At the end of the 2010 Visual Culture Studies Conference hosted by the IMCC in May, the final session discussed the prospect of establishing an International Association for Visual Culture Studies. During this session, a motion was put forward to establish the Association; the motion was carried.

We’ve set up an online forum as a space where we can discuss the Association, its purpose, role, ambitions, aims and objectives, etc. You are invited to contribute to these on-going discussions by registering as a user at www.journalofvisualculture.org/bbpress. Once you have registered, you will have to be approved as a user (so we can stop trolls and spam). Do bear with us as we open up this forum to you all. Should you encounter any technical issues, please email contact@visualculturestudies.org.

About the online forum

We have kept the forum open, with one section for aims and objectives, and another for activities – please feel free to add topics under these headings. Also if you have any suggestions for the forum’s development, do let us know.

To explore the Association’s possible composition, structure and purpose, one forum asks:
How do we need to imagine this community of scholars, students, emerging scholars, curators, educators, museum professionals, practitioners, and cultural sector specialists?
What are the academic, intellectual, and professional ambitions of the Association?

To explore the possible activities of the Association, another forum asks:
What will the Association do?
What kind of forums are most appropriate/necessary (meetings, networks, conferences, etc.) to support the activities of this community, and facilitate the (formal and informal) exchange of ideas and information, as well as its conviviality, sociality, and collaborative impulse?

Here’s to New York City 2012, and to the launch of the International Association for Visual Culture Studies. And to the many productive conversations that will take place in the next few weeks and months – many thanks for contributing.

Wednesday 24 November 2010, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW

Martin Willis (University of Glamorgan)
‘Martian Astronomy and Popular Fiction’

Further details on the English Literature and Culture research seminar series here.

Boundaries and Communities
Friday 26 November 2010, 6.30pm
The Showroom, 63 Penfold Street, London NW8

David Cunningham will be one of the participants in a discussion at The Showroom gallery in North West London organised as part of the exhibition The Church Street Partners’ Gazette curated by Turkish artist Can Altay. Boundaries and Communities focuses on visible and invisible boundaries, how they are negotiated, neglected, transgressed, or forcefully maintained, in the contemporary metropolis. Other contributors include: Neil Bennett (Terry Farrell and Partners), Janna Graham (Serpentine Gallery), Chloe McCarthy (My City Too), Jonathan Mosley (architect) and a representative of the Migrants Resource Centre.

The Showroom is a short walk from Edgware Road underground station, which is served by the Hammersmith and City, Circle and Bakerloo lines.

Westminster English Colloquium #16: Apocalypse and its Discontents
Saturday 11th – Sunday 12th December 2010
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London

UPDATE: REGISTRATION FOR THIS EVENT IS UNFORTUNATELY NOW CLOSED

Registration is now open for the Apocalypse and its Discontents conference. Admission is free, but please send your name, email and affiliation to Monica Germana so as to give her an idea of numbers: m.germana@westminster.ac.uk

Keynote Speakers:
John R. Hall (University of California, Davis)
Adam Roberts (Royal Holloway)
Pat Wheeler (Hertfordshire)

David Cunningham’s essay ‘Capitalist Epics: Abstraction, Totality and the Theory of the Novel’, published in the September issue of Radical Philosophy, is now available online as a pdf on the journal’s Recent Highlights page of their website.

Download it here.

Update: David will be speaking on Philosophy, Capitalism and the Novel at the University of Dundee on Wednesday 24 November (4-6pm). He’ll also be in Glasgow on Thursday 25 giving a talk on the concept of modernism.

Wednesday 10^th November, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Joanne Murray (Birkbeck College, University of London)
“JG Ballard and New Brutalism”

Further details on the English Literature and Culture seminar series at Westminster here.

Monday 29 November 2010, 6.30pm
The Foyer, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

The Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at Westminster is holding a wine reception to celebrate the publication of a plethora of new books, many of which have been publicised already on this site: new books on creative writing and on Scottish women’s gothic by Matt Morrison and Monica Germana, respectively; the collection London Gothic, co-edited by Anne Witchard; and new editions of Mary Coleridge’s poetry and Mona Caird’s The Wing of Azrael by Simon Avery and Alexandra Warwick.

If you’d like to attend email Sharon Sinclair at: sinclas@westminster.ac.uk

For the interest, entertainment, and amusement of IMCC-types: A new publication of visual and material culture, a newspaper called Paperweight, has been launched in the last week.

Paperweight draws together writers, researchers, academics, enthusiasts, designers, artists and curators, with each issue taking a timely theme related to visual and material culture; contributors use this theme as a starting point, or an end point, or something in-between, to explore the territory from different vantage points. The aim for the publication is to offer an alternative space to the journal article, the book, the exhibition catalogue or the gallery; and to promote the work of visual and material culture to as broad an audience as possible. For more information see here.

