporary scholarship, we recognize the arguments and concerns of the first four seasons will evolve along with the show and its characters. Thus, this issue will be supplemented by a series of weekly blog posts by guest bloggers. These posts will reflect the authors’ and editors’ continued scholarship, analysis, and critical viewpoints on the new season. This new section is intended to prompt new approaches to scholarship, and allow for varying formats, thoughts, and interaction. We welcome readers to return each week. InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to explorations of …