Visual Studies

Abstract

Learning Goals • To teach students visual literacy Students of Visual Studies will investigate their place in the global system of images. Through a Visual Studies framework students have the ability to describe, analyze, and negotiate an increasingly complex world of information technologies; the impact of these technologies on art, culture, science, commerce, policy, society, and the environment; and the interrelationship of these technologies with historical and material forms. • To engage students in critical making Visual Studies creates curricular opportunities for students to make images, objects, and digital artifacts with critical awareness of their powers and limitations. Critical making, or thinking with process, encourages students to develop production skills which, when coupled with theoretical training and analytical rigor, will broaden their ability to improvise and problem-solve in a variety of disciplinary contexts. • To train students in interdisciplinary rigor Visual Studies encourages conversation between scholars working on the relationship between text and the visual, the nature of perception, cognition and attention, and the historic construction of looking. Visual Studies can help students perceive when disciplines are essential to understanding a subject, and when they can be combined for a more expansive or more precise critical engagement. • To guide students in an “ethics of the visual” Visual Studies invites a return to the liberal arts as a process of creativity, critique, and reflection. It links creative expression to cultural analysis and social engagement, training a generation of theoretically informed makers, artists, innovators, teachers, and civic leaders. We invite students to examine the relationship between the visual and structures of power, to analyze the role of images in making consumers and to attend to the role that images play in constructing “others” through race, gender, or disability.