“Debating Visual Knowledge” Graduate Symposium at the University of Pittsburgh
October 3 – 5, 2014

Call for Participants

Visual knowledge and visual literacy have become pressing concerns across a variety of academic disciplines and areas of creative production. These concerns are shaped by the fluid definitions of “visual knowledge” and the multiple ways in which it manifests. Many forms of visual knowledge have capabilities that are not shared by language. This knowledge is produced, mediated, and distributed by a number of different objects, tools, media, and technologies. This symposium seeks to broaden understandings of intellectual and creative work by interrogating the theorization, production, use, and historicization of visual knowledge. We envision the event as an exploratory lab, comprising scholarly and creative projects that engage with these questions.

Presentations might relate to (but are not limited to) topics such as:

● Digital humanities
● Cognition, intellectual history, interpretation
● Photography, printmaking, engraving
● “The spatial turn,” GIS, maps, mapping
● The body, performance
● Data visualizations, modeling, categories and groups
● Law and policy
● Media theory, historiography, ecology
● Exhibition design, curating
● Network analysis, grids, graphs, timelines
● Interfaces, constructed/built environments, design
● Astronomy, physics, mathematics, botany, medicine

The symposium will include traditional academic papers, posters, and keynote sessions, as well as presentations of creative works, roundtables, praxis sessions, screenings, and performances. Participants may be invited to take part in curated roundtables, seminars or workshops. We also welcome submissions of projects that could be workshopped or collaborated on in the context of the symposium.

Submission Guidelines:

● For a paper, please submit a 300-word abstract for a 20-minute talk, and a CV.
● For a poster, please submit a 300-word abstract and a CV.  A sketch of your poster is optional. If selected, posters must be printed and provided by the participants, and can be up to 30” x 40”.
● For a creative work, please submit up to 10 images and/or a 2-minute video or sound clip, a 300-word project description, and a CV.
● For a pre-constituted panel of up to four papers, please submit a 300-word abstract describing the panel topic, and a 150-word abstract and author’s CV for each proposed paper.
● To propose to lead a roundtable, seminar, or praxis session, please submit a 300-word description of the topic and CVs for all proposed participants.  You may also propose a topic without having chosen participants.

If you have any questions about possible submissions or formats for submissions, please contact us at debatingvisualknowledge@gmail.com.

Send submissions to debatingvisualknowledge@gmail.com by April 11, 2014. Selected participants will be notified by mid-May.

Photograph from London’s Fashion Week, 2014 by Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters.  The photo was not supplied by the conference organizers, but it does give new meaning to both “debating” and “visual knowledge.”