"The study of pictorial cuneiform tablets reveals the interplay between early writing and visual culture in ancient Mesopotamia. Artefacts such as the Blau Monuments, Babylonian Map of the World or the creation mythos Enuma Elish, exemplify humanity's drive to visually express abstract religious concepts. These early compositions, mostly stored on tablets, provide insights into the connection between ancient visual language, depicting rituals, and spiritual belief systems.
The evolution of religious representation in cuneiform, mirrors the development of the writing system, transitioning from pictographic depictions to symbolic visual elements integrated within the script. Spanning millennia, cuneiform's transition from pictographic to phonetic system introduced a level of abstraction that paved the way for more efficient and adaptable scripts. This innovation influenced the development of alphabetic systems, as the concept of representing sounds rather than objects became central to later writing systems, further interconnecting the use of visual communication in conveying abstracted religious reasoning. "
Through critical visual autoethnographic methodologies, two researchers reflect on their various experiences within interracial marriages as sacred spaces and the negotiation of being shaped by the historical colonial affects of assimilation, sense of identity and belonging, and appreciation of diversity. Through multimodal visuals, we capture the sense making process of transforming our marriage as sacred spaces for reclamation of the self through food. More specifically, we explore our acts of incorporating cultural foods from our respective cultures into our marriage as intentional acts of asserting and reconnecting what may have been lost due to the “mixing” and sharing of different cultures or races within the marriage. In this context, food represents loss, memory, reclamation of our sacred selves. It represents the disruption of cultural erasure through the act of ensuring, and sometimes neglecting cultural continuity through the cuisine we prepare. Our visuals serve as evidence of festive acts in the sacred spaces of the home, marriage, and the kitchen. We position our work as powerful assertions of decentering colonial permanency and invitation to cultural continuity through reflexivity, taste, persistence and reclamation.
This Campfire session explores the use of altar-making as a visual and ritual practice in environmental education. Drawing inspiration from Día de Muertos and sacred commemoration traditions, the session invites educators and scholars to consider how altars—honoring endangered species, climate-impacted places, or ecological loss—can serve as powerful tools for civic reflection and hope. A brief presentation will share examples and theoretical framing, followed by a collaborative dialogue where participants will reflect on grief, resilience, and visual storytelling in climate pedagogy. Together, we will explore how classrooms might become sacred spaces of ecological witness—where images and objects carry memory, meaning, and a call to action.
" This presentation examines the convergence of Zen koan practice and contemporary collage art, exploring how visual paradoxes can serve as contemplative and pedagogical tools. Drawing parallels between traditional verbal koans that frustrate logical thought to provoke insight, the session demonstrates how specific collage techniques—impossible juxtapositions, scale disruptions, spatial contradictions, and contextual inversions—create ""visual koans"" that bypass habitual perception patterns.
The presentation shares practical applications of these paradoxical images in educational settings, illustrating how they develop visual literacy skills that transcend analytical approaches. Through documentation of classroom exercises and student responses, the session explores how visual koans cultivate comfort with ambiguity and multiple interpretations, extending critical thinking beyond art appreciation.
Participants will engage with examples of deliberately contradictory collage works and discuss adaptation strategies for various educational contexts. The session bridges traditional Zen awakening practices with contemporary visual culture, offering theoretical frameworks and practical techniques for creating images that function as catalysts for transformative learning experiences.
Drawing upon the framework of culturally responsive and trauma-informed pedagogies, this research project will explore how diverse fourth grade students from a variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds and with wide range of English Language proficiency negotiate the writing process through print-based and visual forms of literacy. The purpose of the study is to explore the effects of visualization strategy on written personal narratives of diverse fourth graders in a school setting. The school teacher will receive professional development in integrating culturally responsive and trauma-informed pedagogies to teach visualization strategies to fourth graders. We hypothesized that by teaching students to interpret visual information and visual simulations and engaging the students in creating a visual symbol representing a life experience, a cultural value, or an emotion/feeling, we would enable students to generate personal narratives rich in detail.
