IVSA AGM Thursday, 23 July, 2020
Dear Visualistas,
What a year this has been. And we’re just barely past the halfway mark! Time likely feels very weird right now. Yet no matter how strange its current behavior (or rather, our perception of its behavior), there’s no question that it’s doing what it’s always done: passing. It’s also still doing its main job of preventing everything from happening all at once, but that’s another discussion for another … time.
We received many high quality nominations for the IVSA’s Rieger and Prosser Awards, and we are delighted to announce the winners of this year’s Awards.
As an international organization, the IVSA recognizes that government sanctioned and systemic racial violence is not exclusively a U.S. problem. We strongly condemn and oppose systems, institutions, and organizations everywhere that maintain or extend any and all forms of white supremacy and colonial and racist violence. Our current state of furious grief encompasses not just the gross injustices occurring in the USA but also the current stripping of rights from citizens of Hong Kong and the authoritarian regimes being installed in Hungary and elsewhere.
The Visual Studies Editorial Team, and the International Visual Sociology Association, strongly condemns and opposes systems, institutions, and organisations that maintain or extend any and all forms of white supremacy and colonial and racist violence. As part of our commitment to take action, we are calling for cover image submissions on the theme of Anti-Racism. One image will be selected to feature on the cover of the next issue of Visual Studies, and we will showcase other images submitted on the IVSA’s website.
IVSA Members receive a monthly newsletter called “What’s Up” because we want to support the wider community at this time we are sharing this to none members as well this month. Please consider becoming a member today.
Dear Visualistas,
Of all the “What’s Up with IVSA” we have written in the past couple of years, this is probably the most peculiar. For the first time, most of us no matter where we are, are doing the same thing … staying at home. Confinement, though, cannot take away our visual curiosity about the world. We just have to put in practice what Charles Wright Mills suggested back in 1959: to trigger our sociological imagination, to scape our own circumstances and look at the wider picture.
