Technological Earth Visions: Remote Views and Disembodied Landscapes

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Technological Earth Visions: Remote Views and Disembodied Landscapes
Online Workshop SDU 2021, organized by Lila Lee Morrison
Friday, 12 March 2021, 11:00-13:00
Registration, the lecture will be on Zoom.
More information can be found here.

This workshop focuses on the ways in which the earth is visualized through technologically lead perspectives and how this has led to new understandings in our relationship to the environment. Referencing images produced from both historical and emerging forms of advanced visual technologies such as spacecraft photography, popular images of amateur drone operators and remote algorithmic sensing, this panel of speakers will present on the creative and critical potential that is afforded through the aesthetics of such distributed perceptions of the earth. The discussion will explore the notion of ’vision’ not only as an act of sight and/or the representation of a site, but also as a speculative approach towards the role of imagination and the possibility of empathy on a planetary scale.


Talks:

“Earthly Empathy”
Max Liljefors, Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at Lund University,”

“A Recording Device”
Geocinema, Solveig Qu Suess & Asia Bazdyrieva, artist collective that explores the possibilities of a “planetary” notion of cinema

“#unamazingdroneviews: In defense of the poor image of the Earth”
Joanna Zylinska, Professor of New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London

Bios:

Joanna Zylinska is Professor of New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. The author of a number of books – including AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams (Open Humanities Press, 2020), The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press, 2017) – she is also involved in more experimental and collaborative publishing projects. Her own art practice involves working with various forms of image-based media.

Geocinema (Solveig Qu Suess & Asia Bazdyrieva) is a collective that explores the possibilities of a “planetary” notion of cinema. Based in Berlin and Kyiv, they are conducting episodic research vis-a-vis experiments in moving image, narration and collective thinking. Each probe into ways of understanding and sensing the earth while being on the ground, enmeshed within vastly distributed processes of image and meaning making. Their work has circulated internationally, including most recently their first solo show Making of Earths at Kunsthall Trondheim (2020),and, in group shows including Critical Zones at ZKM Karlsruhe (2020-21) and Rethinking Collectivity at Guangzhou Image Triennale (2021). Bazdyrieva & Suess were Digital Earth Fellows (2018-19), and have been nominated for the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research (2020).https://geocinema.network/

Max Liljefors is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at Lund University. His research interests include visual historiography, the visual cultures of the biosciences, boundary object theory, and aesthetic metanoía. 

Schedule:

11:00 Introduction
11:05 Max Liljefors, “Earthly Empathy”
11:25 Geocinema, “A Recording Device”
11:45 Joanna Zylinska, “#unamazingdroneviews: In defense of the poor image of the Earth”
12:05 15 min. Breakout rooms for discussion (This time may also be used for a break for audience / panel members)
12:20 Return for open discussion, Q&A from audience and organisers.
13:00 End

Organized by Lila Lee-Morrison (post doc, University of Southern Denmark).
The event is funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark, Drone Imaginaries: www.sdu.dk/diac), the Surroundings Lab (www.surroundingslab.org) and Center for Culture and Technology at SDU www.sdu.dk/en/cult-tech
Contact person: Lila Lee-Morrison: lile@sdu.dk

Summer School: The Posthuman and New Materialism

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Call for Applications: The Posthuman & New Materialism
Utrecht Summer School Online Course by Prof. Rosi Braidotti
August 16-27, 2021 (on select days)
Registration through this link

Theme and structure
The 2021 intensive Summer School course will continue the tradition of neo-materialist, critical feminist posthuman theory that Braidotti is known for. It focusses on the intersections and divergences between two movements of thought that are close, but distinct. The posthuman turn is defined as the
convergence, within the context of advanced or cognitive capitalism, of post-humanism on the one hand and post-anthropocentrism on the other. Neo-materialism is a theoretical framework that straddles several research fields and emphasizes the embodied, embedded, relational and affective
interconnections across human and non-human entities. The intersections between these two lines of critical enquiry generated some of the most exciting contemporary debates. The course offers a selected overview of this scholarship across a trans-disciplinary range of fields that includes philosophy, literature,
law, media, pedagogy and the arts. Mindful of the patterns of exclusion of the sexualized, racialized and naturalized “others” that were not recognized as belonging to humanity, special attention is devoted to perspectives emerging from Black and indigenous epistemologies and to the efforts to think beyond
anthropocentrism. Priority will be devoted to art practices as forms of advanced research and methodological issues in general.

