The pandemic has been a global experience. But we have responded, adapted, negotiated real-world challenges in local ways. Connecting the local to the global are digital communication networks. And predominantly, it's the images we create, share, and view that tell the story of the pandemic – empty streets, healthcare workers, people in masks. And at the same time, visual graphics have created a shared global experience – marking social distance, explaining new social rules. Data graphics and tables allow us to visualize the effects of the pandemic (cases, hospitalizations, deaths). A new visual language comes to frame social experiences. New visual grammars, patterns, genres have seemed to appear. They connect to the cannon of image-making while offering new ways of seeing. In this year's conference, we are interested in understanding what is new -- and what's not -- in the long history of image-making. And how has the connection of local space to global flows supported by digital networks shaped the visual construction of social meaning of the pandemic itself? In other words, how might picturing a pandemic have changed the practice of image-making, and how might that practice change the meaning we make in society, and what do digital networks as another kind of historical force, lend to this dual process.
The Twelfth International Conference on The Image featured plenary sessions by some of the world’s leading thinkers and innovators in the field.
Assistant Professor, Arts Department, Universidade da Beira, LabCom - Comunicação e Artes, Portugal
Assistant Professor, NOVA University of Lisbon (NOVA FCSH), Portugal
Professor, Rey Juan Carlos University, Madrid, Spain
Founder, DesignLab4U; Assistant Professor, Education School of Lisbon, Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal
Universidad de Málaga, España (Spanish)
For each conference, a small number of Emerging Scholar Awards are given to outstanding graduate students and emerging scholars who have an active research interest in the conference themes. Emerging Scholars perform a critical role in the conference by chairing the parallel sessions, providing technical assistance in the sessions, and presenting their own research papers. The 2021 Emerging Scholar Award Recipients are as follows:
University of the Pacific, USA
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
University of Brasília, Brasil
University of Brasilia, Brasil
NC State University, USA
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
California State University, Monterey Bay, Seaside, USA
Famoulth University, England
Lisbon, Portugal
