Camera Education: Photographic Histories of Visual literacy, Schooling, and the Imagination

Photography has been entangled with education processes for nearly two centuries. For much of that time, photography has been used to communicate information, cement knowledge, and train individuals, groups, and machines alike in visual literacy and the meaning of cultural customs. In the late twentieth century, photography became absorbed into academia as a subject of study. In more recent years, photographic historians and scholars have also begun to consider photography, photographs, and photographic practices as a means to tap into diverse historical processes at large. This paradigm shift has also resulted in various instances in which photography studies has been incorporated into the academic curriculum as a prism through which historical, social, cultural, and political phenomena can be studied.

In its 8th Annual Conference, the Photographic History Research Centre (PHRC) invites applicants to consider the role of photography in education as well as particular histories of intersections between the two. Themes may include (but are not limited to):

- Photography in schooling programmes
- Photography and visual literacy
- The development of photographic education
- Photographs in the classroom
- Photography as an auxiliary to art, archaeological and historical education
- Education and the photographic industry
- Photographic technologies in education systems
- Photographs as participants in familial/domestic education processes
- Photography in social and political propaganda
- Photography-based teaching/learning/training
- Uses of photographic technologies in artificial intelligence
- Digital humanities and photographic history
- The influence of photographic vision on memory, remembering and the imagination
- Educational uses of photographs on New Media platforms
- Photography and “how-to” guides
- The material culture of photography education

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to phrcdmu.ac.uk by 7 January 2020. Include your name, affiliation and contact details in the same document - but please do not send a cv.

For updates and information about the conference keynote speakers, please visit the conference website at: https://photographichistory.wordpress.com/annual-conference-2020/