Asko Lehmuskallio and Paolo Favero present new visual studies book

Asko Lehmuskallio, professor at Tampere University, and Paolo Favero, professor at the University of Antwerp, present their new book “Visual Studies: A Social Scientific Perspective” (Routledge 2025).

Event

Date:

Tuesday 7 October 2025

Time:

14.00 – 16.00

Location:

Campus Albano, Building 2, fourth floor, meeting room 4

The seminar takes place at Campus Albano, Building 2, fourth floor, meeting room 41

Internal event

The result of a long process of dialogue between the two authors, this book presents a transcultural and generative introduction to the field of visual studies. Aimed primarily, but not exclusively, at students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences, it explores the multiple meanings of images and visual culture in human life.

The book is divided into 3 sections. The first section departs from a framework of the look as a medium for understanding imaging practices and offers a critical analysis of the changing ways in which vision has been understood across epochs and cultures and the politics attached. The second section opens with an expanded understanding of images, addressing their affective, sensory and performative roles. It then discusses semiotic tensions between the icon and the index and the role of social interaction in the visual field and ends with an analysis of immersive viewing in a creative juxtaposition between distinct, culturally situated, imaging practices.

Building on the previous sections, the third part provides a series of applications in specific terrains, such as on the significance of faces, on cameras and their environments, the visual culture of death, x-ray imagery and the meaning and role of shadows. Insisting on the role of the look as a medium for studying the visual field, this book reminds us of the importance of images not only as representations of the world but also as proper co-travellers and companions of our journeys on the earth.
 

Paolo Favero is Professor of Visual Cultures and Anthropology at the University of Antwerp and Head of the Department of Communication Studies at the same university. He explores the nexus between visual culture and existential matters both theoretically as well as through the practice of image-making. He currently conducts research on death, care and aesthetics in India and Italy and recently published “Visual Studies: A Social Scientific Perspective” (Routledge 2025) a transcultural and generative guide to the field of visual studies.

Asko Lehmuskallio serves as Professor of Visual Studies and is director of the Visual Studies Lab at Tampere University, Finland. Working at the intersection of visual studies and media studies, he is particularly interested in the interrelations between images, bodies and visual technologies, specifically in those between seeing and knowing. Lehmuskallio’s work has been published widely, reflecting his trajectory at universities in Germany, the UK, Spain, the US and Finland.

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