The course is offered entirely online and is sub-divided in 5 groups of 25 students maximum. Each group is led by a lecturer/tutor and Braidotti visits all of them in turn.
Each day is structured by a mixture of pre-recorded and live lectures by the course director and invited lecturers; live Q&A sessions with all the lecturers; tutorial groups, seminar sessions and artists labs.
Informal meetings will also be encouraged at lunchtime and at leisure.

PLEASE NOTE: The groups are organized by different regional time-zones: one for Australia and the Pacific; one for North and South America; and three groups for Europe.
• The European time-zone programme runs from 9:00-15:00 CET daily.
• The Americas time-zone programme runs from 8:00-14:00 PST/11:00-17:00 EST.
• The Australia-South Pacific programme runs from 14:00-20:30 AEST daily

Applicants are free to select which time zone they prefer to attend, (e.g. Europeans may want to select the North American time zone if they work full time) but the content is the same for every region. Please state in your letter of motivation for which time zone you would like to apply. Competition for registration is strong so you are advised to apply early, as places are allocated on the basis of first come, first served.

Confirmed Lecturers (and more to come…):
Prof. Rosi Braidotti (Utrecht University), Dr. Simone Bignall (University of Technology Sydney), Dr. Natalie Harkin (Flinders University), Assoc. Prof. Mai Al Nakib (University of Kuwait), Dr. Ruth Clemens (Utrecht University), Dr. Emily Jones (University of Essex), Kay Sidebottom (Leeds Beckett University), Fiona Hillary (RMIT University), Goda Klumbyte (University of Kassel).

Assigned reading
– Posthuman Knowledge (Polity Press, 2019), by Rosi Braidotti
– Posthuman Ecologies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), edited by Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall

Background reading
– The Posthuman (Polity Press, 2013), by Rosi Braidotti
– Selected entries from the Posthuman Glossary (Bloomsbury Academic 2018), edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova

Application procedure
Course fees Course fee for students: €350
Course fee for non-students: €550

Application deadline: May 1, 2021.
For more information, contact R. Braidotti’s assistant at gw.braidottiass@uu.nl.

SUMMARY OF KEY ACTION POINTS:
• Due to high demand applications GO on a first-come, first-served basis
• When maximum participation is reached, the applications will be closed
• Pick and indicate your favourite time-zone in motivation letter
• Your registration is finalized only after the fees have been paid
• You are expected to do the background reading before the start of the course
• You are expected to buy the assigned books by Braidotti
• Apply via this link

Call for Papers ESSCS 2021: Art in Common(s) – Understanding Art and Communality

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European Summer School in Cultural Studies
University of Copenhagen, August 23-28, 2021

Experiences of art are mostly something we have together: we gather for the live moments of music and performative art, we mingle around exhibited objects at art venues in public and semi-public spaces, we embrace the togetherness in the dark of the cinema theatre, and even literature, the solitary nature of reading notwithstanding, is a matter of sharing imaginaries, which is probably why we have in turn always been so sociable about literature in an ongoing and ubiquitous conversation at dinner tables and conferences, in journals and reading circles. Our goings about art are communal, and encountering artworks is a particular modality of being together with other people. Moreover, the social encounters that take place around art often also delineate common spaces, zones of togetherness, or zones of opposition, but always zones that differ from other social spaces. The mere existence of art, and all the different uses of art, instigate social relations and social forms with a potential import also beyond the traditional realm of art.

Easy as it is to recognize this imbrication of sociality and art—in so many guises, and in countless instantiations—it has never been a core piece in modern theories of art. Aesthetic experience has been described, analyzed, and investigated with a stern focus on the relation between the artwork and the beholder, between the sensuous form and the sensitive appreciation. Much less attention has been given to the collective experience, and the experience of togetherness, at play in the uses of art. This one-sidedness is itself a historical legacy of modern art. According to Arnold Hauser, the mode of existence of artworks underwent a radical change throughout the eighteenth century from being objects commissioned by authorities to being commodities brought to the marketplace and offered to anonymous buyers. Under absolutism, art was predominantly representative, celebrating sovereign and clerical powers in place, whereas in the new bourgeois context, the understanding of art came to focus less on its representative function and more on its aesthetic function. Hence, the modern understanding of artworks came to focus particularly on the qualities of the artworks themselves and the ways in which they are appreciated by their users, especially in Europe, whereas other cultures, where the emphasis was put on collectivism rather than individualism, display various and different trajectories of how art was, and still is, experienced ‘communally’.

