NeMLA: March 6-9, 2027

Location: Newport, RI

Session Type: Roundtable (this is a hybrid roundtable with in-person and virtual presentations allowed)

Full Call and Submission: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22319

At a time when students encounter images constantly, with or without text, we have an opportunity to engage them critically as readers and producers of visuals and visual meaning. This roundtable explores how students learn to “read” images as complex visual discourses that shape their knowledge, identities, and civic lives. We believe that images are more than mere illustrations to be passively viewed; images can be active representations and drivers of change.

Under this year’s theme of empowering communities, this panel will discuss how multimodal literacy shapes participation in, and the circulation of, culture in both institutional and everyday contexts. This includes, on the one hand, literature and visual arts, which are traditionally associated with education and culture, but also everyday cultural practices and contemporary visual environments, especially the saturation of digital spaces by images and multimodal content. In this sense, multimodal literacy means more than the ability to interpret visuals, with or without text. It values practices that help students navigate, decode, and critically engage with the dense visual cultures that structure everyday social and political life.

This is why we invite participants to share concrete perspectives from their classroom communities: assignments, course designs, teaching strategies, and experiences that help students analyze, critique, and compose visuals with clarity and care. For this panel, we warmly invite visual approaches that focus on the image or series of images (i.e. semantics, iconography and iconology, visual ethnography); quantitative or computational treatment (i.e. content analysis, data visualization); or work that examines the relationship between image and text (i.e. multimodal discourse analysis).

We particularly welcome contributions that address topics such as:

· Book covers or illustrations in children’s and young adult literature

· Visual storytelling, data visualization, and infographics

· Digital visual culture and ethical perceptions of AI-generated images or video

· Multimodal composition and argumentation

· Visual analysis and critical visual literacy

· Multilingual and inclusive approaches to visual literacy

This roundtable is organized by scholars from different disciplines and continents. Therefore, we invite contributions from a broad range of fields, including education, visual studies, and the social sciences, such as sociology, political science, history, and geography. Graduate students and academic-adjacent professionals are also warmly encouraged to apply.

By uniting scholars from diverse backgrounds, our goal is to foster a pluralistic dialogue across cultural, disciplinary, and academic contexts. Participants will provide a brief 5- to 8-minute informal overview of their experiences teaching visual and multimodal literacy in classroom, institutional, or community contexts, followed by an open discussion. Presenters are expected to contribute either a short paper or a presentation outlining a teaching strategy, assignment, or course design.