Situating Visual Knowledge: The Global Politics of Sight, Sense and the Embodied Experience

Presented by Alister Wedderburn, (Australian National University)

The Visual Politics Strategic Research Program invites you to a seminar with Dr Alister Wedderburn. Alister is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in International Relations at the Australian National University.
How International Relations conceives of ‘the visual’ is often oddly detached from the embodied practice of seeing, a theoretical move that has isolated sight from the layered, multisensory nature of experience more generally. Dr Wedderburn will argue that situating visuality explicitly within embodied experience can help to illuminate the intricate epistemological relationship between sight and other senses. Noting that the privileging of the visual over the aural/oral is distinctly modern and western,  Dr Wedderburn will ask what an attentiveness to historical shifts in the politics of seeing can reveal about contemporary visual politics.