"This study explores Diego Rivera’s murals as intersections of visual art, sacred space, and cultural resistance. Drawing from cultural semiotics, postcolonial theory, and thinkers like Walter Benjamin and Mikhail Bakhtin, it argues that Rivera’s work transforms public spaces into sites of collective memory and national identity. His murals, particularly The History of Mexico, challenge Eurocentric visual narratives by centering indigenous and mestizo figures, aligning with Walter Mignolo’s concept of decolonial aesthetics. These artworks function not only as political statements but also echo the symbolic language of sacred and festive traditions, such as Día de los Muertos. Rivera uses vibrant colors and monumental forms to create a visual discourse that bridges the material and spiritual, inviting communal reflection. His murals are positioned as hyperreal constructs that both reflect and shape history, offering a participatory space for cultural reclamation. Ultimately, Rivera’s art exemplifies how visual literacy can transform public imagery into a force for identity and resistance.
From a miniature brick at the "Alasitas" fair to a sugar toad burned in a Mesita offering, Bolivia is a land where objects are not just things—they are ways of being. This presentation explores 31 ritual and festive objects collected across Bolivia’s regions to offer a window into its symbolic, oral, and multisensory cultures. Each object tells a story to understand how sacred imagery permeates everyday life. Rooted in Indigenous languages like Quechua and Aymara, which resist written systems, these traditions challenge Western ideas of literacy and design. Through high-quality photographs—and, where possible, physical artifacts—attendees will be invited to see and feel the worldviews in these material stories.
Saturday November 1, 2025 10:15am - 10:40am MDT TBA
This paper examines the video performances of Pola Weiss and Ana Mendieta as ritual acts that blur the boundaries between the material and spiritual realms. Both artists use their bodies as symbolic tools within charged spaces—natural landscapes, domestic interiors, and ruins—transforming them into sites of sacred expression. Their videos function not just as documentation, but as visual rituals that summon ancestral, feminist, and elemental presences. In line with the theme The Power of Images in Sacred and Festive Spaces, this research explores how their imagery fosters transcendental experience and collective memory. It also highlights how their work contributes to conversations on decolonial aesthetics, feminist spirituality, and the emotional power of images in ritual practice. Through embodied performance, Weiss and Mendieta create images that are both personal and universal—icons of resistance, identity, and spiritual transformation.
How to account for what occurs, what is encountered and what happens if we continue walking beyond some commonly travelled place? The Walking Oracle, born out of the desire to provide a random and playful reading of my experience of walking as artistic research in different continents and seasons since 2021, is composed of 30 images and 30 texts that can be used to produce visual constellations, inviting those present to explore themes around body, territory, time, failure, risk and collective research. The Walking Oracle is part of the long term project El Estado de las Cos(t)as. IG: @el_estado_de_las_costas
Saturday November 1, 2025 10:15am - 11:10am MDT TBA
"At the Otago Polytechnic’s School of Design, we aim to foster positive bicultural thinking through the development of dual visual literacies. With cultural competency in mind, our visual communication programme enables learners to explore indigenous (Māori) culture in various ways, including aspects of symbolism, ritual and ancestral connections. This approach addresses our responsibility as treaty partners as well as an expectation for designers to use their craft to promote “cross-cultural understanding” and a “sense of belonging” (McGuiness, 2020).
To share our insights, we present two case studies that illustrate techniques used to develop capabilities around cultural visual expression in Aotearoa New Zealand. The first looks at efforts to develop Māori visual literacy by connecting students with place, through the practice of interactive visual journalling. The second focuses on the application of evolving knowledge to an event celebrating a Māori-observed phenomenon called Matariki, which has discernible parallels to Día de los Muertos. "
"This paper explores the implementation of visual literacy components within the newly reformed National Curriculum for Primary Education in Slovakia. It offers a comparative perspective by juxtaposing the Slovak approach with the Framework Educational Programme of the Czech Republic. Both documents represent state-level curricular frameworks that reflect the respective countries’ educational policies as well as differing strategies for fostering transversal competencies within compulsory education.
