Visuality/Materiality

Two of the key theoretical shifts over the past two decades of critical work have been the 'visual turn' and the 'material turn'. This collection argues that these hitherto distinct fields should be understood as in continual dialogue and co-constitution and focuses on reconceptualising the visual as an embodied, material, and often politically-charged realm. The interdisciplinary case studies are paired around four themes: consumption, translation, practice and ethics. As well as exploring the bringing together of visuality and materiality studies, the contributors raise questions of social identity and social critique, and also focus on the ethics of material visualities.

Contents: Visuality/materiality: introducing a manifesto for practice, Gillian Rose and Divya P. Tolia-Kelly; Metallic modernities in the space age: visualizing the Caribbean, materializing the modern, Mimi Sheller; Visuality, 'China commodity city', and the force of things, Mark Jackson; Tristes entropique: steel, ships and time images for late modernity, Mike Crang; Citizen and denizen space: if walls could speak, Nirmal Puwar; Seeing air, Caren Yglesias; Intra-actions in Loweswater, Cumbria: new collectives, blue-green algae and the visualisation of invisible presences through sound and science, Judith Tsouvalis, Claire Waterton and Ian J. Winfield; Materialising vision: performing a high-rise view, Jane M. Jacobs, Stephen Cairns and Ignaz Strebel; Melancholic memorialisation: the ethical demands of grievable lives, Karen Wells; Indifferent looks: visual inattention and the composition of strangers, Paul Frosh; Index.