In Europe, the privatization of art experience was accompanied by the emergence of a new public discursive space where the experience of art could be made into a matter of common concern, as described half a century ago by Jürgen Habermas. The modern mode of existence of artworks, then, is twofold: art is a commodity to be delectated (and fetishized, of course, as per Marx’s insight in the commodity form), and art is a matter of public concern. The traditional focus on the artwork as a source of individual experiences mirrors its role as a commodity that can be purchased in the marketplace and appreciated by a consumer, and today, as highlighted by Chantal Mouffe, we increasingly experience how the framing of art as a commodity is also affecting the cultural production of critical art. The focus on the artwork as a meeting place for an interested forum, on the other hand, highlights the way in which art actively participates in organizing commons and communities within the public sphere.

The ESSCS 2021 is dedicated to this other side of art. What is the nature of aesthetic experience, when it is no longer considered as an address to me and to my sensation, but to us and to our common sensibility? What kinds of publics are being instigated by different artworks? What is public in the first place, and how do publics emerge around publications, concerts, exhibitions, performances? Which forms of the political agency come with the public nature of art? How do publics and counter publics in and around the arts include or exclude certain forms of communality? And how can the ways in which we gather around artworks inform our understanding of democracy and of being in this world together? Moreover, what could be a decolonial path for thinking about art and communality?

The summer school will introduce an array of approaches to better understand the intersection of art and communality, historically as well as theoretically, across different art forms, genres, cultural contexts, and political situations. Through academic and artistic keynote presentations, workshops, masterclasses, and paper sessions we will contribute to an ongoing discussion. The summer school welcomes students from the different disciplines studying art and culture as well as those concerned with the social modes of existence of art and the ways in which it contributes to our living together.

We invite proposals for contributions in the following formats:

  • 20-minute academic papers (please provide a 300-word abstract)
  • 1-hour topic panels (max. 4 participants) (please provide a 500-word abstract)
  • Presentations of artworks or projects. We welcome proposals from artists and academics alike to perform, screen, show, or otherwise present artworks and submit them for discussion (please provide a 300-word description).
  • Suggestions for texts to be discussed in workshops (please provide a 300-word argument for including a (not too long) text to the course curriculum)

Proposals should include a short bio (max. 150 words), affiliation, and contact details and be submitted to artasforum@hum.ku.dk by 29 March 2021.

You will be informed whether your contribution has been accepted by 16 April 2021.

PhD students are credited with 3.8 ECTS if certain requirements are met.

There will be a few travel stipends available for artists without university affiliation. Please indicate if you want to apply for a stipend.

The ESSCS is an annual network-based event offering interdisciplinary research training in the fields of art and culture. The network comprises the University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, University of Copenhagen, University of Giessen, Goldsmiths College, Université de Paris VIII, the Lisbon Consortium, Ljubljana Institute for Humanities, University of Trondheim, and Catholic University Rio de Janeiro. Students outside the network are welcome to apply. Participation is subject to availability.

The Summer School is sponsored by the New Carlsberg Research Centre “Art as Forum”, University of Copenhagen.

Organizing committee

  • Brian Jay de Lima Ambulo (Lisbon Consortium)
  • Jonas Bækgaard (University of Stavanger)
  • Line Ellegaard (University of Copenhagen)
  • Omar Escobar (University of Amsterdam)
  • Rasmus Holmboe (University of Copenhagen)
  • Amadea Kovič (Lisbon Consortium)
  • Sarah Nagaty (Lisbon Consortium)
  • Frederik Tygstrup (University of Copenhagen)

For questions and further information, please contact ida.albert@hum.ku.dk.

Call for Papers: Networked Images in Surveillance Capitalism

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CFP: Networked Images in Surveillance Capitalism
Digital Culture & Society, 2/2021
Edited by Olga Moskatova, Anna Polze and Ramón Reichert

Initial deadline: abstract (max. 300 words) and short biography (max. 100 words) – 31 March 2021
Notification Full Paper – 19 April 2021
Deadline full papers – 1 August 2021
Please send your abstract and short biographical note to: olga.moskatova@fau.de.