Through selected comparative examples, the presentation demonstrates the cross-curricular nature of visual literacy and its integration into learning objectives and performance standards – i.e., what pupils are expected to know and be able to do – as well as the formulation of content specifications. Particular attention is paid to how visual literacy is conceptualized as a systemic educational goal, and how it shapes expectations placed on pedagogical practice. "
Saturday November 1, 2025 10:45am - 11:10am MDT TBA
While there have been significant changes to image-making processes following the digital turn, the female body continues to play a central role in the critical examination of the politics of representation. From Black Lives Matter to climate justice movements and beyond, visual portrayals of the female form are both shaped by and continue to influence contemporary social imaginaries. Engaging with the concept of the male gaze and multiple forms of counter-visuality, this paper will employ social semiotic analysis of how the female body functions visually as a site of resistance in digital media. This essay argues that images of the female form which provide counter-hegemonic narratives contribute to the social imaginaries of activist movements seeking new futures. In doing so, these images contribute to a broader visual literacy discourse which examines the role of imagery as a form of public pedagogy, challenging us to consider new ways of seeing.
Saturday November 1, 2025 11:30am - 11:55am MDT TBA
"Superhero cartoons, long a mainstay of children’s television programming, convey cultural ideas about morality and justice that, in the US at least, often reinscribe dominant, Western ideologies about crime and criminality. However, unlike traditional superheroes, the heroism presented in Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur is grounded in the afrocentric philosophies of ubuntu - finding strength in community - and sankofa - finding strength in the past. For members of the African diaspora, especially those who are the descendants of slavery, these two concepts are deeply rooted in the need to feel connected to the past as well as to fight against present negative narratives about Black culture.
A thematic content analysis of the show as a whole reveals Moon Girl’s potential to provide an accessible counter narrative to dominant, Western, Eurocentric messages about culture, community, crime, and criminality that offers children fictive space to think about nuanced and complex questions of morality. The show also provides excellent fodder for critical conversations and an opportunity for teachers and adults to promote critical media literacy in kids. "
Saturday November 1, 2025 11:30am - 11:55am MDT TBA
Can students develop visual and ethical literacy by playing a tabletop card game? The Photo Ethics Card Game challenges players to navigate real-world ethical dilemmas in photography and visual media. Through engaging scenarios and discussions, players critically analyze how images are captured, used, and shared, considering issues such as consent, manipulation, and context. The goal is to develop a deeper understanding of visual ethics while exploring different perspectives in a fun and interactive way. In the game, images are used to deepen students' understanding of shared human experiences. These images contain complex meanings and are meant to provoke profound emotional responses in the player, all while dealing with scenarios in an ethical manner. Led by game designers and researchers, this campfire session will inform attendees about the Photo Ethics Card Game while testing their usefulness in a facilitated setting.
Saturday November 1, 2025 11:30am - 12:25pm MDT TBA
Framed by a critical multimodal literacy framework (Cappello et al., 2019), validation theory (Rendon, 1994), and othering (Bhabha, 1990), our work explores the power of visual representations of marginalized bodies in sacred and public spaces, centering diversely presenting bodies as sites of reverence and resistance. Drawing from personal experiences of navigating various social contexts (school, work, and home), we visually reflect on the tensions between joy and shame, visibility and erasure, sacredness and stigma, and connect our experiences to our indigenous ancestors. Through musically enhanced self-inquiry (Ramirez, 2024) we produce visual multimodalities (MM) to demonstrate (1) power in self-reflexive practices that communicate self love and celebration, (2) understanding of bodily worth and sacredness and (3) how MM can help shape our perceptions and attitudes toward diverse bodies. We encourage educators and students to engage in visual MM to foster meaningful dynamics in and beyond the classroom.
Saturday November 1, 2025 12:00pm - 12:25pm MDT TBA
"In a time when images play an increasingly central role in both everyday life and education, it becomes essential to explore their impact and pedagogical potential. This paper offers a comparative analysis of national curricula in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, with a focus on how visual literacy is supported and where the curriculum provides space for students’ direct, embodied engagement with cultural artefacts.
We distinguish between mediated image perception – such as photographs of artefacts – and multisensory, real-life encounters that occur in galleries, museums, or sacred spaces. We examine to what extent such experiences are institutionalized in curricula, and how teachers can leverage them to foster students’ affective, ethical, and spiritual competencies.