The first issue of Paperweight, ‘Screen: The Birthday Issue’ is now available for sale via the newspaper’s website for an incredibly modest £3. To order a copy, see here. As a special introductory offer,Paperweight is also offering a subscription to issues 2 and 3 for only £4.

The contents of the first issue of Paperweight are:
Mervyn Heard on Smoke Screens / Øyvind Vågnes on the Cultural History of the Zapruder Film / Matt Lodder on Televising the Tattoo / Marquard Smith on Metadata / Howard Pensly on Boatology / Zoe Hendon on Sun and Screens / Laine Nooney on Female Gamers / Geo Takach on Writing Between Stage and Screen / Paul Micklethwaite on Screen Ecology / Scientific Encounters with Alexander Doust / Harriet Riches on Sally Mann’s ‘The Family and The Land’ / Rebecca Onion with Some Notes on Toys

The second issue, due for publication in April 2010, will take ‘ghosts’ as its theme. Ideas for possible submissions are invited through submissions@polygraphia.co.uk.

The Institute takes great pleasure in welcoming Dr Young-Paik Chun as Visiting Research Fellow 2010-11. Dr Chun is Reader in the Department of Art History and Theory at Hongik University, Seoul, Korea. She has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary British, European, and Korean art and visual culture, is the author of Cezanne’s Apples: Thinkers attracted by Cezanne (Seoul: Hangilart, 2008), editor of Twenty-Two Artists Talk through Generations: Self-Portrait of Korean Contemporary Art since the 1970s (2010), and has translated and co-translated books by Thomas Crow, Hal Foster, Griselda Pollock, Madan Sarup, and Kaja Silverman.

Her time as a Visiting Research Fellow is sponsored by the National Research Foundation of Korea. While in England, she will be conducting research on a project entitled ‘“Good Eye” Looking at the Other: Readership in Korea and British Contemporary Art in Each Other’s Terrain’ concerning cross-cultural and inter-cultural non-communicability and mis-recognition, focusing in particular on the case of British cultural perceptions of Korean art.

Our colleagues in the Contemporary China Centre at Westminster present a workshop on:

Changing Subjects: Male Sexualities and Masculinities in Asia
Friday 5 November 2010
Westminster Forum, University of Westminster, 5th floor, 32-38 Wells Street, London, W1T 3UW

The diverse new male sexual and masculine identities of Asia’s burgeoning economies suggest radical re-formations of the male subject in recent years. The figure of the cool, sleek and fashionable ‘metrosexual’ man, for instance, in his various national incarnations, adorns magazine covers and billboards across Asia’s megacities. At the same time, the figure of the gay male has emerged in countries across Asia, diffracted in various forms, through social and activist group efforts, gay dating websites, and commercial and cultural venues and events that celebrate queerness. Metrosexual, straight or gay, these figures inflect the assumptions, processes and practices of Asia’s modernities with a range of gendered characteristics that derive from transnational circulations of meaning, often associated with self-interested desires and consumer practices.

Male sexualities and masculinities in Asia, however, may not be what they appear to be from media images, particularly to the ‘Western’ eye. Ethnographic research shows that men who identify with attributes of transnational, gay, metrosexual and other identities also simultaneously identify with locally and culturally embedded notions of gender that interrupt the neat outlines of discursive renderings. Investigation of men’s subjectivities through what they say and do shows that what their performances mean to them can be very different from what the observer thinks. This workshop, then, seeks not only to contribute to understandings of how notions and practices of sexualities and masculinities mutually interact to produce and regulate the sexual, gendered male subjects/subjectivities emerging in contemporary Asia, but also to think beyond them to consider their relational effects on wider configurations of sexuality, gender and power within and across Asian countries and cultures.

MORNING SESSION
10:00–10:10     Welcome—Dr Derek Hird (University of Westminster)
10:10–11:25     Dr Will Schroeder (University of Manchester)
‘For Fun: Affect and Belonging in Contemporary Gay Beijing’
        Discussant: TBA        
11:25–11:40     Tea and Coffee Break
11:40–12:55     Dr Paul Boyce (Institute of Education, University of London)
‘The Object of Attention: Same-sex sexualities in small town India and the contemporary sexual subject’
        Discussant: Dr Akshay Khanna (University of Sussex)            
12:55–13:55     Lunch Break

AFTERNOON SESSION
13:55–15:10     Dr Jonathan Mackintosh (Birkbeck, University of London)
                ‘Historicising the “Feminisation of Masculinity” in Japan’
        Discussant: TBA
15:10–15:25     Tea and Coffee Break   
15:25–16:40     Dr Derek Hird (University of Westminster)
‘Contesting white-collar norms: Gay metrosexuals and homosocial yingchou in contemporary China’
        Discussant” Professor Henrike Donner (University of Goettingen)
16:40–16:45    Break
16:45–17:30     Summing up and closing discussion—Professor Harriet Evans (University of Westminster)

