Journal of Visual Culture welcomes compelling, critically engaged contributions that explore and expand trans-disciplinary global visual cultures


New design, and our latest open issue! (Vol. 18, Issue 1, 2019)


For almost 20 years, Journal of Visual Culture has been at the forefront of the trans-disciplinary discussion on global visual cultures. Gathering together a remarkable group of collaborators, the journal has created a space for nurturing invigorating research and experimentation on vision, the visual, and visuality for communities of scholars, practitioners, educators, curators, critics, and readers in this ever-growing field of inquiry.

Aligned with our mission, we have decided to rethink the journal’s format, observing the transformations in how academic writing is accessed and disseminated. Our new design is a result of extensive discussions within the Editorial Group in order to find a balance between digital and print readability, as well as to elevate images – our primary resource – to a place where they serve not merely as illustrations to an argument, but rather become an essential part of it.

The redesign process is also a result of the feedback from our contributors, who have progressively found the need to foreground images in their contributions, and who have begun to develop curated image collections and visual essays for which JVC has become a natural home. Alongside the journal, our website, newsletter and social media have also been redesigned in an effort to create a more purposeful digital presence, as well as bonding still further with our readership.

This open issue that inaugurates our new design includes remarkable contributions by Esther Leslie, Jill H Casid, Linda Williams, and Ernst van Alpen, as well as a roundtable discussion on Visuality, Race and Nationhood in Italy featuring Charles Burdett, Alessandra Ferrini, Gaia Giuliani, Marianna Griffini, Linde Luijnenburg, and Gianmarco Mancosu. It also includes our Media Reviews section that will expand beyond books in forthcoming issues of JVC.

We hope you enjoy this new look of Journal of Visual Culture. Please feel free to send us any feedback you may have.

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In our new issue:

  • Esther Leslie studies the new communicative forms of the ‘quantified workplace’ where abbreviated, metric-friendly forms of communication fuse speech, text, and image to introduce emotion-tracking strategies into the HR analytics in the workplace with pernicious consequences.

  • Jill H Casid reframes the Anthropocene as a Necrocene, and, working with the resilient powers of death, draws on current practices of ‘living our dying’ that offer a queer material medium to agitate for livable life toward a black, trans* more-than-human commons.

  • Charles Burdett, Alessandra Ferrini, Gaia Giuliani, Marianna Griffini, Linde Luijnenburg, and Gianmarco Mancosu discuss contemporary and historical constructions of Italian whiteness and national identity in relation to the country’s current xenophobic discourse on race and migration.

  • Ernst van Aplhen uses two works by the Polish artist Artur Zmijewski, to analyse the speech act of provocation in performativity, in the context of the current public discussion about the role of the Polish nation and its citizens in the Nazi holocaust.

  • Linda Williams, following on from and extending the work of Jonathan Crary, argues for the historical transformation of pornography from a medium for social critique to serving to one with the singular purpose of producing sexual arousal and satisfaction.
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  • Book reviews include titles by Mark Jarzombek, Hito Steyerl, Marco Lori and Esther Leslie, and Begüm Özden Firat.

@JVCJournal on Twitter


In this issue:

​Esther Leslie
This other atmosphere: against human resources, emoji and devices

Jill H Casid
Doing things with being undone

Charles Burdett, Alessandra Ferrini, Gaia Giuliani, Marianna Griffini, Linde Luijnenburg, Gianmarco Mancosu
Rountable on Visuality, Race and Nationhood in Italy

Ernst van Alphen
The performativity of provocation: the case of Artur Zmijewski

Linda Williams
Motion and e-motion: lust and the 'frenzy of the visible'

Reviews
Juan D Cadena
Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age, by Mark Jarzombek,

Tally de Orellana
Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, by Hito Steyerl

Robert Picciano
Stan Brakhage the Realm Buster, by Marco Lori and Esther Leslie (eds)

Tülin Ural
Encounters with the Ottoman Miniature: Contemporary Readings of an Imperial Art, by Begüm Özden Fırat