Images and contexts

This panel aims to understand how the integration of images across different media, spaces, and contexts reveals performative practices of identity and communication throughout a broad chronology, from Prehistory to the Contemporary Age. Images are approached as vehicles for ideas circulating among diverse sociocultural worlds, enabling the analysis of modes of production, reception, circulation, and appreciation, as well as the visual languages that emerge and travel from them.

The growing dissemination of the mediatised image has generated theoretical challenges that have driven several epistemological shifts, expanding visual culture’s study into increasingly diverse fields—from digital media to renewed conceptions of materiality and the long life of images.

Considering the image as an anthropological, polysemic, and multicultural expression and document, and recognising its relevance within the social sciences and humanities today, this panel invites multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary approaches to critically explore the relationship between images and contexts.