Generative AI (GenAI) is reshaping how we create, share, and experience spiritual and sacred imagery. Artificial intelligence produces sacred images in seconds, relying not on cultural contexts, theological frameworks, or spiritual investment but on training databases and algorithms. It remixes symbols and images across cultures, styles, and even religions. The outputs circulate rapidly and widely on social media platforms and are used for a multitude of purposes. What happens when images once mediated by tradition and handcraft are instead produced through machine learning algorithms? Can AI-generated images evoke the same spiritual or emotional response as human-made counterparts? And, what is gained—or lost—when spiritual and sacred imagery becomes infinitely remixable and shareable? By examining these questions, this presentation considers how GenAI functions not just as a technological tool but, more significantly, as a potential force of cultural change.
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.
The early 2025 California wildfires present a perfect case study of how current events are prone to mis- and disinformation spread through the use of visual generative artificial intelligence (GAI) images and videos on social media, especially how such disinformation centers on culturally sacred or ritual sites. Centered on a series of social media posts that purported to show the iconic Hollywood sign ablaze, the case study explores how creators are utilizing GAI tools to leverage cultural capital, heightened emotions, and a divided public for content engagement. Using three frameworks: Information Disorder, Metaliteracy, and Visual Literacy, the presenters will walk through the creation, interpretation, and dissemination of the GAI content as it spread. The session will include a discussion of how we can develop critical looking skills and critical evaluation skills to detect GAI content before spreading it. This presentation builds on an upcoming chapter for the book AI and Metaliteracy: Empowering Learners for the Generative Revolution.
This work explores how digital images have become a central element for societies to remember and document their histories, cultures, and identities. The increasing accessibility in generating digital images allows institutions and individuals to create extensive visual collections. By digitizing fragile physical materials, resources susceptible to damage are protected, and remote exploration is facilitated, configuring a dynamic memory that can be updated and reorganized. These image repositories not only preserve memories but also contribute to collective memory, enabling communities to share, reinterpret, and rewrite their histories. Additionally, new methodologies for data analysis and visualization, such as data mining and virtual reality, are discussed, allowing interactive reconstructions of historical and cultural contexts, expanding the reach and diversity of these archives.
M Leuven is a museum that zooms in on visual literacy and transhistoricity. Since 2017, it has collaborated with ENVIL on a model encouraging deeper, more critical engagement with artworks. From 2020 to 2024, the museum hosted Moving, an exhibition exploring religious art and heritage objects designed to move—both physically and symbolically. With themes like procession, pilgrimage, and devotion, it showcased objects essential to rituals, such as animated sculptures, procession tools, cult items, and home altars. These items were created to enhance spiritual experiences and unite communities. The presentation highlights how the exhibition juxtaposed historical and contemporary worship, broadening our understanding of the role of images in religious and festive contexts. It also explores how this theme continues in M Leuven’s permanent collection, where rituals like opening reliquary caskets and adjusting retables on feast days are brought to life.
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.
This critical arts-based research paper centers the creation of two fabric assemblage pieces made in response to Black Lives Matter uprisings. Here, I explore methodology, materiality and representations of collective memory. As a Black joy project, I unpack tacit knowledge production grounded in the Gullah Geechee heritage of my grandfather. This unspoken knowledge undergirded my work in embodied ways. Thus, I meditated on the sources of the work-cultural traditions and visuality-that intuitively informed my making. Lastly, as a former art teacher, current university professor and longtime artist with periods of hiatus, I conclude by positing implications for my field of study.
Revolutionary festivals of the first decade after the social revolution of 1917 in Russia became the main means of manifesting the new ideology. A significant part of the images created for the festive manifestations expressed the ideas of hatred and destruction. Capitalism, monarchism, religion, symbols of culture and everyday life of the past made up a special semantic system consisting of signs of negation. The actions of the revolutionary festivals took place in vast urban spaces, mobile platforms were used, and troops participated in the actions. The ideology of the new state corresponded to the ideas of the Russian avant-garde, which turned into an artistic program corresponding to the new social order. The manifesto of the avant-garde - the opera-performance “Victory over the Sun”, created by Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Matyushin and Alexei Kruchenykh in 1913, vividly expressed with the help of planetary metaphors the concept of negation and destruction. Images of negation were rooted in Soviet visual culture - in cinema, fine art, book design and books for children.
Armando Andrade Zamarripa is a filmmaker, professor, and researcher at the Department of Performing and Audiovisual Arts of the Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes, Mexico. He holds a PhD in Cinematography, a Master's Degree in Documentary Film, and a Bachelor's Degree in Mass Media Communication. Member of the National Researchers System at the level of candidate. Chief Editor of the journal Arte, Imagen y Sonido. Member of the "Abya Yala” visual culture network, the Mexican Association of Cinematographic Analysis and Theory, and REDICPPA: Audiovisual Heritage Research, Preservation and Production Network.
