“Visual Culture Studies in Europe” conference

With the Eurostar, if everything is OK, going to London from Paris takes only 2 &  1/2 hours. However, the expensive prices do not make the foggy city one of the French main destinations.

Being able to be there not only to see the double decker buses, nor to eat fish & chips, but to start exchanging with other Visual Studies people, was, for the Lhivic a great opportunity.

The main goal of this encounter was to start getting in touch and knowing other scholars and researchers in the Visual Studies field: start a Visual Culture Sutudies Network.

Organised by Marquard Smith, editor in chief of the journal of visual culture and very much helped by his spouse Dr Joanne Morra, Prof. à la Central Saint Martins from the University of the Arts London, England, the first ‘Visual Culture Studies in Europe‘ conference took place at the University of Westminster.

Participants such as Iain Chambers, from the University of Naples, Italy, Joachin Barriendos et Prof. Anna Maria Guasch, from the University of Barcelona, Spain – they are in charge of the proyect CVG – , Dr Almira Ousmanova, from the European Humanities University  of Belarus/Lithuania, and  Øyvind Vågnes.

Dr Nina Lager Vestberg, Norwegian, from the University of Science and Technology Trondheim, Norway,  Kresimir Purgar, from the Center for Visual Studies in Zagreb, from Croatia, and Prof. Oliver Grau, Danube University, from Austria.

This first meeting was for many reasons very positive: first it was so as to get to know and understand how the other labs were working and second to start making links among us.

We have agreed in some ideas to do:

• create a website (blog) so as to share call for papers, bibliography, pdfs…
• create & do a visual culture questionnaire, (to understand what is it that we understand by “Visual Culture”)
• networking

During the conference we also talked a lot about languages, about the importance or not of writing and publishing in English… what happens with the non-English speaking people & labs… how strongly both the bibliography and the difference in languages count … Choices are sometimes linguistic ones, but more of the times they are identity or even technological choices.

So, how do we decide in what language to write and publish?

More than often have this doubt… make this report in English or in French? Well, here the answer was quite easy; because Lorraine Audric had formerly done a report in French… it was my turn to do so in English. But bilingual versions are not that frequent.

Some questions to continue thinking… Some rhetorical ones: such as the market of ideas and the dissemination concept… they get transformed in: how are we going to translate, adopt, interpret and finally appropriate all of this?

Tags: colloque, Comptes rendus, English, london, VC

Cet article a été écrit le Lundi 22 février 2010 à 09:08 et est classé dans Compte Rendus, Lhivic. Vous pouvez suivre toutes les réactions par le flux RSS 2.0.