"We must mobilise everything [we] can find in terms of intellectual resources in order to understand what keeps making the lives we live and the societies we live in profoundly and deeply anti-humane."
         — Stuart Hall
Journal of Visual Culture is an international refereed journal that welcomes compelling, critically engaged contributions that explore and expand trans-disciplinary global visual cultures.


December 2020: Announcing new Board members, new publishing initiatives and our latest themed issue!

As we approach the end of an eventful year, Journal of Visual Culture continues to look for ways to create meaningful engagements around many of the critical matters of our time.

Alongside the continued effort of bringing quality content through our peer reviewed Journal, and the development of new collaborations, and publication formats and events, our work is make possible through the valuable efforts of a vibrant community of thinkers that continuously create, expand, and redefine our ever changing visual cultures.

In this regard, it is our pleasure to welcome new Board members: Macarena Gómez-Barris (Pratt Institute, NYC, US), Elizabeth Freeman (UC Davis, US), Visual Culture Research Center (Kyiv, Ukraine), Chika Okeke-Agulu (Princeton University, US), Ali Behdad (UCLA, USA), Simone A. Brown (University of Texas at Austin, US), Karen Mary Davalos (University of Minnesota, US), Abigail DeKosnik (University of California, Berkeley, US), Nicole Fleetwood (Rutgers University, US), Beth Piatote (University of California, Berkeley, US), Jasbir Puar (Rutgers University, US), Dylan Robinson (Queen's University, Canada), and Julietta Singh (University of Richmond, US).
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La Lola Mora, "Face Mask, Not Muzzle". Image: lalolamora.org

Collaboration with the Harun Farocki Institut
Leading to our 20th anniversary, we likewise continue to roll out a series of new initiatives that we hope will help shape the future of Journal of Visual Culture and will connect and engage our community of readers in ways that are sensitive to our current moment. We are delighted with the 38+ quality contributions that continue to shape our collaborative initiative with the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin, an initiative originally provoked by COVID-19, and which has since morphed necessarily into a conversation about the ugly convergences of the pandemic and white supremacy. Recent contributions are by Alexandra Délano Alonso on the death of nature, Kimberly Juanita Brown on unmasking the heart of whiteness, Janine Francois on racial ecologies and radical love, and Elisa Adami on ‘the underlying’ and the biopolitics of the undercommons.
Click here to read all the current contributions to our JVC-HaFI project.

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DECEMBER 2020: ARCHAEOLOGIES OF FASHION FILM AFTER A DIGITAL CULTURE
The December 2020 issue (19.3) of Journal of Visual Culture is out! Entitled ‘Archaeologies of Fashion Film after a Digital Culture’, it’s guest edited by Caroline Evans (University of the Arts London) and Jussi Parikka (Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton). In their Introduction the guest editors ask:
‘Where was (and is) fashion film in the contexts of the avant-garde, the experimental and the popular? How is it that fashion film is more or less invisible in the histories and archaeologies of cinema and fashion? And why look at archaeologies of fashion film now in particular, at a moment of radical change in the fashion industry, mediascapes, data economies and participatory cultures?’

Engaging with these questions, and others, are contributions by: Marketa Uhlorova (University of the Arts London) who excavates a media archaeology of fashion film; Wanda Strauven (Goethe University Frankfurt) who considers sewing machines and weaving looms as devices and materialities that change the order of things; Marie-Audre Baronian (University of Amsterdam) who investigates the interconnectedness of film and fashion through their mutual concern with the processes of crafting and dressing; Lucy Moyse Ferreira (London College of Fashion) who positions Sonia Delaunay’s early work as a form of proto-cinema; and Nick Rees-Roberts who offers a critical interrogation of ‘fashion film’ as a commercial phenomenon which evidences how moving images on social media foreground the visual dynamic of the feed (of marketing snd data) over and at the expense of the aesthetic framework of cinema.