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.
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.
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
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
