“Looking at the world,” whether through the lens of a tourist, consumer, student, artist, biennale visitor, hipster, activist, ufologist, architect, or environmentalist, involves the formation of ways of seeing and the communication of visual images.  Today as never before, visual imagery mediates and shapes our experiences and and informs our thinking.  

This year's symposium presents an exciting and wide range of critical investigations into the visual culture that shapes our conceptions and perceptions of everyday life, relations with others, and how we navigate through our complex globalized world. Our exceptional cohort of thesis students have delved into an array of topics which include how visuality impacts the politics of display at the 4th Berlin Biennial, visual economy of post tsunami tourist landscapes, the deployment of pirate futurism in contemporary art, racial melancholia of transnational adoption, post Indian “survivance,” how green branding became hot, cultural memory of Jonestown tragedy, and rhetoric of craft in contemporary art.