LACS1019 Understanding Visual Cultures (5 cr)
Description
This course introduces the key theories, concepts, and methods to understand and critically analyse visual cultures. It addresses the topics related to our ways of seeing, look as a medium of images, and how vision functions in correspondence with other senses. Through the critical analysis of the visual, we will ask how we make meaning out of what we see. The course explores topics related to the politics of representation, spectatorship, the male/female gaze, gender and visual cultures, photographic seeing and cultural memory, consumer culture and visual rhetorics. Throughout the course, you will develop your visual literacy skills, learn to interpret images from diverse perspectives, and critically engage with the ethics of visual production and consumption.
Learning outcomes
On successful completion of the course students:
- understand their ways of seeing, and recognize the relations between embodied seeing and visual media,
- can identify and apply key concepts and theories to study visual cultures,
- developed critical thinking and analytical skills to interpret contemporary visual cultures,
- understand how to create and use images ethically,
- improved their competency in visual literacy, that is, visual reading, writing and thinking skills.
Additional information
Course implementation type: lectures, seminars, group project (visual case study), portfolio (visual reflection on learning)
Literature
- Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. Penguin.
- Favero, P. S. H., & Lehmuskallio, A. (2025). Visual studies: A social scientific perspective. Routledge.
- Mirzoeff, N. (2023). An introduction to visual culture (3rd ed.). Routledge.
- Rose, G. (2023). Visual methodologies: An introduction to researching with visual materials (5th ed.). Sage.
- Sturken, M., & Cartwright, L. (2018). Practices of looking: An introduction to visual culture (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press.