Publications

CFP: Pictures and Conflicts since 1945

Special issue of Humanities

Professor. Jim Aulich (School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)
Mary Ikoniadou (School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)

Deadline: 3rd March, 2017

This Special Issue of Humanities journal will explore the intersection of conflict and visual culture since 1945. In more than half a century, the nature and depiction of geopolitical conflicts have changed in technology, scale and character. The Cold War political landscape saw many struggles for liberation and national identity become proxy battlegrounds for the major powers. More recently, wars have been waged in the name of democracy, against terror, and in the interests of linguistically and theologically defined worlds. This volume seeks to demonstrate the ways that technologies of producing pictures and making war have shifted since the end of the Second World War through specific historical and contemporary examples. The processes of visualization and the methodological and epistemological approaches that can be brought to the analysis of the examples in this volume, will contribute to our understanding of the ways conflicts are pictured. The intention is to expand the field of enquiry beyond localized, thematic or media-specific approaches and to encourage new perspectives in the research of visual and material culture in periods of conflict.

Pictures and conflicts since 1945 aims to examine our epistemological and real-world engagement with the visual and material depiction of conflict by focusing on ‘non-moving’ images, their ‘lives and loves’ (Mitchell, 2005). We are interested in the study of images and pictures in their own right, with their own, admittedly interdependent, discourses, visual and material capacities for producing knowledge and meaning. We intend to bring together comparative historical approaches and engagement with theories, methodologies and practices that belong to different discourses while, at the same time, contribute to a singular framework of the visual.

Contributions can address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

  • The picture as material object
  • Social media approaches and the evaluation of their impact
  • Pictorial legacies of conflict, exile, migration and displacement
  • Visuality in contemporary struggles
  • Visual and material responses to, and from, networks of solidarity, commoning, collectives, affective communities
  • Post-colonial, neo-colonial and non-European approaches to visual culture in time of conflict
  • The migration of images

Interest scholars are asked to send a short proposal (around 200 words)
and a short bio to Jim Aulich j.aulich@mmu.ac.uk and Mary Ikoniadou m.ikoniadou@mmu.ac.uk, by 3rd of March 2017.

Final manuscripts of approximately 6,000 words and using footnotes
(Chicago Manual of Style) will be due by 20th July, 2017.

More information on the Humanities journal can be found here:

http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities/about

To browse through previous Special Issues of the journal visit:

http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities/special_issues