This thesis discusses the gift in terms of presence and interpretation using varied examples of image that form a visual culture. It contextualises the term "giftness" by analysing its use and our socio-cultural understanding of its function as it relates to the gift process. The hermeneutic processes attached to both the gift, and gifting, are multifarious and require examination of moments of instability present in the act of interpretation and meaning. The gift relationship is juxtaposed against the relationship between image and reader/observer to highlight the abstract quality of the gift and its inherent instability that exists within gift interpretation in general. The fundamental structure and unity of the gift, as is based upon relations between subjects, helps to identify and analyse systems of power and subjectivity developed in terms of investment in order to emphasise the complexities that arise through inter-subjective relations, particularly gift exchange, and those between subject and image. Certain theoretical models help to exemplify and illuminate this thesis, predominantly post-structuralist and psychoanalytic theories. The gift’s condition of instability is further examined in terms of discursive formation and function, looking at how the gift is enunciated so that one can recognise a gift and giving, and acknowledge its problematic status. The relationship between subject and image is investigated to see if we are able to read this investment as a gift relationship within the context of giftness, that is when giftness operates as an instable and challenging element to discursive exchange in visual mediums such as film, painting, television, art and photography. An examination of the gift aporia in this thesis is directed towards a subject’s investment in the image. What transpires between subject and image is akin to what circulates between giver and receiver, on the basis of investment. On this basis, the present configuration of giftness is utilised in terms of the image.

My dissertation is a study of how merchants in Trecento Italy used the imagery they commissioned as a form of moral self-representation and as a practical tool in their pursuit of eternal life in heaven. The study is grounded in the theoretical framework of Michael Baxandall’s concept of the “period eye,” that is, the belief that “social facts lead to the development of distinctive visual skills and habits.” (Baxandall, 1988) A primary social fact affecting medieval merchants was their long association in Christian culture with the individual and societal evils related to the pursuit of money and wealth—the sin of avarice. This linkage was expressed across the entire range of medieval cultural expression, in texts, sermons, and imagery. The challenge for merchants, therefore, was to publicly demonstrate that they earned their money ethically and legally, that they led a morally sound life, and that they used a portion of their money for the common good, especially in caring for the poor. The commissioning and public/semi-public display of imagery thus became a way of portraying a merchant’s moral identity as a worthy civic and Christian citizen, with all of the temporal and spiritual benefits that might produce. In order to better understand how such imagery served these objectives, I have developed an analytical framework I call the Merchant’s Moral Eye. This framework consists of eight primary dimensions that I believe were fundamental to the formation of merchants’ moral beliefs and behaviours during this period. These dimensions are: 1. Purgatory 2. Medieval Spaces 3. Christian Symbolism 4. Obligation & Reciprocity 5. The Virtues & Vices 6. Fama 7. Hospitality 8. Coats of Arms Collectively, these interlaced, multidisciplinary dimensions provide a systematic approach to produce the robust contextualisation needed to explore why, and how, merchants used imagery to achieve their objectives. However, while this study’s focus is solely on the moral and salvific functions of this imagery, it needs to be remembered that the same imagery also served other more worldly objectives, be they social, economic, or political. As an analytical tool this framework enables three fundamental functions with respect to the underlying motives, meanings, and uses of merchant-commissioned art in Trecento Italy: - an assessment of the feasibility of existing interpretations - the enhancement or nuancing of existing interpretations - the identification and explication of wholly new interpretations To demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework in achieving the above, I have selected, as case studies, three merchants in three different locations, whose artistic commissions spanned the entire Trecento. These individuals and their imaged artifacts are: 1. Enrico Scrovegni of Padua and the Arena Chapel, decorated by Giotto 1303-5. 2. Domenico Lenzi of Florence and his illuminated manuscript, Lo Specchio umano (The Mirror of Humanity), produced c. 1340; 3. Francesco Datini of Prato and the Palazzo Datini, decorated in the 1390s. These individuals represent a cross-section of Trecento Italian merchants in terms of status, wealth, and public profile. These merchants and their commissioned artworks are discussed in detail using the framework dimensions as modes of enquiry to show how this imagery supported their self-representation as honest merchants and dutiful Christians, and generated the prayers and other suffrages they assumed they needed to eventually get to Heaven. In all three case studies there were significant findings that fulfilled each of the analytical functions noted above, thereby confirming the utility of the Merchant’s Moral Eye Analytical Framework as an effective methodological approach. / Graduate / 2022-05-27

Three main challenges often confront societies that have experienced mass atrocities and genocide: understanding genocide, narrating and representing genocide, and reconciling after genocide. While these challenges seem different, they are intertwined and often inseparable. This thesis takes on these questions in various degrees by focusing on the subjects of memory, representations of violence and the Anthropocene. By reading two novels and one graphic novel, I argue that a multi-representational and multi-perspectival analysis of the Rwandan genocide gives a perspective through one can think through the questions of narrative silence and erasures, gender and sexual violence, animality and the boundaries between victims and killers. Altogether, the texts represent a genocide testimony that aligns and at the same counters the official narrative of the Rwandan genocide circulated by the Rwandan government.

