The boundaries of art education are growing and encompassing new artistic practices and contemporary discourses. Many art educators are advocating for the inclusion of popular visual culture into the school curriculums. This study investigates what might be learned from the effects of adding a unit of instruction on popular visual culture, in the form of comic book art, into a beginning level high school art curriculum. / text

This dissertation brings critical visual culture studies to bear on mediatized representations of borders and migration in U.S. and Mexican contexts. In particular, this study examines how the human price of the North American Free Trade Agreement is represented and/or disappeared in popular visual culture. I deploy an eclectic methodological framework whose elements emerge from the confluence of Border Studies, Visual Cultural Studies and theorizations of neoliberalism in order to study how television, print media and narrative and documentary film serve as sites for both the visual constitution and critical contestation of neoliberal agendas. For example, I view objects of visual culture such as the Border Wars television program, Backpacker magazine and films Sin dejar huella and AbUSed: The Postville Raid as powerful and privileged sites for the analysis of political discourses.

This thesis is a case study of the relationship between a nineteenth-century French landscape painter, Théodore Rousseau, and his patrons and public. My aim is to reconstruct the context in which Rousseau's work was created, thereby inferring what the artist intended for his painting and how his collectors and public approached the style of his work. The thesis examines the nature of the dynamic between Rousseau and his consumers and the extent to which the artist's style may, or may not, be affected by the taste of his audience. In Part I, I examine Rousseau's involvement with the members of his circle including those who supported him during his years of absence from the Salon, the critic, Théophile Thoré, the industrialist, Frédéric Hartmannn and the civil servant, Alfred Sensier. This provides a framework for discussion of a number of ideas which preoccupied both the artist and his patrons including the level of finish in his work, the importance of pantheism, responses to commercial deforestation and the continuing resonances of ancient Greek culture. In Part II, I look at the problem of Rousseau's response to the expansion of the public sphere for art in the nineteenth-century. I approach this by locating Rousseau within the institutional structures of the art world which acted as intermediary between the painter and a wider public. These include the public exhibition, the rôle of the reproduction in the dissemination of his imagery, the importance of one-man public auctions and the position of the dealer as an outlet for the sale of his work. In reconstructing the dynamic between Rousseau and his patrons and public, I have relied above all on primary sources. These have included the often unpublished correspondence of the artist and his collectors, contemporary Salon criticism and sale catalogues, auctioneers' records and the stock-books of the Durand-Ruel firm of dealers, as well as a close formal analysis of Rousseau's paintings themselves.

Art integration research has received much attention of late, yet the focus generally examines ways integration practice and pedagogy support or enhance outcomes of high stakes testing. Serving as a counterpoint, this qualitative action research study, grounded in my experiences as a middle school arts integration specialist, addresses the value of visual culture art integration as a site of youth empowerment. Working collaboratively over a period of four months with three non-art educators to create and teach a series of social justice art integration units with sixth graders, I examined ways an integrated art and visual culture curriculum fostered safe spaces for students to take risks by deconstructing and reconstructing their identities, beliefs and understandings of others and their world through artmaking. In chapter one, I recount early teaching experiences that prompted the research questions in which an examination of which arts integration pedagogies best stimulate students to examine visual culture, articulate voice, and question power relationships that perpetuate social inequities. I address the theoretical lens of social justice art education as it frames the study and examine and discuss the current literature surrounding visual culture and art integration in chapter two. Chapter three delineates methodologies employed in the action research study including data collection measures of visual journaling, artmaking and photography. In chapters four, five, and six, I recount the process in which students engaged with, responded to, and created artwork through three curricular units--in social studies examining the intersections of culture and visual culture as evidenced through advertising, in language arts class collaboratively exploring persuasion through environmental and ecological art installations, and in math class integrating Fibonacci's theories through art making. Findings, discussed in chapter seven, indicated that visual culture art integration, used by teachers is often mislabeled out of insecurity and is a viable methodology for increasing student engagement. When students work collaboratively a space is created for them to regain power in the classroom and increase empathy awareness for themselves and others. Furthermore, art making, within a non-art classroom, can be a particularly successful arena through which middle school students articulate and clarify their voices.

