About

Journal of Visual Culture welcomes provocative, innovative analyses of visual culture especially those that challenge conventional categories or modes of inquiry. To address the broad interests of our readers, the Journal supports critically informed, original interpretations that both illuminate a specific phenomenon, and yield insights for social, political, philosophical or aesthetic concerns shaping global visual cultures.

Journal of Visual Culture is an international, refereed journal and is published three times a year – April, August and December – by SAGE Publications.

Recent and forthcoming contributions to Journal of Visual Culture include:

• Lauren Berlant on world-making
• Jill Casid (UWM) on being undone​
• Tung-Hui Hu (Michigan) on reticence
• Esther Leslie (Birkbeck) on atmosphere
• Rahul Mukherjee (UPenn) on ecologies of ruination
• MIT’s Lisa Parks (interview by Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes) on global media technologies
• Nicole Starosielski (NYU) on thermal vision
• Magda Szcześniak and Łukasz Zaremba (Warsaw) on paranoid looking
• Beirut-based artist Akram Zaatari (interviewed by Elisa Adami) on history, photography, and the archive

Forthcoming themed issues for 2021 and beyond include:

‘Reparations and Visual Culture’, edited by Adrienne Huard (University of Manitoba) and Gabrielle Moser (York University), examines visual culture in and as a practice of reparations. Bringing together Indigenous, Black, diasporic and settler scholars, as well as artists, curators and emerging scholars, the themed issue investigates the politics and aesthetics of repair, questioning its psychic, economic and symbolic potential, and asking what reparations might offer to the growing transnational dialogue about the need to redress difficult histories of genocide, extraction, appropriation and other forms of colonial violence. Contributors include Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (Brown University), Susan Best (Queensland College of Art, Griffith University), Kimberly Juanita Brown (Dartmouth College), Candice Hopkins (Toronto Biennial of Art), Peter Morin (OCAD University), Jade Nixon, Sefanit Habtom and Eve Tuck (University of Toronto), Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn (Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design and KTH Royal Institute of Technology), Nataleah Hunter-Young (Ryerson and York Universities), Dylan Robinson (Queen’s University), Maya Wilson-Sanchez (independent curator), Nishant Shahani (Washington State University), and Karen Strassler (Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York).

‘Testimony as Environment: Violence, Aesthetics, Agency’, guest-edited by Eray Çaylı (London School of Economics), is about the increasingly prominent role assigned to environments and their images in processes through which to testify to political violence. The themed issue explores the visual politics of the testimony at work here as entangled in the very violence being testified to, rather than simply as a means through which to contend with violence in its aftermath. Contributors include Allen Feldman (NYU Steinhardt), Andrew Barry (UCL), Hannah Meszaros Martin (Goldsmiths), Helene Kazan (Oxford Brookes), Mangalika de Silva (NYU), Nishat Awan (Goldsmiths), and Dubravka Sekulić (RCA), and Milica Tomić (TU Graz) & Philipp Sattler (RCA).

Recent themed issues include:

Trans, Art, and Visual Culture (2020)
Guest edited by Cyle Metzger (Stanford) and Kirstin Ringelberg (Elon University), with contributors including KJ Cerankowski, Kara Carmack, Sascha Crasnow, Sebastian De Line, Robb Hernandez, Heather Holmes, Ace Lehner, KJ Rawson and Nikki Tantum, Cole Rizki, Gregory Stamatina, Chris Straayer, Susan Stryker, Elisa Steinbock, Robb Hernandez, and Frial Zachary.

VR: Immersion and Empathy (2020)
Guest edited by Brooke Belisle (Stony Brook University) and Paul Roquet (MIT)