Kurzus nemzetközi vendég- és részidős hallgatóknak
- Kar
- Bölcsészettudományi Kar
- Szervezet
- BTK Művészetelméleti és Médiakutatási Intézet
- Kód
- MA-ERA-ITHAMS-S-M-106
- Cím
- Visuality and communication
- Tervezett félév
- Őszi
- ECTS
- 4
- Nyelv
- en
- Oktatás célja
- The course is designed for MA students who are interested in contemporary visual culture as it appears in and impacts our everyday lives. The first half of the semester will focus on the discipline of visual culture, including its brief history, subjects and different approaches to studying it and visual communication. The second half will give way to exploring certain contemporary problematics of visual communication in more detail through case studies. We will examine how political imagination is manifest in everyday city life and urban visual culture, cases in point will be Budapest and Baltimore. We will examine the temporal aspects of changes in visual culture through analysing pictorial self-representations from self-portraits to selfies. Factors which possibly determine the reception of the visual are examined in the light of mediatised images of the Russian-Ukrainian war. We will analyse how the media visualises environmental problems and different actors in relation to these through examining news media imagery from movements such as Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future and the farmers protests in 2024 across Europe. Finally, we briefly review the extent to which the mechanisms of artificial intelligence and deep-learning related to visuality are analogous to human cognition.
- Tantárgy tartalma
- 1 09.09 Introduction 2 09.16 What is visual culture? Introduction to the field and its history. Objects and subjects of the discipline. From ‘meaning’ to practices of looking Mirzoeff, N. (2023); Smith, M. (2009) 3 09.23 Visual narratives Agency, transformation and performativity. The image act: agency of the spectator and the image. Visual narration as a cognitively grounded relationship between human experience and human representation of experience Eriksson & Ghötlund (2023). 4 09.30 No class 5 10.07 Visual communication and ideology- the cultural studies approach The sociological aspects of visuality, from Bourdieu to Berger and Mulvey. Text vs context in visual culture studies. The text-first approach. Mechanics of representation and the importance of Hall’s concept of the cultural circuit when analysing visual culture. Howells, R., & Negreiros, J. (2019); Hall, S. (1997); Lister, M. (2024) 6 10.14 The political nature of the image I.- Where? Traces of the political in urban visual culture. Visible patterns of oppression and inclusivity in the contemporary. The importance of space when analysing visual culture. Connecting the everyday and the imagination in urban politics. European examples- constructing Europeanness. Jaffe, R. (2018); Knorr,L. (2016) 7 10.21 A Strike of the eye- Social media images of the War in Ukraine Violence and vision- history of the weaponized gaze. Co-evolution of weapons and cameras. Apertures of the imperial subject. Case study: TikTok images of the Russian -Ukraine war. Primig, F., Szabó, H. D., & Lacasa, P. (2023); Stahl, R. (2018). 10.28 Autumn break 8 11.04 The political nature of the image I- The populist visual agenda Approaching the concept of populism. How are European populist politicians using the visual affordances of social media? Hesová, Z (2021). "Three Types of Culture Wars and the Populist Strategies in Central Europe". Politologický časopis - Czech Journal of Political Science 2: 130–150 link Mudde, C. (2004). “The populist zeitgeist.“ Government and opposition, 39 (4): 541–563. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-7053.2004.00135.x 9 11.11 Social media and visual culture- Visual Culture in the age of AI The case of instagram, how AI shapes social media’s sites (i.e. from production through distribution and perception). The case of virtual influencers. Threat or opportunity? Is the machine creative? What is creativity? How does AI generated imagery reinforce existing bias and visual discourses of oppression and inequality? Ng, J. (2021); Paglen,T. (2016); Vrabič Dežman, D. (2024); Salah, A. (2021). 10 11.18 Visual communication and environmental issues I. Peeples, J., & Murphy, M. (2015). Discourse and rhetorical analysis approaches to environment, media, and communication. In A.Hansen & R. Cox (eds.). The Routledge handbook of environment and communication (pp. 39-49). Routledge. Hansen, A. (2017). Using visual images to show environmental problems. In A.F. Fill & H. Penz (eds.). The Routledge handbook of ecolinguistics (pp. 179-195). Routledge 11 11.25 Visual communication and environmental issues II. Iconic, spectacular and symbolic images in mediatized images of the environment and the question of responsibility. Political and economic pressures in the big picture. Far right and the environment in Europe. Lubarda, B. (2024). 12 12.02 From self-portraits to selfies-When?-We explore the flux of meaning and form, thus the importance of temporality. Through tracing changes of depictions of the self through history. Schroeder, J. (2021); Boylan, A. L. (2020); Peraica, A. (2017). 13 12.09 Summary
- Számonkérés és értékelés
- Course requirements and evaluation: Familiarity with the literature listed below (mandatory literature) and the material presented in class is a prerequisite for completing the course. Evaluation is based on three assignments: 1 & 2: See 11.04 and 11.18. in the syllabus: Each student presents a visual example (i.e. a photograph, illustration, image of a product, package, design etc., image from social or news media, poster, ad etc.) related to the literature assigned for that given class. It is important that in their short, maximum 2-minute accompanying oral presentations, students justify why they considered this image relevant to the topic and to which part(s) of the text the given example relates to. Student’s have to upload their image (and only one image, no ppt etc.) latest a day before class to the Assignment section in Canvas. The originality of the chosen example matters when evaluating the work. This also means that students should make sure not to upload the same image more than once. The first topic is the populist visual agenda, and the second is visual communication and environmental issues, which maps the communication possibilities of environmental activism. These account for 30%-30% of the assessment, but completing at least one of them is a prerequisite for passing the course. 3.: The final essay, which is approximately 2000 words long, presents a case study related to the course topic, using at least two relevant sources of literature. For detailed criteria for evaluating the case study, see the Canvas interface. Essays should be uploaded in canvas, the final deadline is January 15. 2026. midnight. The essay accounts for 40% of the final grade. Key factors when evaluating the essays will be: choosing and applying relevant literature, choosing a relevant and contemporary case study, contextualising the case study within a theoretical framework, depth of research, choosing and applying relevant literature. Note that of the minimum two sources used, only one can be from the mandatory literature.