Popular images of indigenous cultures, both past and present, have served to construct pernicious racial stereotypes of native peoples throughout the Americas. These stereotypes have led to the discrimination and marginalization of native peoples; however, they also have functioned to construct identities and cultural values of non-Indian people. Existing scholarship on the representation of native peoples of Latin America has focused on the ways that nineteenth-century elites in that region appropriated certain elements of indigenous cultures to construct a sense of national unity and historical continuity. However, this scholarship has overlooked the ways that images of the Maya produced social and cultural identities outside of Latin America, as the U.S. public avidly consumed a variety of images of the Maya and commercialized their material culture in the early twentieth century. Analyzing the question of identity construction through the appropriation of Mayan culture, this dissertation focuses on the U.S. construction and use of a particular racial discourse about native people. Public audiences consumed racial discourses in the context of a series of transnational cultural initiatives, including international expositions, popular film, and textile exhibits, which shaped public understandings of the Maya. I argue that despite growing public interest in Mayan culture and shifting understandings about the relationship between race and culture, these venues of visual display reinforced and reproduced older racial discourses of Indian degeneracy. I examine documentary evidence, such as travel brochures, newspapers, and archival materials to show that sites of visual display invented a new language of "indigeneity," which functioned to define not only native peoples, but also to shape U.S. public social identities. I conclude that the production of racial discourses of the Maya as culturally and racially inferior throughout the twentieth century defined contemporary understandings of U.S. identities and the role of indigenous history.

The Hockney - Falco Thesis (THFT) refers to findings published by the artist, David Hockney, and his fellow collaborator, Dr. Charles M. Falco, University of Arizona Professor of Optical Sciences. THFT builds upon Hockney's theories first published in his book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (2001, 2006), by further demonstrating how some Renaissance artists including, van Eyck, Lotto, and Caravaggio, used optics as tools for creating works of art.This arts-based case study reveals that Hockney and Falco's discoveries were significantly informed by their respective practices of art and imaging, and demonstrates why Falco's experiences with Hockney, specifically, has and continues to influence his scientific research practice. These findings support Sullivan's (2004, 2005, 2006) theory of art-practice as research and demonstrate that THFT has significant implications for research and instruction of art and visual culture education.

Denna uppsats avser att undersöka och analysera fem verksamma behöriga bildlärares syn på bildsamtalets betydelse och användande i bildundervisningen. Detta eftersom bildsamtal är en viktig del i bildundervisningen enligt den gällande kursplanen i bildämnet (2000) och den kommande kursplanen i bildämnet (Lgr 11). I kursplanens mål står det utskrivet att reflektion och samtal ska ingå i undervisningen, trots det är mina egna erfarenheter att dessa delar ej förekommer så ofta i undervisningen.      För att undersöka fem lärares syn på bildsamtalets betydelse och användning av bildsamtal i bildundervisningen, har kvalitativa intervjuer genomförts i grundskolan med fem verksamma lärare i år 6-9. Min förhoppning var att dessa intervjuer skulle frambringa en bild av verksamma lärares uppfattningar om bildsamtal och hur de gestaltas i undervisningssammanhang.      Litteraturstudier har genomförts för att ge tyngd åt arbetet samt förståelse för vad samtal kan innebära för elevers utveckling.      I resultatdelen i uppsatsen redovisas de fem lärarnas uppfattningar om bildsamtalet i undervisningen.      Utifrån denna studie kan jag inte dra några generella slutsatser om hur bildlärare i allmänhet upplever att de arbetar med bildsamtal i sin undervisning. Utan studien redovisar dessa fem lärares tankar om bildsamtalet i deras undervisning. / The purpose of this essay is to examine and analyze the views of five active and competent teachers’ perceptions about pictures conversation significance in art education, because it is an important part of art education due to the current curriculum in the subject. The goal of the curriculum says that reflection and conversation should be a part of the education though my own experiences are that this doesn’t occur very often in the education.      To explore some teacher’s views about picture conversation and its significance in art education, I have done some qualitative interviews with five teachers active in the primary school, grades six to nine. My hope was that these interviews would produce a picture of active teachers’ perceptions about pictures conversations and how they are actually made in an educational context.       Studies of literature have been made to bring importance to the work and bring comprehension to what pictures conversations can mean for the development of the students.      In the result part of the essay, the different comprehension and views of the five teachers are shown.      It is not possible to make any general conclusions about how art teachers in common experience that they work with pictures conversations in their teaching.       But the study reports about these five teachers thoughts about pictures conversations in their teaching.

