Imaging ‘East Asia:’
Constructing Knowledge through the Visual
Graduate Student Conference
presented by the East Asia Center
January 25-26, 2019 at University of California, Santa Barbara
Aesthetic sensibilities and visual cognition of the external world are fundamental to the construction of knowledge and divination of meaning. For “Imagining ‘East Asia:’ Constructing Knowledge through the Visual,” a UCSB East Asia Center Graduate Student Conference, we seek proposals that grapple with how “East Asia” and its constituent cultural, linguistic, or national properties and territories are problematized through the framework of the visual (e.g. art, film, digital and popular culture, or the everyday). Visual culture constructs and is constructed by assumptions about the world. How one reads visual culture is determined on at least two fronts—first, by the artist/producer through choices of subject, style, and genre, among others and, second, by the audience’s worldviews, biases, and dispositions. Given the inherent subjectivity of visual cognition, we as historians, art historians, anthropologists, religion, film, and literature scholars are forever conscious of alternative readings and wary of misrepresentations.
We invite participants to examine how ‘East Asia’ has been imagined and is being reimagined through visual culture, as well as the mechanisms and media through which these imaginings further animate various identities, ideologies, economies, and interpermeations. Relevant paper topics may approach this set of issues from any region or time period commonly identified as part of “East Asia.”
Keynote Speaker:
Professor Thomas Lamarre
James McGill Professor in East Asian Studies and Associate in Communications Studies
McGill University
Organized by:
Colin Raymond, PhD Student
Department of History of Art & Architecture
Kaitlyn Ugoretz, PhD Student
Department of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies
East Asia Center at University of California, Santa Barbara
Cosponsors
Department of Comparative Literature
Division of Humanities and Fine Arts
Department of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies
Department of Film & Media Studies
Graduate Center for Literary Research
Graduate Division
Department of the History of Art & Architecture
Interdisciplinary Humanities Center
MultiCultural Center
Mellichamp Global Dynamics Initiative
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