Deadline: Submissions due has been extended to October 15, 2025 to invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu. 

It feels only appropriate, given the recent UR graduate worker strike, that Issue 41 of InVisible Culture focus on the problem of labor. Amid the erosion of labor protections in academia, increasing challenges faced by immigrant workers in the US, and global labor conflicts in fields like healthcare and agriculture, this moment calls for a reconsideration of what labor is and how its value is structured.

The social reconfiguration of labor relations in major industrial nations during the 1970s found a parallel in evolving artistic practices. As Sigler argues, labor in contemporary art extends far beyond traditional notions of subject matter.Friederike Sigler, Work, The MIT Press, 2017.

" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">undefined By contrast with the visual representations of labor in the works of Gustave Courbet, Rosa Bonheur, and Ilya Repin in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a new kind of artistic practice began to emerge in the 1970s—one that emphasized work both within and in the making of art, labeled as de-skilling, dematerialization, and post-studio practices in the post-Fordist era.

More recently, work exploring art and labor in a globalized, digital economy, such as Artistic Labour Now,Isabella Graw and Daniel Birnbaum, Artistic Labour Now Between Specificity and Generality, Materiality and Immateriality, Production and Reproduction, Sternberg Press, 2025.

" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">undefinedprimes us with questions about the value and materiality of art in these new landscapes of virtual, incorporeal labor. This is also a useful time to reflect on the robust intersection of art history and labor studies in the work of scholars like Meyer Schapiro, T.J. Clark, Linda Nochlin, M.I. Finley, and Stephen J. Eisenman. Such work can be read alongside the extensive scholarship on labor in cinema, which covers topics such as the labor of cell animation,Hannah Frank, Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons, edited by Daniel Morgan, University of California Press, 2019.

" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">undefined the spectral materiality of Bombay horror cinema,Kartik Nair, Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror, University of California Press, 2024.

" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">undefined and the work of the film prop.Elena Gorfinkel and John David Rhodes, The Prop, Fordham University Press, 2025.

" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">undefined Recent studies on work versus labor in the historical materialist context of Soviet avant-garde art,Nikola Dedić, “Avant-Garde Transformation of Artistic Labor,“ AM Journal, No. 28, 2022, 133−151.

" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">undefined research on global labor histories,Hammers, Roslyn Lee. The Imperial Patronage of Labor Genre Painting in Eighteenth-Century China, Art History & Visual Studies series, Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2021; Tijen Tunali (ed). Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape (Routledge Research in Art and Politics). Oxford: Routledge, 2021; Erika Kindsfather,  “From Activism to Artistic Practice: (Re)Imagining Indigenous Women’s Labour Activism in Contemporary Art.” RACAR: Revue d’art Canadienne / Canadian ArtReview 47, no. 1 (2022): 58–71. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48679852.

" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">undefined and studies on coercion and wage labor in artistic productionBatista, Anamarija, Viola Muller, Corinna Peres, and Viola Franziska Müller. Coercion and Wage Labour: Exploring Work Relations through History and Art. London: UCL Press, 2023.

" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">undefined provide a fertile foundation for innovation in the field.

For Issue 41, InVisible Culture invites articles and artworks that engage with labor as manifested in visual culture, from embodied processes (factory assembly, caregiving, artisanal crafts, reproductive work) to posthuman, data-driven labor performances. Additionally, we encourage submissions that engage with labor as it pertains to displacement caused by neoliberalism, whether it be through how Filipina domestic workers and their families deploy visual technologies to sustain “communities of care”;Valerie Francisco-Menchavez, The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age, The University of Illinois Press, 2018.

" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">undefined or Amazon warehouse workers navigating AI surveillance and “time-off-task” algorithms.Philipp Staab and Oliver Nachtwey, “Market and Labour Control in Digital Capitalism,” TripleC 14, no. 2 (2016), 457–474.

" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">undefined

In an era of immaterial labor,Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought In Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardy, University of Minnesota Press, 1996, 133-147.

" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">undefined where work increasingly escapes both physical and visual legibility, we must ask: What and whom do we work for today?

What defines labor, or its undoing, in the context of digital capitalism? As platformization erodes traditional workplaces, how is the value of material production reshaped? At the same time, which laboring bodies—such as caregivers, gig workers, or content moderators—remain illegible within these emerging systems, and by what mechanisms?

We invite works from the disciplines of film studies, media studies, art history, anthropology, visual studies, and sound studies on topics that are not limited to but include:

• Emotional labor

• Gendered labor

• Sex labor

• Creative/artistic labor

• Labors of Performance Art

• Sonic labor (music’s work)

• Reproductive labor

• Housework

• Free labor

• Invisibility & Abstraction

• The body (as labor site)

• Labor and Risk

• Working hard/hardly working

• Digital and Analog Labor

• Interface labor (STS)

• Labor in film, media, and television production

• Value theory (Marxism, etc.)

• Extraction (resource/data)

• Work vs. Labor

• Labor and Identity (race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, age)

• Global Labor

• Theories and Philosophies on Labor

Articles

Please send completed papers (with references following the guidelines from the Chicago Manual of Style) of between 4,000 and 10,000 words to invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu by October 15, 2025. Inquiries should be sent to the same address.

Creative/Artistic Works

In addition to written materials, InVisible Culture accepts works in other media (video, photography, drawing, code). Please submit creative or artistic works along with an artist statement of no more than two pages to invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu. For questions or more details concerning acceptable formats, go to or contact the same address.

Reviews

InVisible Culture is also currently seeking submissions for book, exhibition, and film reviews (600-1,000 words). To submit a review proposal, go to https://www.invisibleculturejournal.com/contribute or contact invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu.

About the Journal

InVisible Culture: A Journal for Visual Culture (IVC) is a student-run interdisciplinary journal published online twice a year in an open access format. Through double-blind peer-reviewed articles, creative works, and reviews of books, films, and exhibitions, our issues explore changing themes in visual culture. Fostering a global and current dialogue across fields, IVC investigates the power and limits of vision.

Each issue includes peer-reviewed articles, as well as artworks, reviews, and special contributions. The Dialogues section offers timely commentary from an academic visual culture perspective and announcements from the editorial board.