220126 What is an Image? Picture Theories for Historians and Sociologists (S) (WiSe 2015/2016)

Two decades after the statements of a "pictorial" or "iconic turn" have introduced the argument that our perception and knowledge of the world is constituted not only linguistically, but also through visual practices which are not congruent with language, images and the visual sphere have become a new epistemic paradigm in the humanities and social sciences. The transdisciplinary field of visual culture studies, with their focus on the socio-political conditions and effects of images and visibility, and the attention for the materiality, presence and performative power of images as represented by German scholars of "Bildwissenschaft" have much contributed to a new reflection of images in history and sociology. Approaches to the visual organization of perception, knowledge, memory, and of social and power relations are inviting historians and sociologists to formulate new research questions, and to encounter images in a way different from understanding and using them simply as products of ideologies, social functions, or illustrations of "conclusions that the author has already reached by other means" (Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing, 2001).

It remains difficult, however, to methodologically bridge the space between an abundance of image theories from various intellectual backgrounds and concrete research interests of historians and sociologists. In the first part of the seminar, we will study basic analytical approaches to images and visuality (visual studies and art history, informed by semiotics, discourse theory, anthropology, phenomenology) and discuss their potential for historical and sociological research interests. In the second part, we will concentrate on analytical methods that connect theory and empirical research, taking the doctoral students’ own questions and projects as examples.

The language in the seminar is English. The reading, however, will be in English and German. An introductory meeting will take place on Thursday, December 3rd 2015, 2 – 3 pm. The following sessions will be held as a two-day workshop, taking place on Thursday, January 21st 2016, 10 am – 1 pm & 2 – 4 pm and Friday, January 22nd 2016, 10 am – 1 pm & 2 – 4 pm.

Bibliography

Elkins, James and Maja Naef (eds.), What Is an Image? Pennsylvania State University Press 2011; Mitchell, W.J.T., What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, University of Chicago Press 2005; Netzwerk Bildphilosophie (Hg.), Bild und Methode. Theoretische Hintergründe und methodische Verfahren der Bildwissenschaft, Köln 2014; Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking. An Introduction to Visual Culture, Oxford University Press 2005; Rose, Gillian, Visual Methodologies. An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials, London 2001.