"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.
This presentation reports on a critical visual analysis of Latinx-themed picturebooks illustrated by Latinx artists and published in the US from 1990 to 2025. It specifically examines how these illustrators weave cultural beliefs and values into these titles using visual details, iconic cultural references, and complex techniques in their visual narratives on ceremonies like Día de los muertos and naming children after ancestors, among others. Participants will receive a comprehensive list of the titles analyzed and participate in discussions of their applications across various educational contexts.
This presentation explores how visual representations of timekeeping tools and traditions function as cultural artifacts that bridge material and spiritual realms across time and space. By examining images of ancient timekeeping systems, such as Chinese and Korean water clocks and the Mayan calendar, we highlight how visual design elements like shape, color, and symbolism encode cultural values, cosmology, and practical functions. These images are not just representations of time—they are visual literacy tools that deepen our understanding of engineering, astronomy, and environmental adaptation. The presentation also connects to the concept of "underground STEM" (Jessen et al., 2022), recognizing the scientific knowledge embedded in non-Western cultural practices. By engaging with these images, participants will gain insights into how visual literacy fosters cross-cultural empathy and supports a pluralistic approach to STEM education, encouraging the inclusion of diverse cultural practices in modern STEM learning.
Aikú, Cuba is a photographic series created during the XXXII Festival del Caribe in Santiago de Cuba. The project captures a bembé—a ritual celebration rooted in Yoruba tradition that fuses music, dance, and spiritual invocation. Performed by a folkloric ensemble from Pinar del Río, each dancer embodies an Orisha deity through distinct colors, movements, and ceremonial attire.
This Campfire session begins with a visual presentation of selected photographs and cultural context, followed by an open dialogue exploring the symbolic language of sacred performance. Participants will reflect on how color, costume, and movement communicate ancestral knowledge and religious identity.
Viviana Torres-Mestey is a Puerto Rican interdisciplinary artist, photographer, and researcher. Her work bridges visual literacy, design, and cultural memory. This project expands upon her doctoral research into the visual codes of Afro-Caribbean spirituality and the role of photography in documenting sacred traditions.
In 2022, Aotearoa New Zealand officially adopted the Māori new year celebration known as Matariki which falls between June 19-22. This historic moment signified another step in decolonizing the country from lingering British colonial traditions. It celebrates the first rising of the Pleiades star cluster and with it a time for reflection, reconnection, and hope for the future. Originating from a mythological story involving the god of wind, Tāwhirimātea, who in response to his parent’s separation, Ranginui the sky father and Papatūānuku the earth mother, gouged his eyes out in a temper and cast them into the skies. While the holiday is young in terms of mainstream culture, it has been a welcomed opportunity for many Māori and other New Zealand residents to engage with a ritual unique to Aotearoa. In the capital city of Wellington, they have redistributed funds from Guy Fawkes Day (historic British fireworks holiday held November 5) to an annual Matariki festival. Today, the celebration incorporates traditional mythological imagery with contemporary design and technology. It is likely that over time the sacred holiday will develop new ways of honoring Māori culture and the passage of time in Aotearoa. For a traditional celebration, people gather at dawn for a sacred ceremony involving food, prayer, songs, and moments of silence. Families take time to remember loved ones, elders share knowledge, and feasts are offered and then enjoyed. For the more casual observer, the day is simply a gathering of families and friends to share memories, company and food. These ways of connecting share much in common with indigenous cultures around the world that celebrate the Pleiades star cluster at varying times of the year. Matariki emphasizes the power of nature and seasons over western notions of time, and in doing so asserts Māori sovereignty. This presentation will provide a survey of the aesthetics surrounding Matariki festivities, including art in a variety of formats, both independent and commercially produced.
This presentation explores how picturebooks about death help children honor loss and embrace healing. Analyzing selected picturebooks from diverse cultural backgrounds, this study examines how illustrations convey emotional experiences of grief and the role of cultural rituals in the healing process. With a focus on visual literacy, the research investigates how illustrations depict the identities of grieving characters and how cultural symbols and rituals support healing. Preliminary findings indicate that the main characters are portrayed by the intersections of the locations, the relationships with the deceased and the surviving loved ones, and shared activities to communicate emotional experiences of loss. Additionally, diverse cultural rituals offer symbolic pathways for remembrance, reinforce continuity with loved ones, and provide culturally embedded frameworks for processing grief. By highlighting the power of images in storytelling, this study underscores the importance of picturebooks in helping children navigate loss through culturally meaningful representations of mourning and healing.
