Call for Participation:

Visual Culture Papers

American Studies Association (ASA)

November 20-23, 2025 | San Juan, Puerto Rico

**As the ASA has extended the deadline for its general CFP, the Visual Culture Caucus is also extending its call until January 24.**

The Visual Culture Caucus (VCC) of the American Studies Association (ASA) promotes the participation of visual culture scholars at the annual meeting. Within the conference theme, “Late-stage American Empire?,” we seek papers and panels that investigate or interrogate visual culture and its relationship/resistance/complicity with American imperialism and (settler) colonialism.

As a caucus, we link potential panelists with shared interests in visual culture topics to encourage the formation of cohesive and engaging panels. We aim to host three proposed sessions, with one of these explicitly about film and media and another on pedagogy.  If you, your colleagues, or graduate students are considering proposals for the conference, please email us the panel idea or paper abstract and we will work to connect you with similar panelists and papers. We are also happy to offer suggestions on complete panel proposals.  Topics might include a variety of visual practices outside of the art world as well as those that seek to transform what is possible within the privileged space of the gallery; creative films, filmmaking, and television; the Internet and social media; methods of studying visual culture; and the instruction of visual culture across various disciplines. 

Please read about each of the submission options below and, if interested, send the materials requested to both VCC co-chairs Rebecca Kumar (rebecca.kumar@spelman.edu) and Carmen Merport Quiñones (cmerport@oberlin.edu) by January 24, 2025. Please put either “ASA proposal for scholarly paper/panel” or “ASA proposal for pedagogy roundtable” in the subject line. 

The VCC will provide its decision on sponsored panels and roundtable participants by January 31st. Panelists will then be responsible for following all posted instructions and for submitting their own panels or papers in proper ASA format to the ASA by the ASA deadline (February 1, 2025). For more ASA instructions on proposal submission, click here. 

Visual Culture Caucus Panel Sessions:

The theme of this year’s conference asks us to consider the “America”  that is “invoked in American Studies” in light of familiar declarations about “the end of the American Century, the end of history, and more recently, the end of the U.S. empire.” Now that America has been “stripped of its exceptionalism,” we are invited to confront contemporary formations of US imperial power and “imagine an American Studies otherwise, from its peripheries, from the standpoint of elsewhere.” Inspired by this urgent call to reimagine American Studies as a space of resistance and possibility,  the VCC seeks papers/panels that wrestle with the following questions: “What sorts of violent eruptions characterize this stage of imperial transformation and through what methods, questions, theories (and from where) can we locate resources for meaning, imagine new forms of sociality, and articulate new modes of knowledge production? What possible futures do our methods enable or foreclose at the present conjuncture? How might Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, Ethnic Studies, Critical Disability Studies, Queer and Trans Studies, and Puerto Rican Studies offer critical resources for understanding the present conjuncture?”

We hope to form two traditional  panels:

1. The Visual Culture Caucus invites proposals for conference papers/panels, especially from emerging scholars, that address this conference theme through analysis of visual objects and practices that address American imperialism and settler colonialism. Please submit a paper abstract (maximum of 500 words per abstract), a 350-word (or less) biographical statement, and an abbreviated CV. 

Some possible themes include, but are not limited to:

-Visual representations of American empire

-Imperial resistance through social media

-Alternative and community print and broadcasting media

-Critical cartographies

-Speculative worldmaking in the visual arts

-Artists reclaiming “creative ground” on the walls and in the streets (graffiti, lowrider art, murals)

-Visuality and vision in sacred spaces, particularly those preserving oppositional movements and memories

2. The VCC also invites proposals for conference papers/panels, especially from emerging scholars, that address the conference theme with an eye toward film and television. Not only are we seeking work that analyzes representations of American empire onscreen, but also welcome submissions on the material conditions/limitations/possibilities of visual cultural production  (i.e. mainstream censorship of Palestinian genocide)

Visual Culture Caucus Pedagogy Session:

 The VCC welcomes brief proposals of topics (including individual submissions) for participation in a roundtable or skill sharing session on visual culture-centered teaching across fields and disciplines, including classroom methods, assignments, projects, exhibitions, campus film festivals, and other forms of outreach or hands-on learning that employ visual culture.  The session may feature short-presentations by participants followed by a moderated discussion. Please submit a paper abstract (maximum of 500 words per abstract), a 350-word (or less) biographical statement, and an abbreviated CV. 

With the conference theme in mind, we also welcome proposals on pedagogy, dissent, and visual documentation. College and university campuses have long been sites for political uprisings in response to genocide and war. Since the 1960s, anti-war student protests responding to violations of human rights have often been met with violent discipline by the very institutions that purport to foster political and intellectual debate and dissent. The recent student movement against the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza (and increasingly the Occupied Territories of the West Bank) is an extension of this tense legacy. Against institutional attempts to censor and repress this movement, the VCC at the ASA heeds our University of Southern California colleagues who suggest we are in a “teachable moment,” arguing that “...protest [does] not disrupt student life. It is at the very heart of student life, for it demonstrates a core value that we as professors…are supposed to cherish: the necessity of debating the principles, actions, and culture of our society.” Some possible themes include, but are not limited to:

• The role of documentation in campus protests, including ethical considerations and the impact of disseminating footage and other media.

• Visual explorations of the relevance of higher education institutions in times of genocide, war, and oppression.