The paper also highlights the pedagogical traditions in both countries that encourage moving beyond the classroom into culturally and symbolically rich environments. One of the central questions raised is how to integrate the power of images – as carriers of meaning and transformation – into systematic teaching strategies that account for students’ well-being, resilience, and holistic development."
Saturday November 1, 2025 12:00pm - 12:25pm MDT TBA
This presentation explores how nationalistic movements co-opt the visual language of religious iconography to sanctify the nation and foster a religious-like devotion. By comparing religious and nationalistic motifs—such as halos, divine light, martyrdom, and sacred gestures—this study examines how processing fluency and emotional intensity shape ideological agreement and emotional engagement. A mixed-methods approach that combines netnography and experimental research reveals how individuals’ personality traits (Big Five) and socio-political conservatism influence their susceptibility to sacralized nationalistic imagery. By analyzing both historical and contemporary cases, this research highlights the psychological mechanisms through which visual propaganda reinforces national identity and promotes collective loyalty.
This research explores audio description (AD), a form of accessible intersemiotic translation aimed primarily at blind and visually impaired audiences. Though AD emerged in various contexts during the 20th century, it was only in the latter half that it began receiving scholarly attention. Initially applied in theatre, it rapidly developed within film. AD translates visual content into words, offering an accessible version of audiovisual material. This study centers on films and considers the potential value of AD for a wider audience, recognizing that images often carry cultural meanings. The research highlights the role of visual literacy—our ability to decode visual messages—and how specific codes shape meaning. Focusing on multimodal content, we propose an empirical study involving the AD of Sacred and Festive Spaces. Key aspects include identifying socio-cultural elements in the imagery, effectively incorporating them into AD, the mental representations they evoke, and the importance of the viewer’s socio-cultural background.
A story is never simply told—it is shaped in the telling. A photograph is never simply taken—it holds onto an instant while time moves on. Oral History x Photography is a participatory methodology that integrates oral history and portrait photography, creating a dialogue between narrative and the visual in an imagetext—a space where text and image exist in constant negotiation. Drawing on a community initiative I conducted in collaboration with university students and local participants in Manta, Ecuador, we will use this campfire session to examine how Oral History x Photography operates in practice, the ethical complexities of integrating images and narratives of others, and how new meanings emerge through this process. Together, we will reflect on who—or what—ultimately decides what is seen, told, and understood.
Framed within the Education, Justice and Memory Network (EdJam) of the University of Bristol and hosted at the National University of San Martín (UNSAM), Argentina, Cartografías íntimas en Comunidad (https://cartografiasintimasencomunidad.unsam.edu.ar/) develops a pedagogy of memory oriented to the high school students of Lomas de Zamora, a district of the metropolitan area of Greater Buenos Aires, from the year 2022 to the present. This project proposes an approach to researching the memories of the last civil-military dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983) in a neighborhood through the tracing of a map of continuities and identifications between the intimate and affective intergenerational experiences. Using walking, like a pilgrimage, it seeks to connect, through collective and art-based research methodologies, the records of generations that did not inhabit that historical moment but that, nevertheless, can recognize visible traces of that past in the different forms of violence that cross their daily lives (institutional, environmental, racial, gender).
This presentation examines how Taylor Swift's distinct visual aesthetics for each album "era" foster community-building among her fanbase. Drawing fan culture studies and parasocial relationship theory, I analyze how Swift's carefully crafted visual universes create identity markers facilitating fan connections. Swift's era-specific aesthetics serve as visual shorthand, enabling Swifties to identify each other through clothing, accessories, and aesthetic choices. These cues spark conversations at concerts and online, creating moments of belonging. The Eras Tour (2023-2024) showcased ten distinct eras, each with unique iconography. This multi-era approach provides diverse entry points for new fans, allowing them to connect with aesthetics that personally resonate. My social media analysis explores how these visual frameworks become community infrastructure, creating a fandom that balances collective identity with individual expression.
Optional conference add-on for November 1. Join us for a light meal (boxed sandwich meal with vegetarian option) and a painting activity: paint a ceramic skull to celebrate Dia de Muertos!
Optional excursion. Walking tour to Panteon de la Cruz Cemetery. Transport will be provided from the university to a location near to the cemetery, and from the cemetery to Plaza de la Patria, near hotels.
