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Editorial
Journal of Visual Culture 2002 1: 5 DOI: 10.1177/147041290200100101 The online version of this article can be found at: http://vcu.sagepub.com/content/1/1/5.citation

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journal of visual culture

Editorial
During the past three decades, there has emerged a wealth of thoughtful, mischievous, exacting and imaginative research and writing on visual culture. We have also seen the same complexity in local and global practices of visual cultural production. The journal of visual culture will embrace and extend these encounters while provoking transformations of its own. It will do so by encouraging scholarship that is critically engaged with visual culture from a range of methodological positions, on various historical moments, and across diverse geographical locations. The journal of visual culture is a springboard. It will engage with the demands of both new and old ways of handling visuality. The journal will do so by responding to explicitly visual domains such as art, design, and architectural history, film, media, and television studies, photography, new media, and electronic imaging. At the same time it will also draw from and mesh together areas that are less obviously visual, but which are often engrossed in the visual, such as cultural studies and critical theory, philosophy, history, geography/urban studies, comparative literature, and the history and philosophy of science, technology, and medicine. As such, the journal of visual culture is a site for interdisciplinary work that remains sensitive to the challenges that come with such archival curiosity, research and writing. This dialogue on the historical, contextual, theoretical, institutional and interpretive modalities of visual culture and the formations through which they are manufactured, circulated and encountered will take on specific and interrelated forms. As a space of convergence, the journal will generate debate, provocation and contestation for subsequent negotiations of visual culture. The journal of visual culture is an incitement. Visual Culture and Visual Studies have a number of genealogies. Part of our task is to trace them. Another part is to help compose the present and future of the critical study of visual culture. The journal has a pivotal role to play in shaping and articulating this, thereby initiating shifts in intellectual, academic and readers expectations. Is this a utopian endeavour? Perhaps. But, then, we never thought that doing, activating, sounding out visual culture should be anything other than awkward, thought-provoking, captivating. The journal of visual culture is a laboratory. It is an experiment in how we think,

journal of visual culture Copyright 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 1(1): 5-6 [1470-4129(200204)1:1;5-6;022418]

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journal of visual culture 1(1)

research and write the concerns of visual culture historiographically, methodologically, conceptually, tropologically. The opportunity is available to propose alternative, even eccentric critical thinking, and styles of articulation as they emerge from the concerns of visual culture. We are confident that the articles, debates, interviews and reviews published in these pages will take account of the complex and inter-animating series of relations that exist between history, theory and practice as they emerge through visual and other cultures. This is simply one of the stimulating intricacies with which visual culture presents us. The journal of visual culture fosters community. Open to all aspects of visual culture, it offers a home for critical, dynamic, and absorbing thought as it bears upon the local and global contexts of the production, dissemination and consumption of visual culture. The journal of visual culture is, then, for academics, scholars, students, and practitioners struggling with the questions, the challenges, and the possibilities of visuality.

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