"This presentation examines how librarians successfully integrated Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) into an innovative ""Acting for Medical Simulation"" theater course, creating an effective interdisciplinary bridge between the arts and healthcare education. Research demonstrates that VTS—an instructional method that encourages slow looking, increases diagnostic success, and fosters medical practitioners’ empathy for their patients—significantly reduces burnout and enhances empathy among medical students.
Integrating VTS and medical education can help to reveal complex patient experiences and build the emotional intelligence needed for compassionate care. This presentation will discuss the rationale for choosing VTS, the collaboration between librarians and faculty, the assignment, which included both a visual and a textual component, the librarians’ lesson plan, learning outcomes, and best practices. Through student examples, we will illustrate how this approach creates meaningful connections between visual literacy skills and empathetic patient care. Attendees will gain practical tools to implement similar cross-disciplinary initiatives at their institutions. "
In this campfire session, Eliza Gregory and Emily Merrifield will present their work with a photography history course and solicit feedback and dialogue from participants around alternative pedagogical structures for teaching visual literacy, research, and the value of original scholarship. The Sacramento State context comes with specific challenges—students are often food and housing insecure, provide caregiving for family members, work full time while attending school, and many are first generation to college. Figuring out how to push students intellectually while they are dealing with profound logistical challenges on a daily basis is difficult. We will also be eager to connect with colleagues around how to meet students where they are, and evaluate what skills are most crucial to their success going forward, while operating within a vast bureaucracy with little formal support for pedagogical innovation.
In this paper presentation, we examine how a trauma-informed art and writing program that incorporated museum, university, and community partners created space for adolescents to explore their racial, cultural, and social identities in a community organization that works with refugee youth. Informed by a critical multimodal literacy framework, we ask: "How do critical multimodal literacies create space for youth to explore and express their racial, gender, cultural, and social identities?" We utilized a qualitative case study approach focused on visual and multimodal qualitative research methods. Our findings suggest that a) multiple modes of expression created opportunities for youth to center their identities within the context of their cultural backgrounds; b) writing alongside their art allowed youth to interrogate existing power structures through harnessing the power of images as cultural tools; and c) multimodal literacies enabled students to imagine possibilities and identities of past, present, and future selves while navigating cultural expectations and influences. Our study has implications for the affordances of how trauma-informed and art-based literacy practices can better help students express the complexities of their adolescent experience across diverse cultural contexts.
Framed within a musically enhanced self-inquiry (MESI) methodology and design, our study leverages the assets of reflexive visual data to further problematize the oversimplified and often essentialized characteristics found in the ubiquitous positionality statements now required in qualitative inquiry. Perhaps encouraged with good intentions, these statements often end up re-centering colonial privileges. We also demonstrate the ways multimodal methodologies support and enhance the sense-making and reflexive acts required to illustrate our complex academic positionalities in relation to the social categories assigned to us. Engaging in reflexivity through multimodalities can be a useful tool for education practitioners, counselors, educators, students to gain deeper insight.
This study explores how pre-service and in-service craft teachers perceive and utilize sketching as a cognitive, pedagogical, and embodied tool in craft education. Drawing on Embodied Cognition, the research positions sketching as a material and multimodal practice that bridges abstract thinking and hands-on making. Data was collected through a survey distributed to craft educators. Findings reveal that teachers view sketching as an important support for student planning, problem-solving, and reflection. While some educators scaffold sketching through modeling and dialogue, others rely on implicit or ad-hoc approaches. The study also highlights challenges in motivating students who resist sketching or perceive it as irrelevant. These insights underscore the need for pedagogical strategies that position sketching as an inclusive, flexible, and epistemically rich practice.
Maps have long served as more than just tools for navigation; they carry symbolic and ritualistic significance, shaping how individuals engage with the territories, the sacred, meaning making, history, and experience. This fireside session explores how maps communicate ideas through visual literacy, comparing historical and contemporary practices. We consider maps as both practical tools and metaphors for transformation, shaped by cultural perspectives and visual symbols—some universal, others deeply rooted in place and identity. Researchers will share insights from undergraduate projects that investigate mapping as practice, navigation, and symbolic exploration. A 20-minute hands-on workshop will follow, inviting participants to map a personal experience. This activity will support reflection on how we use visual communication to express meaning, and how maps can act as cultural artefacts as well as tools for connection and understanding.
