Sasha Welland (Anthropology & Women Studies)

Yomi Braester (Comparative Literature & Program in Cinema Studies)

Danny Hoffman (Anthropology)

James Tweedie (Comparative Literature & Program in Cinema Studies)

An invitation to participate
We invite all faculty and graduate students who share an interest in visual theory and practice to join this research cluster.

Graduate students can enroll in the Visual Praxis Collective for one unit of credit per quarter through ANTH 600 (contact Sasha Welland for an instructor enrollment code).

• Students are encouraged to enroll for the entire 2007-2008 academic year.


• To receive credit, they must attend all regularly scheduled collective meetings and serve as primary co-organizers for one of our three quarterly film festivals. (Co-organizers will work in faculty / student teams).


• Participants will have the opportunity to workshop their visual research prospectuses or projects-in-progress; help develop and organize events that cross disciplinary and academic-public borders; and meet with visiting speakers.

Visual Praxis Collective ORCA (for VPC members)

Autumn 2007
Winter 2008
Spring 2008

Regular work-in-progress workshops & planning sessions

Wednesday, April 16, 2008
5:00-7:00 pm
911 Media Arts Center, 402 9th Ave. N. Directions
Tour and Discussion with either Misha Neininger, Executive Director, or Tina Aufiero, Education Director

Wednesday, April 30, 2008
5:00-7:00 pm
Communications 202
Group Meeting: Megacities Works-in Progress VPC members will discuss works-in-progress that address the following: What does a global megacity look like? In representing these proliferating social spaces, how can we move beyond conventional city imagery?

Presentation and discussion with artist/curator Donald Fels.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008
5:00-7:00 pm
Communications 226
Project development workshop with artist/curator Donald Fels.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008
3:30-5:00 pm
Communications 120
"Iterations of the Impossible"
Jonathan Beller (Critical & Visual Studies, Pratt Institute)
Lecture will be based on chapter from his book, Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalist Struggle, and the World-Media System.

Wedensday, May 28, 2008
11:30 am - 1:30 pm
Thomson 317
Seminar with Jonathan Beller (Critical & Visual Studies, Pratt Institute)
"The Aesthetics and Politics of Posthumanity"

Professor Beller requests that seminar participants read the following article to prepare for the seminar:
"Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalist Struggle, and the World-Media System"

"Picturing the Global Megacity" Film Festival
Co-sponsored by the Institute for Transnational Studies, the Visual Praxis Collective’s spring 2008 program is focused on the theme "Picturing the Global Megacity" and will examine urban cultures of globalization in the Global South through the lens of visual media.

How do filmmakers, photographers, artists, and visual documentarians represent proliferating urban spaces in ways that challenge a solely economic model of the "global city" as a command point for transnational capitalism?

How does the increasing ubiquity of visual technologies and their ever-expanding range of circulation influence how inhabitants of global megacities map their social worlds?

How do visual economies order, influence, and connect global megacities from Africa to Asia?

We believe that working across disciplines to examine the interplay of ethnographic and cinematic impulses will enable new ways of understanding the role of cultural flows in globalization.

Wednesday, April 2, 2008
5:00-7:00 pm
Communications 120

"Picturing the Global Megacity" Film Screening

Film: A selection of the following, depending on availability:

Ordinary Lives, Sheetal Agarwal (2005)
A documentary set in a slum in Mumbai, with the lives of a family of ten living in a 180 square feet shack at its center. The documentary attempts to highlight the social, cultural, infrastructure and political issues that affect the lives of ordinary people in Mumbai and their juxtaposition with the efforts to make Mumbai a modern city. Details

Tree, Shelly Niro (2006)
Shelley Niro is a Kanien'kehaka (Mohawk) artist who exhibits her art internationally. In her video Tree, she presents Mother Earth walking through her realm. She visits a city. She weeps. She feels violated. Tree pays homage to the "Keep America Beautiful" campaign showing on television across the continent in the early 1970s. Iron Eyes Cody appeared as the stereotypical Indian as he looks around the environment and sees that the landscape is no longer being cared for and that there is little respect for it. Details

Lagos/Koolhaas, Bregtje van der Haak (2002)
For the past four years Rem Koolhaas and students from The Harvard Project on the City have come to Lagos regularly to research the type of urban environment that is produced by explosive population growth. The Project on the City is framed by two concepts: academia's bewilderment with new forms of accelerated urbanization in developing regions and the maelstrom of redevelopment in existing urban areas; and, second, the failure of the design professions to adequately cope with these changes. Details

Manufactured Landscapes, Jennifer Baichwal (2006)
Edward Burtynsky is internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of nature transformed by industry. Manufactured Landscapes – a stunning documentary by award winning director Jennifer Baichwal – follows Burtynsky to China, as he captures the effects of the country’s massive industrial revolution. This remarkable film leads us to meditate on human endeavour and its impact on the planet. Details

Friday, April 11, 2008
3:30-5:30 pm
Communications 120

"Picturing the Global Megacity" Film Screening

Film: One of the following, depending on availability:

Manila in the Claws of Neon, Lino Brocka (1975)
Gripped in the film's subtitular 'claws of darkness', country-boy Julio seeks his lost village sweetheart, lured to the big city by a procuress. Slitting the underbelly of Manila (Brocka's true protagonist), he moves through shanty towns, street markets, building sites, brothels, and cheap Chinese cafes, all throbbing with poisonous life: the sin and cynicism of poverty under President Marcos' regime, captured with a raw immediacy against which the golden, sun-splashed flashbacks of pastoral romance seem like the flimsiest of painted veils. Details

Squatterpunk, Khavn De La Cruz (2006)
Fresh from winning the grand jury prize at the recently concluded Cinemanila International Film festival, Squatterpunk tackles the life of youth in urban poor communities living the punk lifestyle. The film is set in the slums of Manila where law enforcement is rare. The camera follows the lives of the youth as they scavenge the garbage beach for a living while still managing to play around. Images of riot and poverty are set against the background of a loud musical score that makes the film wild, pulsating and certainly punk. Yet despite the exploitative connotations of its title, "Squatterpunk" casts a tenderly poetic eye at the squalor of Philippine society. Details

Regular work-in-progress workshops & planning sessions
Simpson Center Conference Room (Communications 202) unless otherwise indicated.

Wednesdays, 5-7 pm
(Jan. 16, 30 / Feb. 13 / Mar. 5)

January 30: "On Maps"

February 13: "Websites"
This session includes a web design skills workshop. The group will also project and discuss websites that serve as models for how to use online space for projects and research. In preparation for this workshop, participants are asked to post information and URLS for favorite websites to the VPC ORCA.
This will be an opportunity for VPC members to discuss their own research topics in relation to visual theory and practice.

March 5: "Cityscapes/Senses of Place"

Location: Communications 226

VPC members will present short (5-10 min.) visual essays related to their own work that address cities or place in some way.

Regular work-in-progress workshops & planning sessions
Simpson Center Conference Room (Communications 202) unless otherwise indicated.
Download e-flyer (pdf)

Wednesdays, 5-7 pm
(Oct. 3, 17 / Nov. 14 / Dec. 5)

Collecting the Museum: a film festival

Friday, November 2
Henry Art Gallery Auditorium

Download flyer (pdf)
Download poster (pdf)

How do museums shape collective memory? What are the politics and possibilities of different forms of visual exhibition? This film festival presents a variety of cinematic and documentary takes on aesthetic, archival, and ethnographic impulses in museum practices of collection and display.

9:30-11:30 am: Histories of Display

Bontoc Eulogy, Marlon Fuentes, 1995

In Search of the Hamat’sa: A Tale of Headhunting, Aaron Glass, 2007

12:45-2:15 pm: Sites of Memory

Toute la Mémoire du Monde, Alain Resnais, 1956

The Phantom Museum: Random Forays into the Vaults of Sir Henry Wellcome’s Medical Collection, Quay Brothers, 2003

Erasing Memory: The Cultural Destruction of Iraq, Suzy Salamy, 2004

2:30-3:45 pm: Artifactual Journeys

In and Out of Africa, Ilisa Barbash & Lucien Taylor, 1992

Fang: An Epic Journey, Susan Vogel, 2001

4:00-5:30 pm: Roundtable Discussion on Curatorial Practice
with members of the UW/EMP team behind American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music

UW Guest Curators: Marisol Berríos-Miranda (Latin American Studies), Michelle Habell-Pallán (Women Studies), Shannon Dudley (Ethnomusicology)

UW Guest Associate Curators: Robert Carroll (Ph.C. Ethnomusicology), Francisco Orozsco (Doctoral Candidate, Ethnomusicology)

Experience Music Project, Director of Curatorial Affairs: Jasen Emmons
Wonder Mine Designs, Exhibition Designer: Ken Burns

"Memory and Public Art as Critical Pedagogies: A Museum of Memory in Medellín, Colombia"

Monday, November 26
3:30-5:00 pm
Communications 120
Download flyer (pdf)

Pilar Riaño-Alcalá (Social Work and Latin American Studies, University of British Columbia)

This lecture is sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities and the Departments of Anthropology and Women Studies.

Download the VPC brochure (pdf)

This research cluster explores forms of visual praxis in research, pedagogy, and public scholarship. Visual Praxis Collective participants meet regularly to workshop visual projects by faculty and graduate students and to curate quarterly film and video festivals that feature a guest speaker and focus on incorporating visual media in teaching and curriculum development.

At a time when imaging technologies are increasingly ubiquitous and when so much knowledge transmission relies upon video, photography, and digital media, critical and engaged inquiry into the use of visual practices is vital to contemporary scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. However, most forms of academic evaluation—from graduate student comprehensive exams to faculty tenure reviews—continue to privilege textual analysis and production. We seek to address this gap by examining how visual work can add to the scholarly record, contribute to theoretical debate and development, lead to research innovation, enhance teaching, and engage diverse audiences in research.

Visual Anthropology Working Group
Visual Documentation Praxis