Workshop Images as Agents in Digital Public Spheres. 3rd Internationa...

Abstract: The starting point for the conception of this workshop is the assumption that the advent of the internet and of digital media restructures the relationship between people and information in a new way. Correspondingly, the guiding question for us is how to connect current research on the social agency of (moving) images in the digital age with investigations into contemporary public spheres. The aim for organising the workshop on this guiding theme is thus to bridge an analysis of visual media worlds with a sociological, historical, aesthetic and political analysis of contemporary public spheres. This we see connected to questions of social and political practices of contemporary image production and to economies of looking and sharing in social networks but also to contemporary art practices in relation to digital image making. These guiding questions are tackled from various viewpoints using a wide range of methodological approaches. There are presentations on visual activism and on ways of political image making, on hyper-images, on technological questions, but also on historiographies of image practices and visual archives, pictures as witnesses and questions of media-ethics. This workshop is organised in cooperation with the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee/ RC 57 Visual Sociology.