The cartoon’s role is to communicate. Through visual language, the cartoonist transmits fast and immediate messages to citizens. The humor, satire, and comedy implicit in the cartoons have the power to inform and promote critical thought and a deep analysis of the facts represented. However, the cartoons are not a denotative representation of the topic discussed. They represent the author’s perspective, perception, and intention and are understood according to the reader’s knowledge, beliefs, values, and tendencies about the fact. Hence, it is essential to critically read political cartoons because the audience reinterprets the cartoonists’ representations, and they should read them regardless of the author’s intentions. This paper analyses the cartoons of two Ecuadorian cartoonists who represent the daily crucial political events. The author aims to expose the characteristics of their visual representations to reveal their intentions, ways of conveying the visual message, and how the representations have impacted the audience.
Totemic symbolism has long been a source of identity, strength, and storytelling across cultures. This presentation explores how visual totems can be used by educators to help students discover their identities and build resilience. By examining traditional and contemporary applications of totemic imagery in education, we uncover its role in fostering emotional intelligence, self-expression, and community belonging. Through workshop practices, indigenous educational models, and digital adaptations, this session highlights innovative ways to integrate visual totems into learning environments. Additionally, the practice of journaling is explored as a means of making connections between totemic symbolism and personal reflection. Attendees will gain insights into how totemic symbolism and reflective journaling enhance student engagement and resilience, making them powerful tools for educators aiming to create inclusive and identity-affirming educational experiences.
This study examines images of teaching discovered through Google Image searches and their potential to perpetuate oppressive narratives. Utilizing critical multimodal, queer, and decolonial theories, we analyze these visual/ multimodal representations and uncover dominant ideologies embedded within. The research employs collage methodologies to create visual counter-stories to these dominant narratives. Through this process, we challenge and transform the existing visual canon, illustrating how collage can serve as a powerful tool for reflexivity and narrative repair. The findings emphasize the importance of critical visual inquiry in education and suggest collage as a method for developing students' critical multimodal literacy and praxis. The findings also highlight the potential for visual (counter)storytelling to reshape perspectives on teaching and learning.
"When does an image migrate from the “iconic” to being an “icon”? How do we exemplify our attachments to image in an age of reproduction and AI? Through an exploration of the interweaving of sacred and secular imagery, this presentation will examine how and why we maintain images in close proximity to ritual.
In a modern society with fleeting attention spans and access to more visual data than ever before it is curious that we continue to create more images than ever before. What do our attachments to certain ritual images and not others relay about our own assumptions and/or ownership of others and even otherness? And, during an age where our own bodies are commodified - what do these images relay about the body as spectacle rather than a site for ritual?
With wonder at the center of this presentation, it will be imperative to examine our modern conceptions of attachments and icon worship (and by extension worship of contemporary selfhood) from a place of curiosity.
Essays, images, and writings explored will be by Praba Pilar, Alejandra Oliva, Grupo Proceso Pentágono, Simone Leigh, Hélio Oiticia, Lygia Clark, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, and Naomi Ricón Gallardo."
This presentation explores tarot card decks as powerful visual systems that live between sacred imagery and artistic expression, serving as both a spiritual tool and a dynamic storytelling medium. As visual texts, the cards tell universal stories: of growth, loss, transformation, discovery, love, and death, that are constantly reinterpreted by artists who call on their own cultural and lived experiences to develop the visual lexicon of their tarot deck. After learning more about the long history of tarot imagers and artists who create them, attendees will be invited to reinterpret a card from the Major Arcana—the 22 tarot cards representing archetypes and life stages. Participants will be guided through the process of creating a card of their choice, incorporating their own cultural, spiritual, and personal symbols. This activity offers a fresh perspective on cultural reinterpretations of universal stories through visual language.
"This paper begins with Demián Flores Cortés' sculpture of a figure holding a Christian cross and a statue of the Santa Muerte. Like other work that has at times been called syncretic, mestizaje, or New World baroque, the sculpture manifests the inadequacy of efforts to categorize and compartmentalize visual and artistic expression. If visual methodologies commit to a de/anti/colonial ethic and epistemology, then the time travel, insertion, and indeed infiltration of indigenous and hybrid representation do not represent a reconciling of cultures, religions, or societies, but rather a “will to survive and persist culturally”. The counter-hegemonic, or even counter-conquest reversal and resignification of iconographic conventions falling outside disciplinary traditions of analysis call for visual methods to permit the resemantization of representing and reporting on visual “data”. This paper then takes the destabilization offered by these tensions to ask: What then are the implications for visual research methods? And for visual literacy more broadly?"
November 2 post-conference dinner (set menu with vegetarian option) and then walk to a location at which to watch the Dia de Muertos parade! We cannot accommodate mobility requests for this event due to the parade location. Registered participants only.