- Irodalomjegyzék
- Mandatory course literature: Eriksson, Ghötlund (2023). Foundations of visual communication. How visuals appear in Daily Life. Routledge pp 66-90. Hall, S. (1997). Representation . The work of representation.1-28, Sage Publications. Hesová, Z (2021). "Three Types of Culture Wars and the Populist Strategies in Central Europe". Politologický časopis - Czech Journal of Political Science 2:130–150 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352871333_Three_Types_of_Culture_Wars_and_the_Populist_Strategies_in_Central_Europe Howells, R., & Negreiros, J. (2019). Visual culture(Ideology: pp 87-122). John Wiley & Sons. Paglen,T. (2016, December 8.). Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You) – The New Inquiry Peeples, J., & Murphy, M. (2015). Discourse and rhetorical analysis approaches to environment, media, and communication. In A.Hansen & R. Cox (eds.). The Routledge handbook of environment and communication (pp. 39-49). Routledge. Primig, F., Szabó, H. D., & Lacasa, P. (2023). Remixing war: An analysis of the reimagination of the Russian–Ukraine war on TikTok. Frontiers in Political Science,( 5). https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpos.2023.1085149/full Schroeder, J. (2021). The selfie in consumer culture. In Neumüller, M.(Ed). Visual Culture Approaches to the Selfie (pp. 166-187). Routledge.
- Ajánlott irodalom
- Further reading: Boylan, A. L. (2020). When? Visual culture (pp 112-142). MIT Press. Di Ronco, A., & Allen-Robertson, J. (2020). Representations of environmental protest on the ground and in the cloud: The NOTAP protests in activist practice and social visual media. Crime, Media, Culture, 17(3), 375-399. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659020953889 (Original work published 2021) Durante, T. (2021). Global Consciousness and New Visual Order: The Populist Aesthetic Challenge.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354184024_Global_Consciousness_and_New_Visual_Order_The_Populist_Aesthetic_Challenge Gillian, R. (2012). The question of method: practice, reflexivity and critique in visual culture studies. In I. Heywood & B. Sandywell (eds). The Handbook of Visual Culture (pp. 542–558.). Berg. Jaffe, R. (2018). Cities and the political imagination. The Sociological Review, 66(6), 1097-1110. Knorr, L. (2016). Divided landscape: The visual culture of urban segregation. Landscape Journal, 35(1), 109-126. Lister, M. (2024). Seeing beyond belief. Cultural Studies as an Approach to Analysing the Visual. In Liz Wells (ed.). Photography, Curation, Criticism (pp. 194-226). Routledge Lubarda, B. (2024). Far-right ecologism: environmental politics and the far right in Hungary and Poland, (pp. 1-15). Routledge. Miller, A. I. 2019. The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativity. MIT Press. Mirzoeff, N. (1999). An introduction to visual culture (1st ed.)pp 1-35. Routledge Ng, J. (2021). An Alternative Rationalisation of Creative AI by De-Familiarising Creativity: Towards an Intelligibility of Its Own Terms. In Pieter verdegem (ed.). AI for everyone? Critical perspectives (pp. 69-93). University of Westminster Press Page, J. T. (2020). Trump as global spectacle: The visual rhetoric of magazine covers. In S. Jospehson, J. Kelly & K. Smith. Handbook of Visual Communication (pp. 139-151). Routledge. Peraica, A. (2017). Histories of self-observation. In A. Peraica. Culture of the Selfie. Self-Representation in Contemporary Visual Culture (Vol. 24, pp 18-31). Institute of Network Cultures. Salah, A. A. A. (2021). AI Bugs and Failures: How and Why to Render AI-Algorithms More Human?. In Verdegem, P. (Ed.). AI for Everyone? (pp 207-231). University of Westminster Press Smith, M. (2009). From Art History to Visual Culture Studies? Questions of History, Theory, and Practice. Journal of History of Modern Art (26),163-210. Stahl, R. (2018). A Strike of the eye. Through the crosshairs: War, visual culture, and the weaponized gaze(pp 1-23). Rutgers University Press. Vrabič Dežman, D. (2024). Promising the future, encoding the past: AI hype and public media imagery. AI and Ethics, 1-14.