Capturing personal data in exchange for free services is now ubiquitous in networked media and recently led to diagnoses of surveillance and platform capitalism (Zuboff 2019; Srnicek 2017). In social media discourse, dataveillance and data mining have been criticized as new forms of digital work and capitalist exploitation for some time (cf. Allmer 2015; Andrejevic 2012; van Dijck 2014; Fuchs 2010, 2013; Scholz 2013; Trottier 2012). With the general transformation of the open web into an ecology dominated by commercial platforms (Hands 2013; Helmond 2015; Langois and Elmer 2013; Gillespie 2018), platformization and economic surveillance also redefine digital visual culture, facilitating new forms of images, everyday practices and online visibility, while expanding the logics of social media to the rest of the web. From social photos (Jurgenson 2019), selfies and image communities on the internet to connected viewing and streaming, and video conferencing during the Corona pandemic – the digital image is not only predominantly networked (Rubinstein and Sluis 2008) but also accessed through platforms (van Dijck 2013; van Dijck et al. 2018) and structured by their economic imperatives, data acquisition techniques and algorithmic processing. Today, participation and commodification are closely linked in the production, circulation, consumption and operativity of images and visual communication, raising the question of the role networked images play for and within the proliferating surveillance capitalism.

Linking images and surveillance automatically brings traditional concepts such as panopticon and its numerous modifications into play, since they rely on optical and visual metaphors (Haggerty 2006; Buschauer 2016). In his famous analysis of the panopticon, Michel Foucault showed to what extent power can be exercised through visuality and so produce specific subjects. However, as frequently remarked (Haggerty and Ericson 2000; Kammerer and Waitz 2015), this form of power seems incapable of grasping the dynamics of networked digital media technologies. In the paradigm of the control society (Deleuze 1992), not only media but also the techniques of surveillance and control are increasingly networked and unobtrusive. Many of their contemporary forms do not rely on the visible demonstration and internalization of the gaze, but on automated data-based and algorithmic forms of control that are often motivated economically. They are not “salient”, but “silent” (Introna and Wood 2004) and even “calm” technologies (Weiser and Brown 1997) that proliferate in everyday life and diffuse through environments. Although the relationship between visuality and surveillance is thus being transformed, images are nevertheless an important part of post-panoptical media assemblages and their silent forms of power. Since many successful economic platforms and our everyday networked practices are image based, an evaluation of surveillance capitalism that takes media differences seriously becomes decisive.

Aestheticization of Surveillance Capitalism
The special issue therefore aims to interrogate the manifold relationships between economic surveillance and networked images, and to identify their intersections. On the one hand, images may support the reproduction and maintenance of surveillance capitalism in several ways: Aesthetic strategies and media principles of user-generated, professional and popular images such as humour, compactness, nudity, spectacularity, cinematicity, seriality, interactivity, cuteness or emotionality can contribute to users turning to a platform, capturing attention, prolonging browsing times and generating the “network effects” (Srnicek 2017) necessary for the functioning of surveillance capitalism. Adding to the “attention economies” (Beller 2006; Franck 1998; Goldhaber 1997; Krogan
and Kinsley 2012; Terranova 2012) and experiential-aesthetic regulation online, they can reintroduce the logic of “gaze”, i.e. the focused stare, into the media environments of “glance”, i.e. the incidental and fleeting glimpses (Bryson 1983) or intermediate forms of active cognitive engagement with media content such as “grazing” (Creeber 2013). As such, images can serve as incentives themselves or be part of nudging interface and website aesthetics (Mühlhoff 2018), and therefore contribute to the aestheticization of digital capitalism.

Anaesthetization of Images
On the other hand, networked images can become anaesthetized, “calm” and “silent” themselves – in a similar way to the techniques of control and surveillance: Against the background of surveillance capitalism, technological endeavours such as the internet of things (IoT), ubiquitous computing and
ambient intelligence appear as attempts to expand the opportunities for data extraction and monetization. Everyday objects become sentient things that are capable of multimodal monitoring of environments and living beings, and of recording, storing and circulating captured information. Visual data acquisition in the form of sensors, webcams or computer vision operates without drawing attention to itself. Often, not only the technologies are invisible, but also the images that are no longer destined for human viewing and remain data without being visually displayed (Paglen 2016; Rothöhler 2018). By being processed in machine-to-machine seeing and communication within IoT or used as training data for computer vision application (Crawford and Paglen 2019), the networked and social media images are anaesthetized and rechanneled into an invisible “visual” culture as new economic assets (Mackenzie and Munster 2019). These “invisible image data” (Rothöhler 2021) or “invisible images” share their unobtrusiveness with algorithmic security systems such as facial recognition, which exploits the publicness of the face, and produces “calm images” operating in the background without addressing the users’ conscious attention (Veel 2012).

