In these uncertain times, it will be the arts that serve as artifacts and bear witness to our current realities when we are no longer around to tell these stories. With the visual nature of our current society, the visual is more important and more powerful than ever. While the term was coined in 2009 by Betsy Greer, this work has long and deep roots in community-based efforts of arts and activism. This study conducts a visual exploration and analysis of two craftivism acts, the 1985 We Are the World music video and the 2025 Super Bowl performance. Using a thematic analysis of craftivism and a critical visual analysis we look at these two seminal moments in craftivism, and how it expands our notion of craftivism and the need for the visual in promoting awareness, advocating for marginalized communities, and moving towards social justice across time, place, space, and modalities.
This campfire session examines how Medusa tattoos function as powerful visual testimonies of resilience and transformation. Through a critical literacy lens, we will cover research that explores the reclamation of Medusa, once viewed as a monstrous figure, as an emblem of survivor empowerment. Drawing on frameworks from Bhabha's third space theory and Rosenblatt's transactional theory, the study investigates how tattoo artists and survivors collaborate to create meaningful visual narratives. Situated within the conference theme, this research illuminates how these tattoos serve as contemporary sacred artifacts in healing rituals, transforming bodies into sites of agency and collective resistance. By analyzing the collaborative meaning-making between artists and survivors, this study contributes to understanding visual literacy's role in trauma recovery while legitimizing tattooing as a sophisticated multimodal literacy practice. Together, we will also examine additional tattoo content to extend the concept of tattooing as a critical literacy practice.
Kamishibai (literally "paper plays") are a staple of early childhood education in Japan, often presenting stories about traditional festivals and events. The presenter shows the audience a series of text-free pictures while performing the narrative and dialogue. The kamishibai images allow considerable flexibility in performance. Traditional motifs in the images make them understandable to a pre-literate audience. They also create a shared visual language of cultural symbols that the children will hold in common, and help sustain lifelong interest in traditional events and festivals. This presentation will examine how kamishibai help to reflect, shape, and create images of traditional festivals and events, how the flexibility of the presentation format creates a richer visual language than anime and film, and how they inspire children to create their own visual interpretations. The campfire portion will encourage participants to consider how kamishibai might be used to present traditions in their own culture.