Oblique Optics contends that studies of visual culture must account for the queerness of images. This argument posits images as queer residents within visual culture by asking how and where the queerness of images becomes visible. These questions are interrogated by utilizing queer theories and methods to refigure how the image is conceptualized within traditional approaches to visual culture studies and media studies. Each chapter offers different approaches to see the queerness of images by torquing our vision to see "obliquely," whereby images are located beyond visible surfaces (like pictures or photographs) through ec-static movements within thresholds between bodies and beings. Chapter One rethinks how images are conceptualized through metaphorical language by exploring how images emerge from fantasies about will-be-born bodies in fetal photographs. This chapter turns to figures of queer children for insight about oblique approaches to visual culture and foregrounds later engagements with aesthetics of failure. Chapter Two considers how aesthetics of failure extend to the visible forms of lacking bodies. The visibility of lack is explored by considering how pixelated vision provides alternative ways to image mastectomy scars in the film The Body Beautiful (1991) and the advertising campaign "Obsessed with Breasts." Chapter Three addresses the visible form and function of cutting within images about Michael Jackson and these images are shown cutting the body toward non-human forms of visibility. Chapter Four expands on this discussion about the non-human by contemplating how the film Air Doll (2009) reveals a visual culture of things, where we not only see things but also see how things see. Finally, Chapter Five turns to digital glitches as a visible form to explore how non-human bodies like the computer produce images beyond human-centric concerns and reveals how the digital is shown to image itself.

<p>This project focuses on the visual culture that emerged from Japan's relationship with Manchuria during the Manchukuo period (1932-1945). It was during this time that Japanese official and popular interest in the region reached its peak. Fueling the Japanese attraction and investment in this region were numerous romanticized images of Manchuria's bounty and space, issued to bolster enthusiasm for Japanese occupation and development of the region. I examine the Japanese visual production of a utopian Manchuria during the 1930s and early 1940s through a variety of interrelated media and spatial constructions: graphic magazines, photography, exhibition spaces, and urban planning. Through this analysis, I address how Japanese political, military, and economic state institutions cultivated the image of Manchukuo as an ideal, multiethnic state and a "paradise" (rakudo) for settlement in order to generate domestic support and to legitimize occupation on the world stage. As there were many different colonial offices with different goals, there was no homogenous vision of the Manchurian ideal. In fact, tensions often emerged between offices as each attempted to garner support for its own respective mission on the continent. I examine these tensions and critique the strategic intersection of propaganda campaigns, artistic goals and personal fantasies of a distant, exotic frontier. In the process, this project explores how the idea of Manchuria became a panacea for a variety of economic and social problems plaguing Japan at both a national and individual level.</p> / Dissertation

In art and education, theorists dispute the concept of visuality, or how meaning occurs from what we see. This study examines two opposed and acrimoniously entrenched theoretical perspectives adopted internationally: visual culture and aesthetics. In visual culture, visual experience, including perception is mediated by background cultural discourses. On this approach, subjectivity is explained as conventional, the role of the senses in making meaning is strongly diminished or rejected and from this, accounting for visuality precludes indeterminate and intuitive aspects. Differently, aesthetic perspectives approach visual meaning as obtaining through direct perceptual and felt aspects of aesthetic experience. Here, subjectivity remains discrete from language and the role of cultural discourse in making meaning diminishes or is excluded. Each description is important to the explanation of visuality in art and education, but problematic. To start, the study outlines the central explanatory commitments of both visual culture and aesthetics. The study identifies problems in each with their explanations of subjectivity or self. Both positions maintain from earlier explanations of cognition that separate theoretically and practically the senses, cognitive processes, and context. The study looks at approaches to mind and representation in accounts of visuality and provides some background from the cognitive sciences to understand the problem further. Contemporary explanation from science and philosophy is revising the separation. However, some approaches from science are reductive of mind and both aesthetics and visual culture theorists are understandably reluctant to adopt scientistic or behaviourist approaches for the explanation of visual arts practices. The aim of the study is to provide a non-reductive realist account of visuality in visual arts and education. To accomplish this aim, the study employs philosopher John R. Searle's explanation of consciousness because it explores subjectivity as qualitative, unified, and intrinsically social in experience. By doing this, the study addresses a gap in the theoretical understanding of the two dominant approaches to visuality. The key to relations between subjectivity and the world in reasoning is the capacity for mental representation. From this capacity and the rational agency of a self, practical reasoning is central to the creation, understanding, and appreciation of art and imagery. This account of consciousness, its aspects, and how it works includes description of the Background, as capacities enabling the uptake and structuring of sociocultural influence in mind. Crucially, the study shows how the capacity for reasoned action can be represented without dualism or reduction to the explanatory constraints of behavioural or physical sciences, an important commitment in the arts and education. In this explanation, the study identifies epistemic constraints on the representation of mental states, including unconscious states, in accounting for practices as reasoned activities. Centrally, the study looks at how, from the capacities of consciousness and the self's freedom of will, visuality is unified as qualitative, cognitive, and social. In exploring Searle's explanation of consciousness, some account of current work on cognition extends discussion of a reconciliation of visuality on these terms.