ECREA TWG Visual Cultures, Report 2017
The ECREA TWG Visual Cultures was approved by the ECREA Bureau on 16 June 2015, and the TWG chairs were informed of approval on 14 September 2015, after which the TWG became operational. 2017 was the TWG’s second full year of existence.
The main activities included:
• The steering group was expanded to ten persons in total to facilitate the aims of the TWG Visual Cultures and to expand international collaboration. The chair/vice-chairs report to ECREA. The steering group meets online 3–4 times a year and consists of:
- Catarina Costa (U Nova de Lisboa)
- Edgar Gómez Cruz (vice-chair) (UNSW)
- Paolo Favero (vice-chair) (U of Antwerp)
- Joanna Kedra (U of Jyväskylä)
- Asko Lehmuskallio (chair) (U of Tampere)
- Katharina Lobinger (U della Svizzera Italiana)
- Patricia Prieto-Blanco (U of Brighton)
- Maria Schreiber (U of Vienna)
- Paula Uimonen (U of Stockholm)
- Shireen Walton (UCL)
• A workshop was organized June 19th at 35th Annual International Visual Sociology Association Conference in Montréal, Canada, titled “Visual pedagogies”. The panel discussed and explored ways of teaching visual cultures from social scientific perspectives. It was chaired by Joanna Kędra (U of Jyväskylä), additional speakers included Līga Vinogradova (Latvian Academy of Culture), Asko Lehmuskallio (U of Tampere), Vivian Wenli Lin (Voices of Women Media) and Choon-Lee Chai (Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences, Alberta, Canada).
• At the Collecting Social Photo workshop in Helsinki 23-24 November, TWG steering group members Asko Lehmuskallio (advisor in reference group) and Paula Uimonen (researcher) participated. Collecting Social Photo is a collaborative project between Stockholm University, The Nordic Museum, Stockholm County Museum, Finnish Museum of Photography, and Aalborg City Archives. The three-year project (2017-2020) aims to identify how museums can collect digital photographs in social media.
• In addition members of the steering group have presented the activities of the TWG during conferences and lectures that they have participated at. They have also inserted it in their official bios and, when possible and meaningful, in their publications.
• For 2018, the ECREA TWG Visual Cultures steering group has decided to organize a workshop titled “Social scientific perspectives on ‘photographic truth’” on March 26 at Helsinki Photomedia, a lab (Shireen Walton/Paolo Favero) and a workshop (Paula Uimonen) titled “Aesthetic Encounters: The Politics Of Moving And (Un)settling Visual Arts, Design And Literature” for the forthcoming EASA conference in Stockholm, August 2018, as well as a pre-conference titled “Mobile (in)visibilities” on October 31 in Lugano, before the main ECREA conference.