All welcome. This workshop is free. For enquiries or to reserve a place, please contact

Dr Derek Hird
Email: d.hird@westminster.ac.uk

Contemporary China Centre, Department of Modern and Applied Languages
University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW
http://www.westminster.ac.uk/asian-studies

Wednesday 27^th October, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Nick Hubble (Brunel University)
‘Naomi Mitchison: From Intermodernism to Science Fiction (via Mass-Observation)’

From her 1920s novels, influenced by Lawrence but aimed at the audience of Wells, to her subsequent deployment of modernist techniques for political ends, Naomi Mitchison may be considered a key intermodern writer. Her relentless pursuit of the ‘just society’, free from gender-based and sexual repression, made her a controversial figure even in that controversial decade. And her close literary associates of that decade – including Auden, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Stevie Smith, Wyndham Lewis and Walter Greenwood – suggest different ways of thinking about literary networks and cultural history in general. She was also a friend and supporter of Tom Harrison and Mass-Observation, for whom she kept a wartime diary. Nick Hubble’s paper analyses this intermodern work and investigates how it relates to Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), a forerunner of the 1970s feminist utopian science fiction of writers such as Ursula Le Guin, Marge Piercy and Joanna Russ.

Rescheduled from last semester. Further details here.

Wednesday 17 November 2010, 4-6pm
The Westminster Forum, 5^th Floor, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW

Professor Rebecca Karl (New York University)
‘Mao Zedong and China in the World’

Rebecca E. Karl is author of Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, and of Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History (both Duke University Press). Her most recent book, The Magic of Concepts: Philosophy and ‘the Economic’ in Twentieth Century China, is forthcoming.

Co-organised by The Contemporary China Centre and the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture

Videos from the Royal Academy event Ballardian Architecture in May, including David Cunningham’s talk on Pop art, Brutalism and Ballard’s prose of space, have now been posted online.

You can watch the videos here.

We are delighted to announce the publication of London Gothic, a new collection of essays from Continuum Books edited by our own Anne Witchard in conjunction with Lawrence Phillips at the University of Northampton. London has taken a central role in urban Gothic, from key canonic texts like Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Dracula through modern Gothic texts to the ‘tourist gothic’ of rebranded gastropubs and ghost tours. Featuring contributions from Fred Botting, Roger Luckhurst, Catherine Spooner, Julian Wolfreys and Westminster’s Emma McEvoy, among others, this is the first book to focus on Gothic representations of London as it is manifested in a variety of media and through diverse critical approaches.

Update: Anne will be speaking, alongside Mpalive Msiska, on Limehouse and ‘London’s Dark Half’ as part of Birkbeck’s Night Shift seminar series at 6pm on Friday 26 November 2010, 43 Gordon Square, room B03. Further details on the series here.

Spatial Justice: Radical Spatial Foundations
Friday 19 November 2010, 10am-6pm
The Pavilion, University of Westminster, 115 New Cavendish Street, London W1W

Our colleagues in the Centre for the Study of Democracy and the Westminster International Law & Theory Centre – and members of the IMCC’s executive advisory board – Chantal Mouffe and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos have organised a fabulous one-day workshop on spatial justice on November 19th.

Keynote Addresses: David Harvey and Doreen Massey

Roundtable with Mustafa Dikec, Engin Isin, Ruth Levitas, David Slater and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos

Admission free but places limited.
Please contact Andrea Pavoni at a.pavoni@my.westminster.ac.uk to reserve a place.

Simon Avery has edited a new edition of the poetry of the late-Victorian writer Mary Coleridge for Shearsman Press. Over the course of a quarter of a century, Coleridge wrote a substantial number of poems – lyrics, ballads, dramatic monologues, sonnets, elegies and occasional verse – which are often startling, idiosyncratic and challenging and which engage with contemporary issues as wide ranging as the politics of relationships and the position of women, religious doubt and spiritual experience, nature and the urban space, history, war, art and creativity. Clearly suggesting the influence of poets such as Robert Browning, Emily Brontë and Christina Rossetti, and paralleling the techniques of more modern poets like Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Mew and D.H. Lawrence, Coleridge’s poems have much to tell us about the shifting nature of poetry and poetics in the Victorian fin-de-siècle and early twentieth century. Certainly they deserve to be more widely known than they currently are.

Mary Coleridge: Selected Poems is the first edition of Coleridge’s poetry to appear for over fifty years. It includes ninety of her most compelling pieces, along with notes and a substantial introduction which considers the poems in their intellectual and cultural contexts.

Never one to rest of his laurels, soundscape-ist Joe Banks is out and about in the next six weeks. He’s underground in Hackney, improvising at The Chelsea Theatre on the Kings Road, and noise-making in Harrow. Catch him if you can!

