This interdisciplinary convening brings together scholars and practitioners pursuing innovative approaches to thinking and doing across media, platforms, technologies, and techniques. We approach unsettling images in a double sense: both as images that we find unsettling (i.e., disturbing)—from colonial images of the Other to images of war—and images that unsettle (i.e., decenter) the visual as a modern default, from Amazonian activist media to ekphrastic poetry. Participants also explore engaging fictions in a double sense, considering not only how fictions engage us as escapes, fabrications, falsehoods, or irrealities, but also how fictions can be generative spaces for imagining, prefiguring, and fabulating possible worlds.
Unsettling Images, Engaging Fictions brings together conceptual strands that are typically kept separate across domains of theorizing and writing, thinking and doing. Through presentations, roundtable conversations, and hands-on, creative workshops, participants and attendees will explore the diverse range of things that fictions and images are used to accomplish across times and spaces. Fictions and images are a powerful and pervasive feature of human and more-than-human worlds, but this is not a failure. Rather, it is a feature of how we organize our worlds. By letting go of the question of if or when fictions and images are present, we turn instead to the questions of how, where, and toward what ends images and fictions give sensuous form to all manner of imagining—and how we might work toward greater accountability and collaboration in critiquing, creating, and curating our images and fictions otherwise.
Unsettling Images, Engaging Fictions is organized by Josh Babcock, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brown University and Suzie Telep, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with support from the Pembroke Center, Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Brown Arts Institute, and the Department of Anthropology at Brown University.