Speaker Series | Sharon Sliwinski "Other Ways of Seeing"

Sharon Sliwinski
Associate Professor, Faculty of Information and Media Studies
Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario in Canada

In his late work, John Berger both returned to and expanded upon his signal ideas about the language of images, experimenting with what we might call “other ways of seeing.” Sometimes these experiments were political in nature—attempts to register how political crises can flatten the visual field, eroding our appetite for that dimension of the imaginary order that does not yield directly to sight. And sometimes the experiments were more intimate—gestures that sought to re-enliven gendered encounters, for instance. My presentation will explore some of these other ways of seeing, with particular attention to the picturing of migrants and refugees. The aim of the discussion will be to explore the relationship between visual praxis, forms of regard, and the structure of the political imaginary.