‘When The Dust Settles’ – live electromagnetic sound installation, sculpture, performances and video by Melanie Clifford, Nicola Counsell, Disinformation, Esmeralda Munoz-Torrero + Zai Tang, Raagnagrok, Tai Shani, David J. Smith, The Stargazer’s Assistant, Neil Taylor, Sophie Tom and Amanda Whittle, in an extraordinary underground location…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ICHv7V5yIY
http://www.youtube.com/C4eye

The Bunker
18 Ashwin Street
London E8 3DL

Performances start 7.30pm
Thurs 7th Oct – 6.30 to 11.30pm
8th + 9th Oct – midday to 10pm
10th Oct – midday to 5pm
Admission Free

http://www.campbellworks.org/content/when-dust-settles-dalston-bunker

Bus – 30, 38, 67, 76, 149, 242, 243, 277, Train – Dalston Kingsland, Tube – Dalston Junction

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‘Film/ Music/ Other’ (Music Orbit Series 2) Disinformation and the Music Orbit Ensemble – Steve Beresford, Joel Bell, Francesca Thompson and Ben Crawley, improvising live scores to the films ‘Spellbound’, ‘Fire in the Eye’ and ‘Blackout’ by Disinformation. Programme includes “Electronic Labyrinth THX1138 4EB” – the first experimental short by director George Lucas and legendary sound-designer Walter Murch, the extraordinary ‘C’était un Rendezvous’ by the French Jewish-Algerian film-maker Claude Lelouch, ‘The Elephant and the Ship’ and ‘Monet’s Dream’ by artist and composer Ian Harris.

8pm Thurs 14th Oct 2010
The Chelsea Theatre
World’s End Place
Kings Road
London SW10 0DR
Admission £5

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=240635372337
http://www.musicorbit.co.uk/node/473

Presented by Music Orbit in association with Brunel University and the PRS Foundation. Bus – 22 or 11 heading west from Sloane Square tube (get off when you see the ‘World’s End Distillery’ on your left).

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Usurp Arts Lab – performance, electronic music, documentary film, painting, sculpture and installations by Daniel Ackie, Blue Daisy, Sarah Cramer, Disinformation, Katy O’Donovan, Sarah Fowler, Reynir Hutber, Dilaksky Kandasamy, Natalie Leer, Isabel & Sophia Moseley, Aleesha Nandhra, Sheena Patel, Alice Turner, Aoife Twomey, Simon Underwood and Rich Watson.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cd61OQ6HIG4

Launch party + performances – 7pm Fri 12 Nov
Closing party – 7pm Sun 28 Nov

Usurp Art Gallery & Studios
140 Vaughan Road
London HA1 4EB
http://www.usurp.org.uk/

Usurp Gallery is 2 mins walk from West Harrow tube, 20 mins from Baker Street taking the Met Line towards Uxbridge. Gallery open Thursdays to Sundays 2pm to 8pm.

Westminster English Colloquium #16: Apocalypse and its Discontents
Saturday 11th – Sundary 12th December 2010
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London

Keynote Speakers:
John R. Hall (University of California, Davis)
Adam Roberts (Royal Holloway)
Pat Wheeler (Hertfordshire)

While visions of destruction and fantasies of the end have always haunted humankind, the modern period has been characterised by a particularly intense sense of concern and fascination with the apocalypse, especially during the twentieth century.  Today we are surrounded by scenarios of imminent destruction and annihilation from politicians, scientists, religious groups, and writers, among others.  This conference aims to explore and question the widespread appeal of the apocalypse, as well as to consider narratives that either challenge or offer alternative responses.

Admission is free, but please send your name, email and affiliation to Monica Germana so as to give her an idea of numbers: m.germana@westminster.ac.uk

Our colleagues on the MA Photography Studies in the School of Media, Art and Design, based in Harrow, have organized an excellent Open Photography Lecture Series on Wednesdays this semester. They are free, but please arrive early since places are limited.

29 Sept, 2pm     Karen Knorr, Guest Photographer/Artist Talk
Lecture Theatre 2

6  Oct., 6pm     Kobena Mercer, ‘Questioning the Cross-Cultural in Contemporary Art’
Lecture Theatre One (LT1)

13 Oct, 6pm     Victor Burgin, ‘A Place to Read-a recent projection work for Istanbul’
Lecture Theatre One (LT1)

20 Oct, 6pm     Michael Newman, ‘John Stezaker and the Image’ 
Lecture Theatre One (LT1)

27 Oct, 6pm      Renata Salecl, ‘Identification in times of uncertainty’
Lecture Theatre One (LT1)

24 Nov, 1pm     Paul Seawright, Guest Documentary Photographer/Artist Talk
Room TBC