DEADLINE APPROACHING FOR 

Popular Culture Association 2026 (PCA 26): Atlanta, GA

April 2026

"Visual Culture’s Pasts, Presents, and Futures"

The VISUAL CULTURE area of the Popular Culture Association welcomes proposals in anticipation of its 2026 conference, which will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, April 8-11.

VISUAL CULTURE is an inherently interdisciplinary field, distinct from other areas such as fandom, film, television, science fiction, video games, comics etc. Visual culture overlaps with material culture, but the former emphasizes visual aspects of culture that may be ephemeral, immaterial, digital, or other types of images that circulate through cultural consciousnesses. Visual culture is also distinct from art history and critical theory in its fascination with transhistorical approaches and embrace of multidisciplinary methods. 

In the words of scholar WP Mitchell, visual culture “lays the groundwork for thinking visual realities (including everyday habits of visual perception) as cultural constructions, therefore interpretable or readable…” (1995).

Additionally, Rogoff explains:

At one level we certainly focus on the centrality of vision and the visual world in producing meanings, establishing and maintaining aesthetic values, gender stereotypes, and power relations in culture. At another level we recognize that opening up the field of vision as an arena in which cultural meanings get constituted, also simultaneously anchors to it an entire range of analyses and interpretation of the audio, the spatial ,and the psychic dynamics of spectatorship. This visual culture opens up an entire world of intertextuality in images, sounds and spatial delineations are read on to an through another, lending ever-accruing layers of meanings and of subjective responses to each encounter we might have with film, TV, advertising, art works, buildings, and urban environments (1998).

We study images, texts, art, digital media, and forms through the lens of culture. Some examples of visual culture scholarship include:

• Photographic representations of cultural ideas, events, interpretations

• Historical approaches

• Digital and analog representations circulating through cultures

• Cross-cultural or international approaches

• Ideas and interpretations that manifest in cultural venues\

For this year’s conference, the VISUAL CULTURE area welcomes papers/presentations that emphasize unexplored pasts, current events and potential futures. In particular, we are interested in papers that deal with the following topics:

• Current events in visual culture

• Speculative/future paths in visual culture

• Feminist approaches

• Unexpected or unexplored historical connections

Submit abstracts to pcaaca.org by NOVEMBER 30. Abstracts must be at least 250 words not including accompanying bio. Please include your affiliation (if any), rank (if any), areas of research, and list of representative publications (if any).

More information can be found on the official Call For Papers website: https://sites.google.com/view/2026pcaconference/call-for-papers

Presenters will need to become members of the Popular Culture Association. 

For more information, or if you have any questions, contact Ivy Roberts, VISUAL CULTURE area chair, at ivyrobertsis@gmail.com.