| Visual Studies |
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| CATEGORIES ABOUT VISUAL CULTURE | |
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Major work on visual culture has been done by W. J. T. Mitchell , particularly in his books ''Iconology'' and ''Picture Theory''. Other writers important to visual culture include Stuart Hall and Slavoj Zizek . Visual culture is related to Visual Sociology and Visual Studies . There is debate over how art history and visual culture are distinct from one another. Visual Studies, an inter- or postdisciplinary field, aims to integrate and expand the already existing disciplines of Art History, Film and Media Studies, Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, and others. Though often engaging objects or artifacts included within these fields, it can often incorporate those overlooked or excluded by more traditional fields of study. Often criticized for its lack of historical rigor, this is not necessarily intrinsic to the field, and many of its practitioners remain rigorous in their historical foundations and object analysis. Because Visual Studies aims not just to fill in gaps to challenge disciplinary boundaries, it can also be said to have political implications. In fact, Visual Studies is often quite closely linked to engagements with Critical Theory. Scholarship in Visual Studies tends to be more thematically, rather than artist-, style-, or filmmaker-based, partly due to its engagement with questions concerning biography and the author function (Barthes, Foucault), but also due to its comparable openness toward broader questions concerning theory and technology. Scholars working in Visual Studies engage with far-reaching questions from temporality and cinema to biopower and feminism to nationalist cinema to video games and new media -- the list goes on. Most importantly, with widespread changes taking place throughout the Humanities, Visual Studies appears to be a growing program of study, rather than discipline persay. Several major universities now either house or are developing graduate programs in Visual Studies. They include: University of Rochester; University of California, Irvine; University of California, San Diego; University of Southern California; State University of New York, Buffalo. FURTHER READING |
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