We invite proposals for papers and presentations from graduate and advanced undergraduate students across mediums and disciplines for Social-Scapes, a research symposium sponsored by Illinois State University’s Master’s Program in Visual Culture.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Greg Foster-Rice, Ph.D., art historian and professor of photography at Columbia College Chicago, is co-editor of the recently published anthology, Reframing the New Topographics (2011).

This symposium considers the meeting point of landscape and the social, and reexamines the relationship between the two. In Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (2008), Rebecca Solnit discusses landscape as, “...both a composition and subject. As the former, it is usually a picture of land and sky, organized by a horizon line... As a subject, it is about nature, space, location and other organic and inorganic elements of the physical world as well as about the desires and associations these particular places call forth” (161). Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan inserts the individual into the landscape when he describes landscape as “both a vertical view and a side view” in which the latter “sees landscape as space in which people act, or as scenery for people to contemplate” (Thought and Landscape: The Eye and the Mind’s Eye, 90).

We offer these ideas as a starting point for thought but encourage a range of approaches to the general topic of Social-Scapes from students in visual culture, art history, studio art, English, geography, history, sociology, etc. Presentations will be 20 minutes in length.

250 Word Abstract - submission deadline - March 18, 2012 You will be notified of submission acceptance by March 30, 2012 Registration deadline: April 6, 2012

You may register and submit an abstract at http://www.isuvisualculture.wordpress.com