Today we welcome our second CIMS Colloquium guest, Dr. Alix Beeston, whose research exemplifies a set of critical frameworks for visual analysis. Feminist and speculative methods are central to Dr. Beeston’s work, which bridges traditional scholarship and popular writing. Dinner afterward for today’s student hosts!
NOON: CIMS COLLOQUIUM with Alix Beeston, 330 Fisher Bennett Hall, “Image Encounters and the Feminism of Photography”
VISITOR, 4-5:00pm: Alix Beeston, Senior Lecturer, English, Cardiff University
To Read for Today:
- Skim the description and table of contents for Gillian Rose’s classic Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, 5th ed. (SAGE, 2016). This text could serve as a valuable future reference if your own work involves visual analysis.
- Check out Professor Beeston’s Object Women project on Instagram. Please also read this description of the project on her personal website, as well as this conversation between Beeston, Alexandra KIngston-Reese, and Cadence Kinsey about IG: “On Instagram: An Intimate, Immediate Conversation,” ASAP/Journal (February 29, 2020).
- ASAP/J, btw, is a fantastic venue for short(ish)-form writing about the arts, media, and design; I published a piece on interspecies typography 🍃🔠 this past spring 🙂
- Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon, “Pathways to the Feminist Incomplete: An Introduction, a Theory, a Manifesto,” in Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film (University of California Press, 2023): 1-30.
- Alix Beeston, “Kathleen Collins… Posthumously,” in Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film (University of California Press, 2023): 245-65.
The Broader Context for Beeston’s Work:
- The work of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay; this short 2023 Infinity Award video from the International Center for Photography offers a window into Azoulay’s work [video: 13:36].
- The work of Tina Campt; read “Break This Down: ‘Listening to Images,’” Barnard (September 14, 2017) and listen to “Tina Campt on Listening to Images,” Ideas on Fire (May 16, 2018) [podcast: 27:11] – or, if you want something a bit more contemplative, “Tina Campt,” Helga (Park Avenue Armory / WNYC Studios, July 28, 2021) [podcast: 49:43].
- We might regard Campt’s “listening to images” as a synaesthetic — image-to-sound — method of close-reading archival images. Carter Mathes extends Campt’s work in “Black Ecological Vibrations,” Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture 3:3 (2020): 330-8.