Talking Visual Lit @ Toledo & Princeton

This Friday, November 7, I'm pleased to be giving a keynote session at the International Visual Literacy Association's annual conference, held at the Toledo Museum of Art. As the organization puts it - "visual thinking is a form of critical thinking," "the ability to derive meaning from images of everything that we see - to read and write visual language." It is to, to be sure, a great fit for my work, and i'm excited to be a part of it! I'll be talking about my comics dissertation, what I mean by Unflattening, and what happens when we do research through the visual - giving equal weight to both visual and textual elements, where the whole meaning only emerges from their interaction. In my session, i will also be making comics with those in attendance - so should be a lot of fun all around!

If you're in the Toledo area - all the keynote talks are free and open to the public (there are fees to attend the entire conference). Check out details about the conference here and info about invited speakers here. Also, my hometown Detroit radio station AM760 WJR interviewed several of those involved with the conference, including me, for a special program on the Trend of Visual Literacy. You can listen to the audio of that here on the Relevant University show with host Larry Burns out of the University of Toledo. Updates about the conference on twitter will be at #IVLA2014

Immediately following that, Monday the 10th, I'll be speaking at Princeton University, in their Department of English, a guest of professor Kinohi Nishikawa. The focus will be somewhat more specifically on the dissertation and reimagining scholarship and academic writing (as with the recent #remixthediss event at CUNY) - but I will also be taking attendees through hands on theory through practice with some comics-making explorations. If you're in the Princeton neighborhood - come on out!

And, as I mentioned in some detail in my last post, my dissertation is coming out March 9, 2015 in book form from Harvard University Press! I am to say the least, excited to be able to share it all in one volume - and to work with such a supportive editor and publisher to realize this work in published form. I'll be sharing many images from the dissertation/book in all these talks and giving away, as I do, mini-comics excerpts from the work.

To close this post, I want to share a few excerpts directly referring to concepts of visual literacy and perception (and eyes) - key themes that run through the work and that I'll be addressing in the coming talks.  (These excerpts came from pages that have appeared previously on my site. You can see the entire pages by clicking on the respective links for the Odyssey, Parallax, Kaleidoscopic vision, and Saccadic Motion, to see the entire sequences.) Look forward to conversations to come at these gathering. Thanks for the support! - Nick