Two of the key theoretical shifts over the past two decades of critical work have been the 'visual turn' and the 'material turn'. This book argues that these hitherto distinct fields should be understood as in continual dialogue and co-constitution and focuses on reconceptualising the visual as an embodied, material, and often politically-charged realm. This edited volume elaborates this conceptual argument through a series of contemporary case studies, drawn from the disciplines of Architecture, Sociology, Media Studies, Geography and Cultural Studies. The case studies included are paired around four themes: consumption, translation, practice and ethics. As well as exploring the bringing together of visuality and materiality studies, the contributors raise questions of social identity and social critique, and also focus on the ethics of material visualities.

This edited book set in the context of North East India explores issues concerning symbols, meanings, representations, and social implications of materiality and visuality, as well as the dynamics of power, social reproduction, ideological dominance and knowledge production, from an interdisciplinary perspective. It seeks to answer the question of why some things matter more than others or what happens when certain things are made more visible than others. The book provides valuable insights into the process of identity construction through the use of cultural sources, both material and visual. Following on the debates/discussions on material and visual culture in the 1970s and 1980s, the book argues that instead of viewing objects as mere representation(s), one should see them as active agents in creating perceptions, bodily practices, discourses and perceptions of our social world. Each chapter in the book unravels and engages with these pertinent issues in order to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of the status quo. The book is of interest to scholars of ethnicity, identity construction, politics and state, cultural studies, media studies, visual, social and cultural anthropology and sociology, as well as lay readers who want to learn more about the region.

Parks, maps, and mapping technologies like the GPS are objects of visual and material culture that rely on the interplay of text, context, image, and space to guide our interpretations of the world around us. LOCATING VISUAL-MATERIAL RHETORICS: THE MAP, THE MILL, AND THE GPS examines in depth, and in several contemporary settings, how visual and material discursive artifacts, when understood as rhetorical, shape our understanding of the unique cultural moments that these artifacts set out to represent.

More than any other secular story of the Middle Ages, the tale of Tristan and Isolde fascinated its audience. Adaptations in poetry, prose, and drama were widespread in western European vernacular languages. Visual portrayals of the story appear not only in manuscripts and printed books but in individual pictures and pictorial narratives, and on an amazing array of objects including stained glass, wall paintings, tiles, tapestries, ivory boxes, combs, mirrors, shoes, and misericords. The pan-European and cross-media nature of the surviving medieval evidence is not adequately reflected in current Tristan scholarship, which largely follows disciplinary and linguistic lines. The contributors to Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde seek to address this problem by opening a cross-disciplinary dialogue and by proposing a new set of intellectual coordinates--the concepts of materiality and visuality--without losing sight of the historical specificity or the aesthetic character of individual works of art and literature. Their theoretical paradigm allows them to survey the richness of the surviving evidence from a variety of disciplinary approaches, while offering new perspectives on the nature of representation in medieval culture. Enriched by numerous illustrations, this volume is an important examination of the story of Tristan and Isolde in the European context of its visual and textual transmission. "Comprehensive and cutting edge, Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde defines the moment in the history of Tristan scholarship. The essays, gathered from both sides of the Atlantic, enrich and expand the key concepts of materiality and visuality to account for the proliferation of the Tristan story in an astonishing range of media. The collection gives scholars in several disciplines the tools to explore the productive connections between the verbal and the visual in medieval culture." --Sarah Westphal-Wihl, Washington University in St. Louis "This is a major collection of essays that gives new direction to the study of one of the most important poets of the Middle Ages and one of the most fascinating works of literature from the period." --C. Stephen Jaeger, University of Illinois "Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde successfully opens up the conversation between literary historians and art historians on its intended subject, and as such is an original contribution to the field. The editors are well-versed in past and current medieval, and specifically Tristan, scholarship, and their substantial introduction lays out the methodology behind the investigation as well as the structure of the book." --Denise Della Rossa, University of Notre Dame

Family photography, a ubiquitous domestic tradition in the developed world, is now more popular than ever thanks to the development of digital photography. Once uploaded to PCs and other gadgets, photographs may be stored, deleted, put in albums, sent to relatives and friends, retouched, or put on display. Moreover, in recent years family photographs are more frequently appearing in public media: on posters, in newspapers and on the Internet, particularly in the wake of disasters like 9/11, and in cases of missing children. Here, case study material drawn from the UK offers a deeper understanding of both domestic family photographs and their public display. Recent work in material culture studies, geography, and anthropology is used to approach photographs as objects embedded in social practices, which produce specific social positions, relations and effects. Also explored are the complex economies of gifting and exchange amongst families, and the rich geographies of domestic and public spaces into which family photography offers an insight.

The aesthetics of urban life offer a curious quality, one that is both highly visible and hidden, both openly influencing and subtly imprinting. These aesthetics participate in the production of places; to the way they are built, to their resisting materiality, to their image in people's minds, to advertising and to the way people respond to the place. Exploring the encounter with the aesthetics, images and material design of urban life, this book offers analytic insights into contemporary cities. It shows how photography, maps and videos play a crucial role in bringing aesthetic dimensions into urban studies. This transdisciplinary approach draws on the full spectrum of the visual representation to tie the encounter with the realm of the visual directly and explicitly into the exploration of urban space.

Over the last two decades the historiography of medieval art has been defined by two seemingly contradictory trends: a focus on questions of visuality, and more recently an emphasis on materiality. The latter, which has encouraged multi-sensorial approaches to medieval art, has come to be perceived as a counterpoint to the study of visuality as defined in ocularcentric terms. Bringing together specialists from different areas of art history, this book grapples with this dialectic and poses new avenues for reconciling these two opposing tendencies. The essays in this volume demonstrate the necessity of returning to questions of visuality, taking into account the insights gained from the 'material turn'. They highlight conceptions of vision that attribute a haptic quality to the act of seeing and draw on bodily perception to shed new light on visuality in the Middle Ages.