Journal of Visual Culture is an international refereed journal that welcomes compelling, critically engaged contributions that explore and expand trans-disciplinary global visual cultures.


JVC 2020: New Year, New Design, New Editorial Group members and more!

December 2019’s issue completes the lineup of colors for JVC’s new design, but it also commemorates the opening of a new chapter in our two decades’ long history.

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Over the years, JVC has had the privilege to count on an exceptional team of editors and supporters that have led and animate the many fields crossed by visual cultures and visuality. In this spirit, we welcome two new additions to the Editorial Group: Dr. Irene Chien, who is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media & Communication at Muhlenberg College; and Dr. Rahul Mukherjee, who is Dick Wolf Assistant Professor of Television and New Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

They join what is now the largest and most diverse Editorial Group in Journal of Visual Culture’s history, and we look forward to this new team initiating a new period of evolution and expansion. 
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As we approach rapidly our 20th anniversary, we’re putting ourselves to the task of rethinking our role in leading transversal academic and intellectual discussions beyond disciplinary boundaries across the Arts and Humanities.

As part of this effort, Journal of Visual Culture co-hosted two events at Tate Modern in December: a day-long workshop on the future of academic publishing, and a launch party for the latest issues of JVC and Tate Papers. The workshop brought together editors of Art History, {{em_rgencia}; Ekphrasis: Nordic Journal of Visual Culture, Journal of Visual Arts Practice, Open Humanities Press, Radical Philosophy, Third Text, and View: Theories and Practices of Visual Culture, as well as editors of prestigious academic publishing houses, and students on Arts and Humanities Research Council doctoral training programmes (including TECHNE, Chase, and the London Doctoral Training Partnership), along with their senior staff. 

​With regards to our forthcoming 20th anniversary in 2021, we have some exciting plans in the works, so watch this space!
An update on the PhD student/early career research award, sponsored by Journal of Visual Culture and the International Association for Visual Culture: are were delighted and honored to receive a huge number of fantastically smart texts from early career scholars that will surely revitalize our conversations and will lead us to new fields of inquiry in the future. Proposals are currently in review by our jury, and we will announce the results shortly. Please remember to follow our Twitter and Instagram accounts for updates on this and other initiatives in development!
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Our latest open issue includes contributions by Eric Triantafillou, Laurent Berlant, Katarzyna Bojarska, Vanessa Chang, Tanushree Gosh, Erika Balsom, and Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich, plus a provocation from our Reviews Editor, Jae Emerling, presenting our new vision for a more dynamic and broader encompassing approach to reviews.


In this issue:
Eric Triantafillou investigates the image of the social pyramid to reveal how it serves as an obscuring agent of the abstract forms of domination that characterize late-stage capitalism. He also reflects on how the recent efforts of social movements to update the structure of the pyramid reveal the potential and limitations of a visual epistemology for anti-capitalist praxis in the present. 

Katarzyna Bojarska interviews Laurent Berlant on her new collaborative book (with Kathleen Stewart), The Hundreds (Duke University Press), the genre of the theoretical poem, ways of thinking with images, and Berlant's approach to affect theory.

Vanessa Chang studies two cases of recent digital performance, Ghostcatching and as.phyx.ia to reflect on the repercussions of motion capture and the infiltration of computer technologies in the inter-subjective relationships between performers, technology and spectators.

Tanushree Gosh compares the photographic work of WW Hooper and Sunil Jamah during the 1870s Madras Famine and the 1940 Bengal famine, to complicate our imaginaries of photo documentation practice as creating fixed hierarchical relationships between observer and observed subjects.

Erika Balsom examines the unfinished footage of Harun Farocki's Moving Bodies, a project the filmmaker was working on at the time of his death in 2014, to chart the inchoate propositions of a final installation that we will never see.

Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich looks at the work of the anonymous Syrian film collective Abounaddara, to reflect on how it subverts the media coverage of the Syrian conflict, using a complex combination of discourse and form that raises contentions discussions on representation, media ethics, and the circulation of graphic images.

Jae Emerling charts a new route for understanding the role of reviews in accounting for the multiple forms of intellectual production that characterize our visual cultures, and invites our community of readers to respond thereby giving shape to a renewed understanding of a what an academic journal’s Reviews section is capable of being and doing!

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In this issue:

Eric Triantafillou
To make what is vertical horizontal: picturing social domination

Lauren Berlant
The Hundreds, observation, encounter, atmosphere, and world-making

Vanessa Chang
Catching the ghost: the digital gaze of motion capture

Tanushree Ghosh
Witnessing famine: the testimonial work of famine photographs and anti-colonial spectatorship

Erika Balsom
Moving bodies: captured life in the late works of Harun Farocki

Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich
Abounaddara and the global visual politics of the ‘right to the image’


Reviews

Jae Emerling
Reviews Section: Provocation