Subjectivation in Surveillance Capitalism
Furthermore, silent and economically motivated forms of networked surveillance do not eliminate power relations and processes of subjectivation. Rather, silent and scopic forms of power are related in different ways, depending on platforms and the images they provide: On social media platforms, forms of social control based on the visibility of the personal can hardly be separated from algorithmic sorting and recommending. They modulate visibility and invisibility as well as the associated social fears (Trottier and Lyon 2012) and thus algorithmically reconfigure scopic forms of power (Bucher 2016, 2018) and self-care (Nguyen-Trung 2020). It can be assumed that algorithmic control not only complicates or prevents the possibility of subjectivation (Chiney-Lippold 2011, 2016;
Rouvroy 2013; Rouvroy and Berns 2013), but also enforces new and old ways of subjectivation. This means that categories such as gender, age, class and race, which are gaining increasing attention in surveillance studies (Dubrofsky and Magnet 2015; Browne 2015; Conrad 2009), take on special relevance for investigations of a networked digital capitalism. For example, not all bodies are subjected to the exposure, economization of attention, automated censorship and content moderation in the same way on popular platforms for sharing images (Gillespie 2018; Müller-Helle 2020; Roberts 2019). Nudity, female nipples, scars, bodily fluids, or pubic hair, for instance, are regularly banned from Instagram (Byström et al. 2017; Gerling et al. 2018), while TikTok gets negative
press for shadow banning LGBTQ-related tags or suppressing black or disabled creators – raising questions about the relationship between moderation, discrimination, normalization, and economics. Image sets that can be retrieved from social media platforms without compensation, and destined to train algorithms, are known to demonstrate racial and gender bias or lack of diversity (Buolamwini and Gebru 2018; Crawford and Paglen 2019; Gates 2014; Kember 2013; Monea 2019). On streaming platforms, the rhetoric of algorithmic personalization (Alexander 2010; Finn 2018) also obscures collaborative filtering and stereotypical clustering, which can reinforce gender and age biases (e.g. by correlating gender and genre) (cf. Lin et al. 2019), among others, and so modulates
specific viewer subjects (Kellogg et al. 2020).

The special issue invites the submission of papers examining such and comparable phenomena that are capable of shedding light on the role of networked images and the reconfiguration of visuality in surveillance capitalism. In particular, it focuses on the tension between a visual aestheticization of capitalism and the anaesthetization of images or/and surveillance techniques. It raises the following questions, such as: To what extent and by means of which aesthetic strategies do images create incentives for, and stabilize surveillance capitalism? How do they contribute to its aestheticization? How is pictoriality reconfigured in post-panoptical, ambient media environments and subjected to forms of anaesthetization? How is subjectivation produced in apparatuses of dataveillance and algorithmic control, and how are the regimes of the gaze transformed within them?

Topics can include, but are not limited to:

  • The role of images for the generation of the “behavioural surplus” (Zuboff 2019) and data
  • extraction
  • Images as decoy and nudges; medial and aesthetic incentive strategies
  • Audience labour and modulation of viewing
  • (In-)visibility as social control, and its relation to data monitoring and algorithmic sorting
  • New forms of subjectivation, desubjectivation or the prevention of subjectivation in visual surveillance capitalism
  • Economization of attention
  • Platform politics and automated censorship of images
  • AI training on user-generated images and platform capitalism
  • Surveillance capitalism in popular visual media and media arts
  • Gender, race, class and algorithmic control on platforms for (moving) images
  • Calm images and invisible images
  • Visual data acquisition in the internet of things, and ubiquitous computing
  • Tension between the aestheticization of surveillance capitalism and the anaesthetization of images

When submitting an abstract, authors should specify to which of the following categories they would like to submit their paper:

  1. Field Research and Case Studies (full paper: 6000-8000 words). We invite articles that discuss empirical findings from studies that examine surveillance and political economies in digital visual culture. These may e.g. include studies that analyze particular image platforms; address nudging and incentive aesthetic strategies; scrutinize whether and how algorithmic personalization produces specific consumer subjects, etc.
  2. Methodological Reflection (full paper: 6000-8000 words). We invite contributions that reflect on the methodologies employed when researching data-driven and algorithmic surveillance and networked images. These may include, for example, critical evaluation of (resistance) discourses of transparency or obfuscation, algorithmic black boxing, and their implicit epistemologies of the visible; discussion of new or mixed methods, and reflections on experimental forms of research.
  3. Conceptual/Theoretical Reflection (full paper: 6000-8000 words). We encourage contributions that reflect on the conceptual and/or theoretical dimension of surveillance, capitalism and images. This may include, for example, the relationship between scopic and silent forms of power and control; critical evaluation of different concepts such as surveillance capitalism, platform capitalism, algorithmic governmentality, etc.; the tensions between the aestheticization of capitalism and anaesthetization of images in data-driven media environments (e.g. due to filtering, platform censorship, calm technologies, etc.).
  4. Entering the Field (2000-3000 words). This experimental section presents initial and ongoing empirical work. The editors have created this section to provide a platform for researchers who would like to initiate a discussion about their emerging (yet perhaps incomplete) research material and plans, as well as methodological insights.

