Visual Culture Studies : Interviews with Key Thinkers

Visual Culture Studies presents 13 engaging and detailed interviews with some of the most influential intellectuals working today on the objects, subjects, media, and environments of visual culture. Exploring historical and theoretical questions of vision, the visual, and visuality, this collection reveals the provocative insights of these thinkers, as they have contributed in exhilarating ways to disturbing the parameters of more traditional areas of study across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. In so doing they have key roles in establishing visual culture studies as a significant field of inquiry. Each interview draws out the interests and commitments of the interviewee to critically interrogate the past, present, and future possibilities of Visual Culture Studies and visual culture itself. The discussions concentrate on three broad areas of deliberation:

• The intellectual and institutional status of Visual Culture Studies
• The histories, genealogies and archaeologies of visual culture and its study
• The diverse ways in which the experiences of vision, and the visual, can be articulated and mobilized to political, aesthetic and ethical ends

This book demonstrates the intellectual significance of visual culture studies, and the ongoing importance of the study of the visual.

Marquard Smith is Reader in Visual and Material Culture at Kingston University, London, and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Visual Culture.

CONTENTS:
1. Visual Culture, Everyday Life, Difference and Visual Literacy
Interview with Nicholas Mirzoeff

2. Mixing it up: The Media, the Senses and Global Politics
Interview with W.J.T. Mitchell

3. Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, Politics and the Citizen
Interview with Susan Buck-Morss

4. On the State of Cultural Studies
Interview with Paul Gilroy

5. Disability Studies, the Humanities and the Limits of the Visible
Interview with Lennard J. Davis

6. Naming, Networks and Scientific Regimes of Vision
Interview with Lisa Cartwright

7. Phenomenology, Mass Media and Being-in-the-world
Interview with Vivian Sobchack

8. Performance, Live Culture and Things of the Heart
Interview with Peggy Phelan

9. Cultural Cartography, Materiality and the Fashioning of Emotion
Interview with Giuliana Bruno

10. Visual Studies, Historiography and Aesthetics
Interview with Mark A. Cheetham, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey

11. That Visual Turn: The advent of visual culture
Interview with Martin Jay

12. Polemics, Postmodernism, Immersion, Militarized Space
Interview with Hal Foster

13. The Object of Visual Culture Studies and Preposterous History
Interview with Mieke Bal