Across cultures and historical periods, texts, images, and other representational forms have done more than depict the world: they have shaped the conditions under which people, identities, communities, and ways of life become visible. From illuminated manuscripts and printed portraits to serialized fiction, photography, cinema, social media, and AI-generated imagery, representational technologies do not merely record cultural realities—they participate in producing them. Every medium affords particular ways of seeing, circulating, and legitimizing forms of visibility while simultaneously obscuring or rendering others unthinkable.

This seminar invites participants to investigate the making of visibility as a comparative and interdisciplinary problem. Rather than treating representation as the passive reflection of preexisting identities or cultures, we ask how representational forms actively configure what can appear, who can be recognized, and which aesthetic, social, and political possibilities become imaginable. How do texts, images, performances, and digital interfaces organize visibility differently? How do changing technologies of representation reshape cultural practices, aesthetic values, and forms of social intelligibility? What happens as representational practices migrate across media, languages, historical periods, and geopolitical contexts?

Bringing together scholars from literature, art history, film and media studies, performance studies, history, digital humanities, and related fields, the seminar seeks to develop a comparative vocabulary for understanding visibility as a cultural process rather than a purely visual phenomenon. We welcome contributions that examine the material, aesthetic, political, or technological conditions through which visibility is produced, contested, circulated, or withheld. Participants may explore canonical or understudied archives, historical or contemporary case studies, analog or digital media, or theoretical approaches that illuminate how representational practices shape cultural life.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• the relationship between representation and visibility across historical periods;
• aesthetic practices that render individuals, communities, or identities culturally legible;
• the circulation and remediation of forms across texts, images, performances, and digital platforms;
• visibility, opacity, and the politics of recognition;
• technologies of representation, mediation, and cultural memory;
• fashion, design, architecture, and material culture as representational practices;
• translation, transnational circulation, and cross-cultural adaptation;
• archives, collections, and the politics of preservation;
• interfaces, platforms, algorithms, and emerging forms of digital visibility;
• generative AI and new regimes of representation.

Please submit a 250–300 word abstract via the ACLA portal. Any questions can be directed to [email protected] .