From social media profiles to networked photography, from digital storytelling to creative video practices, across art, popular culture, politics, and everyday communication, images play a central role in negotiating who we are and where we belong. In an increasingly interconnected and image-saturated world, identity is not a stable category. It is continuously shaped and transformed increasingly more through visual practices that construct, communicate, and contest individual and collective identities across platforms, cultures, and spaces.
In contemporary media ecologies, the visual practices are shaped by the interplay of cultural nuances, platform affordances (e.g., feed algorithms, audiovisual formats, aspect ratios, location-aware colour, typography templates and kits, geolocation targeting), sociotechnical architectures and spatial contexts. Physical spaces (e.g., urban centers, peripheries, rural areas), cultures, and platform affordances influence how images are produced, received and resignified. Their original meanings therefore intersect with situated interpretations, participatory practices, systemic possibilities and constraints.
Thus, this conference approaches visual identity as an ongoing process of becoming, negotiating, and communicating across cultural contexts, social relations, technological infrastructures, platforms, and media environments. We particularly welcome contributions that move beyond viewing identity as representation and instead investigate the processes, practices, and conditions through which visual identities come into being.
Submissions can include but are not limited to the following topics:
- how identities are produced and/or negotiated across social media and digital platforms,
- how gender identities and bodies are visually produced and negotiated,
- how visual cultures construct race, nation, belonging, and “otherness”,
- visual identities in urban spaces, peripheries, and rural areas,
- place-based meaning of visual identities,
- (re)negotiations of visual identities and belonging,
- comparative studies exploring the visual identities across cultures and contexts,
- the influence of time in the imagining and making of visual identities.
Spotlight panel:
“Visualizing Protests in Europe and Beyond: Graffiti, Urban Media, Social Media, and Resistance” organized by the Urban Media and Participatory Spaces Research Group
Organizers:
Department of Language and Communication Studies
ECREA Visual Cultures Section
Organizing Committee:
Conference Chair: Joanna Kedra, PhD, University Teacher, Department of Language and Communication Studies, University of Jyväskylä & Vice-Chair of the ECREA Visual Cultures Section
Conference Secretary: Terhi Paakkinen, Coordinator, Department of Language and Communication Studies, University of Jyväskylä
Patricia Prieto-Blanco, PhD, Co-Chair of the ECREA Visual Cultures Section
Suay Özkula, PhD, University of Salzburg, Austria, Co-Chair of the ECREA Visual Cultures Section
Grace Omondi, PhD, University of Exeter, UK, Vice-Chair of the ECREA Visual Cultures Section
Giulia Isabella Guerra, PhD Student, Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland, YECREA Representative for the Visual Cultures Section