    Deadlines and contact information
    Initial abstracts (max. 300 words) and a short biographical note (max. 100 words) are due on:
    31 March 2021.
    Authors will be notified by 19 April 2021, whether they have been invited to submit a full
    paper.
    Full papers are due on: 1 August 2021.
    Notifications to authors of referee decisions: 1 September 2021.
    Final versions due: 10 November 2021.
    Please send your abstract and short biographical note to: olga.moskatova@fau.de.

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Allmer, T., 2015. Critical Theory and Social Media: Between Emancipation and Commodification. Routledge, New York.
Andrejevic, M., 2012. Exploitation in the data mine. In: Fuchs, C. et al. (eds.): Internet and Surveillance: The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Social Media. Routledge, New York, 71-88.
Beller, J., 2006. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle, Dartmouth Coll. Press, Lebanon, NH.
Buolamwini, J., Gebru, T., 2018. Gender shades: Intersectional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification. Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency, 77-91.
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Call for Papers: Book Chapter “Psychosomatic Imagery”: Photographic Reflections on Mental Disorders

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Deadline: Mar 10, 2021
Contact Leiden University: dr. Helen Westgeest (h.f.westgeest@hum.leidenuniv.nl) and dr. Ali Shobeiri (s.a.shobeiri@hum.leidenuniv.nl)
Find the entire call for paper attached here. 

If the current pandemic has shown us one thing over the past year, it is our vulnerability to pain, not only to physical but also to psychological pain. It has exposed the fact that all humans, regardless of their social, political, and economic status, are susceptible to conditions like anxiety, insomnia, and depression. But mental health conditions are nothing new; they were even described and treated by the populace of ancient Mesopotamia as early as 3,000 BC, who would consider them as “hands” of specific deities taking control over a person. In our time, according to the WHO, in most countries one in three people report sufficient criteria for at least one mental health condition at some point of their life, a number which signals the urgent demand for further research into this expanding field. The study of mental disorders, however, is not only limited to psychology, but has also been open to a variety of other disciplines, such as the arts and philosophy. For example, over the past decade numerous artists and other professionals have used photography as a way of reflecting on the characteristics of mental disorders, or as a means of recovering from such conditions.

Instead of using photography as a mere documentational means, our book project aims to provide new insights into the understanding of, and ways of communicating about, mental disorders by examining contemporary photographic practices, technics, and metaphors. Amongst many possible photographic approaches and metaphors, contributions may include reflections on, but are not limited to:

– Diffraction, inflection, deflection
– Window/mirror
– Shadows/lights
– Occlusion/eclipse
– Latency/dormancy
– Temporality/spatiality
– Disruption, dislocation, disjunction
– Projection, introjection
– Invisible/visible
– Framing/unframing
– The blind field
– Camera Lucida/Obscura
– Trace/index

Abstracts:
We welcome English abstracts of approximately 250 words that engage with and reflect on mental disorders through contemporary photographic practices, technics, and metaphors. Please send your abstract & a short biography (100 words) to the following email addresses no later than March 10st, 2021 (s.a.shobeiri@hum.leidenuniv.nl h.f.westgeest@hum.leidenuniv.nl). A selected number of abstracts will be invited to submit a full chapter of 5,000 to 6,000 words in August 2021.

The edited book will be published at a prestigious academic publisher in 2022.

Schedules & Deadlines:
Submitting abstract: March 10st, 2021
Communication of acceptance/rejection: March 30th, 2021
Submitting the full chapters: August 30th, 2021
Provisional date for publishing the book: The first half of 2022

Co-editors:
– Dr. Helen Westgeest, Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and Theories of Photography, Leiden University
– Dr. Ali Shobeiri, Assistant Professor of Visual Arts Theory and Photographic Studies, Leiden University

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