OCR in collaboration with the International Association for Visual Culture, Arts Administration @ Boston University and the Museum of Contemporary Cuts is proud to announce that Prof. Nicholas Mirzoeff will deliver the keynote address for the conference section titled Revolutions, Free Speech, Radicalization and Social Media for THE SOCIAL @ Boston University. This particular session of the conference will discuss and analyze “if contemporary social media have ushered in an era of engagement, participation and free speech or one of radicalization, revolution and censorship characterized by political division and confrontation. Is it possible for Visual Culture to argue for a transformational and democratizing role of contemporary social media and technologies as tools that can provide the framework for participation, democratic and civil engagement beyond radicalized politics and ideologies?”
The call for papers for THE SOCIAL is available here. The call for the Graduate Forum of THE SOCIAL can be found at this link. The application for the Clark Institute Travel Fellowships for IAVC2016@Boston can be found at this link. Here you can find the Facebook event page and the Newsletter to stay in touch.
Nicholas Mirzoeff is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He is one of the founders of the academic discipline of visual culture in books like An Introduction to Visual Culture (1999/2009) and The Visual Culture Reader (1998/2002/2012).
He is currently Deputy Director of the International Association for Visual Culture and organized its first conference in 2012. Since 2013, he has been Visiting Professor of Visual Culture at Middlesex University, London. His book The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality(2011) won the Anne Friedberg Award for Innovative Scholarship from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies in 2013.
In 2012, he undertook a durational writing project called Occupy 2012. Every day, he posted online about the Occupy movement and its implications. Open source anthologies of the project are available. In 2014, he launched After Occupy: What We Learned, an open writing project on the lessons of the social movement. In 2015 his most recent book How To See The World was published by Pelican in the UK.
Currenty, he is working on a project entitled The Visual Commons #BlackLivesMatter. It looks at the formations of the visual commons from the Haitian Revolution, via Reconstruction and 1968 to the Black Lives Matter movement.
The video is from an exhibition titled I Occupy, 2013, Istanbul, curated by Lanfranco Aceti at Kasa Gallery. Prof. Mirzoeff reads an excerpt from his essay Why I Occupy (2012).
Image: Nicholas Mirzoeff, I Occupy, 2013. Video. Exhibition installation at Kasa Gallery, Istanbul. Photograph: Lanfranco Aceti.
