October 24 and 25, 2025
Organized by the Media Studies Program
American University of Beirut
Keynote Speaker: Thy Phu (University of Toronto)
See the full program here
Images of violence saturate media and visual culture. Circulating at an unprecedented scale and speed, within a globally networked, corporately owned, profit driven media landscape, images of brutality, war, torture, and exploitation confront us with ethical and political questions about our own roles as consumers and producers of violent images. Today, our screens and feeds are inundated with photographs and videos of the mutilated, charred, and dismembered bodies of Palestinians in Gaza. We watch a genocide being committed in real time. We are enraged by what we see, and yet we cannot stop it.
Today it is Gaza, but before it there was Aleppo, Baghdad, Falouja, Lebanon. The history of violence is also the history of its visual horror. From Tunis to Yemen, from Turkey to Iran, and to the current assaults on student encampments and protestors in North America and Europe, we have more than a decade’s worth of digital footage of military and police brutality against protestors, of political regimes violently crushing any and all signs of dissent and rebellion. In our hypermediated reality, we are forced to grapple with our roles and positions as spectators of and witnesses to violence, and by extension with our agency as political subjects. Are we desensitized by long and repeated exposure to brutality, or do such images move us to take action? In bearing witness to violence, do we understand our own implication in the regimes that perpetrate and sustain it, and does this new awareness transform our political imagination and bring about a sense of commonality and responsibility that transcend nationality and citizenship?
Images and visuals of course are not merely mimetic reflections of reality but also participate in its construction, and significantly condition how we understand it. In studying the visual organization and mediation of our life worlds, we come to understand the workings and logics of contemporary power structures, and how certain forms of violence are normalized and legitimized while others provoke horror and outrage. Visuality, or the conditions of negotiation through which something is made visible or invisible, defines the dynamics of power in contemporary society and is also directly implicated in the production and justification of violence. Visuality as Mirzoeff has famously argued is not war by other means; it is war. Thus, the right to look is also the right to disrupt the social and political order—inscribed in aesthetics and relations and practices of looking—and to imagine reality on our own terms.
In centering our conference on the relationship between violence and visuality, we aim to provide a space for critical reflection on how violence is documented, witnessed, censored, and memorialized in images, and also importantly how violence is waged and resisted through visual logics and regimes. How, moreover, does visuality participate in the justification and legitimization of some forms of violence over others? And what are the new ethical and political questions that technologies of surveillance and visualization—harnessed as they are in the service of capital and the military-industrial complex—confront us with?
We seek submissions from scholars, writers, and artists on the subject of violence and visuality. We invite proposals for 15-minute presentations or pre-organized rountables. To propose a presentation, please submit a 200-300-word abstract. Roundtable submissions should include a 200-word rationale in addition to 150-word abstracts for each individual intervention. All submissions should include name(s), affiliation, e-mail address, paper title, and a brief bio. Submissions should be sent to mediastudies@aub.edu.lb no later than September 2, 2024. Decisions will be communicated by September 30, 2024.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
- Visual cultures of war
- Ethics of witnessing
- Visual politics and practices of memorialization
- Technologies of visualization
- Surveillance and countersurveillance
- Technologies of Policing
- Representation of violence in media, art, and film
- Visual regimes of race and gender
- Visual cultures and practices of protest
- Visual archives of violence
- Borders and migration
For further information, please contact the organizers, the Media Studies Program at the American University of Beirut, at mediastudies@aub.edu.lb.