Visual Culture Studies at the 2009 ASA Annual Meeting

I'm writing to inform you of the many sessions and events related to
visual culture studies at the upcoming Annual Meeting of the American
Studies Association, which will be held in Washington, DC, November 5-8,
2009.

The Visual Culture Caucus (VCC) is sponsoring a session on Thursday,
November 5, "Visualizing the Urban Jungle and the Urban Oasis: Cities in
the American Environmental Imaginary." Organized by Catherine Zuromskis
(University of New Mexico), the papers in this session will draw from
"the
disciplines of art history, geography, cultural studies, and literary
studies" to "foreground the various visual practices that produce, and
reproduce… conceptions of urban nature." At the bottom of this email
is a
list of the 40+ other sessions on the 2009 ASA program tagged with the
keyword "visual culture studies." You may search the complete meeting
schedule at http://www.theasa.net/annual_meeting.

The VCC has also organized a series of events on Friday, November 6. The
first of these is its annual business meeting, which will be held at the
Renaissance Hotel, 10-11:45am. Current and prospective members of the
caucus are encouraged to attend. Following the business meeting, several
sessions related to visual culture will take place in the McEvoy
Auditorian of the National Portrait Gallery/Smithsonian American Art
Museum (Eighth and F Streets, a short walk from the meeting
headquarters);
these are noted on the list below. The VCC and Material Culture Caucus
will then host a joint reception at the NPG/SAAM, 6-7pm.

Finally, on Saturday, November 7, Helen Langa (American University) will
be leading a tour of the exhibition "1934: A New Deal for Artists" at
the
SAAM, 11:30-1:00pm. To attend you must register online at
http://www.theasa.net/annual_meeting. Space is limited to 20. For a
description of the exhibition, go to
http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/archive/2009/1934/.

If you have questions about the VCC or any of the above events, please
see
http://www.theasa.net/caucus_visual/ or contact me directly at
tsheehanrci.rutgers.edu. I look forward to seeing you in Washington!

Tanya Sheehan
Chair of the VCC Programming Committee
Assistant Professor of American Art and Visual Culture
Rutgers University

----THURSDAY, NOV 5----

10:00-11:45am Visualizing the Urban Jungle and the Urban Oasis: Cities
in the American Environmental Imaginary

10:00-11:45am Interpreting Images, Icons, and Intent: The White House
Residence as Cultural Sphere

10:00-11:45am Oil Culture: Representations of the Petroleum Industry

10:00-11:45am Training Sights: The Visual Pedagogies of American
Citizenship

10:00-11:45am Violent Belonging

12:00-1:45pm Photography: Imaging the Future of Race in America

12:00-1:45pm Internment, Redress, and Reparations

2:00-3:45pm Haiti as Icon in Transnational Discourse

2:00-3:45pm Mothering the State

2:00-3:45pm Transnational Imagined Communities

4:00-5:45pm Everybody's Disabled Nowadays: Reconfiguring American
Studies through Disability

4:00-5:45pm Vulnerable Bodies, Ecological Citizenship, and the
Making of
Environmental Publics

----FRIDAY, NOV 6----

8:00-9:45am Staging Citizenship in the Progressive Era

8:00-9:45am Contemporary Displacements of Humanitarianisms

8:00-9:45am Pasts that Refuse to Go Away

8:00-9:45am Intimate Responses to Empire

10:00-11:45am Performing Indian Identities

10:00-11:45am Popular Fronts: Artists and Activism in the 1930s

10:00-11:45am Visions of Anti-Racism, 1890-1940

10:00-11:45am Visual Distortions of the Environment

12:00-1:45pm A Nation of Bodies or Embodying the Nation

12:00-1:45pm Black Man, White Man, Commander-in-Chief: Barack Obama in
Popular Visual Culture (NPG/SAAM)

12:00-1:45pm Visual Culture in the Americas

2:00-3:45pm Danger and Beauty: Affect, Aesthetics, and Belonging in
Filipino America

2:00-3:45pm Frontier Encounters: Citizenship and Belonging in Western
Photographic Portraits (NPG/SAAM)

2:00-3:45pm Feeling like you Belong: Sensory Perception, Experience,
and
Group Identity

2:00-3:45pm Framing America's Hard Edges: Photographs, Health Imagery
and the (De)Construction of Racialized Belonging

4:00-5:45pm Visual Citizenship: A Roundtable Discussion (NPG/SAAM)

4:00-5:45pm Exporting American Dreams

----SATURDAY, NOV 7----

8:00-9:45am Grotesque Masculinities in Contemporary American Art and
Culture

8:00-9:45am Something to Declare: Latina/o and Caribbean Place-Making
Performances

8:00-9:45am Spatializing Culture: The Production of Difference in the
Built Environment

10:00-11:45am Sustaining Transpacific Studies: Empire, Desert, and
Circuit

10:00-11:45am Laboring Citizens

12:00-1:45pm The Practice of Labor Photography: A Conversation with
Earl
Dotter and Mark Rogovin

2:00-3:45pm Bad Citizenship and Good Games: Video Gaming, Criminality
and Citizenship

2:00-3:45pm James Baldwin and Devil's Work: Screening Citizenship and
National Belonging in Harlem, London, and Istanbul

2:00-3:45pm Regimes of Memory and the Power of Forgetting

2:00-3:45pm The City as History

4:00-5:45pm Racial Inbetweeness: Subtle Constructions of Asian
Americanness

---SUNDAY, NOV 8---

8:00-9:45am American Studies 2.0: Student Learning through Documentary
Video Production in the American Studies Classroom

8:00-9:45am Practices of Community and Belonging: Teaching Graphic
Narratives in a post-9/11 World

10:00-11:45am Women and Belonging: Gender and Citizenship in the Realm
of Public Memory

10:00-11:45am Visualizing Difference, Consuming Identity

10:00-11:45am The Visual West and American Identity: Constructing
Nationalism through the Western Landscape, 1860-1985