Announcing the 4th biennial
William A. Kern Communications Conference
Visual Communication: Rhetorics and Technology
April 10-13, 2008
Rochester Institute of Technology
Strathallan Hotel, Rochester New York
Call for Papers: The first Kern conference on Visual Communication took place in 2001 and provided a wide-ranging forum for scholars and practitioners to share their work. Since then, the interdisciplinary study of visual communication has continued to grow, generating a variety of projects, books, journals, studies, and methodological approaches to research and critical studies. The fourth and final Kern Communication conference on visual communication continues the conversation with a renewed commitment to interdisciplinary interests and scholarship. Visual Communication: Rhetorics and Technology (2008) focuses on the study of visuality and communication with a special interest on the interconnections between visual rhetoric and visual media technologies.
We invite individual papers, panels and presentations that address this theme in the widest ways we can imagine. How does scholarship in visual communication interact with traditional approaches to the processes of human communication, inclusive of rhetoric and communication media technology? How do individual cases of visual communication, visual rhetoric, visual documentation and creative innovation enlarge our understanding of human communication? How does the history and practice of visuality inform our teaching of communication, media and rhetoric? What is the state of the field? Where are our individual research projects taking us? Individual papers, presentations, experimental “work in progress,” panel proposals and workshop proposals are welcome.
Send complete papers or 500 word abstracts via email as a Word document attachment to Diane S. Hope, [dshgpt@rit.edu], or by paper mail to Diane S. Hope; 92 Lomb Memorial Drive, RIT, Rochester, Institute of Technology, Rochester NY, 14623, by December 1, 2007.
Confirmed plenary speakers include:
Paul Martin Lester, author of the text, Visual Communication: Images with Messages and incoming editor of the journal Visual Communication.
Roger Remington, Massimo and Lella Vignelli Distinguished Professor of Design, School of Design, Rochester Institute of Technology, who will present a talk on visual communication and posters.
Ron Osgood, documentary film maker, Indiana University, who will present and screen his new film “My Vietnam, Your Iraq.”
Confirmed plenary sessions include:
“Blogging Visual Politics,” a panel of visual rhetoric scholar/bloggers, explores the blog as a compelling public forum for visual engagement and political critique. Chair, Cara Finnegan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign http://caraf.blogs.com/caraf/
“Visual Rhetoric: Past Present and Future,” an occasion to reflect on past studies of visual rhetoric with an eye to priority setting for the future of scholarship in the area. Chair, Lester Olson, University of Pittsburgh, author of Emblems of American Community and Benjamin Franklin’s Vision of American Community; Carolyn Handa, University of Alabama, author of Visual Rhetoric in a Digital Age; Charles Hill, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and Marguerite Helmers, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, co-editors of Defining Visual Rhetoric.
(Others to be announced).
Keynote speaker to be announced
Please check the website: www.rit.edu/kern for updates, further details and on-line registration information.
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