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<p>"Imaging Church" examines the impact of visual practices on a religious community's ecclesiology. I argue that visual practices potentially encourage others to perceive the church differently and participate in the mission of a community to which they do not belong. Employing ethnographic research and material analysis, I investigate the visual practices of the Congregation of St. Joseph, a Roman Catholic women's religious community. Seven of communities of the Sisters of St. Joseph reconfigured in 2007 to form the Congregation of St. Joseph: the communities of LaGrange Park, Illinois; Tipton, Indiana; Wichita, Kansas; Nazareth, Michigan; Cleveland, Ohio; Wheeling, West Virginia; and the Médaille community which includes sisters in Louisiana, Minnesota, and Ohio.</p><p>My ethnographic research consisted of interviews and participant observation. Between May 2011 and May 2013, I interviewed 107 sisters in the Congregation as well as 17 individuals who were Congregation of St. Joseph Associates (non-vowed members) and/or employees of the Congregation. Interviews attended to the sisters' personal prayer lives, ministerial activities, congregational life and worship, congregational space, and the commodification of images. To gain an understanding of their visual practices, I worshiped with the sisters and observed several ministries. I employ material analysis to examine the influence of images created by and used in the Congregation. Analysis of particular images and spaces employed by the Congregation reveals the messages they articulate and potentially share with those who engage them. </p><p>To assess the centrality of practices for examining the ecclesiology and justice commitments of religious communities, the first chapter argues that the Sisters of St. Joseph in seventeenth century France and nineteenth century America articulated and dispersed their vision of the church through their practices (ministries and the production of commodities). These practices provide the foundation for the sisters' contemporary practices and the means through which they work for justice. The second chapter explores the sisters' charism (spirituality and mission) and commitment to justice and how these concepts are articulated in their congregational spaces. I argue that the sisters promote their mission through a visual archive which emphasizes their history and unity as a community, their chapels which display their belief and charism, and their public spaces which attempt to unify the Congregation's visual practices and extend these practices outside of their religious community.</p><p>The third chapter argues that the sisters employ visual practices in their spiritual lives and ministries to manifest their mission and to promote engagement with society. I examine these practices in relation to John Fuellenbach's concept of a theology of transformation. Analysis of the sisters' individual and communal prayer lives reveals the way visual practices assist in discerning identity and relationships. I further argue that the sisters' train others in their visual practices through their ministries, including their publications, retreats, and artwork produced in the Congregation. The fourth chapter examines how the Congregation's production of religious commodities evangelizes viewers and encourages participation in the sisters' mission for social and ecological justice. Through their business, the Ministry of the Arts, the Congregation employs religious commodities to assert a new perception of the church and world and invite others to commit to this vision. Through these visual practices in their prayer lives, congregational life, and ministries, the Congregation demonstrates the transformative potentiality of visual practices and offers techniques through which the church can pursue justice.</p> / Dissertation

How do we engage with old photographs or with images that appear to be “old?” Moreover, how do we relate to the past through such images? These are questions I explore through a series of photographs created between 2007 and 2013 by master printmaker, Lothar Osterburg (German, b. 1961). For Imagining New York, Osterburg worked purely from memory, building models of the city from found and everyday materials and composing them through the frame of a fixed camera lens. As his look through the lens suggests, Osterburg’s New York stems, perhaps primarily, from memories of images. His final images, printed as photogravures, may create a similarly memory-fueled experience for the viewer. These images may look and feel quite familiar, but they resist easy identification; the strange artificiality and generic nature of the model may bring to mind any number of associations—real and fictional—spanning the turn of the twentieth century, each slipping into the next. Thinking Imagining New York through Sigmund Freud’s potentially productive melancholia, and Walter Benjamin’s melancholic “historical materialism,” I suggest that the ambivalence of Osterburg’s images—their particular fixation on the past—invites a mode of viewing that produces a certain distance, a critical remove not only from habitual viewing practices, but also from the viewer’s own relation to the past. But how is this melancholic movement productive today? Osterburg’s images may point to a collective experience in seemingly personal “historical processes” of reflection; emphasizing the status of the past in the imagination as image, it may become something that—together—we actively access and construct to inform the present. And through the critical distance they prompt, these images suggest “work” that is productive in acknowledging, specifically, the misrecognition of the social. During this process of prolonged disjuncture of temporality and space, the viewer quite literally “sees” these images differently. Or rather she may “see” herself seeing them, to become aware of her active role as viewer, as an active presence in the present. And in turn, it may be that the past—a kind of cultural experience—becomes an active, present social formation. / text

By contrasting the uses of image-as-evidence and documentary-as-witness, this report challenges some of the maxims of documentary film studies and exposes the ways in which different forms of audiovisual media construct distant conflict. More specifically, the report analyzes a purposive case selection of videos/films related to the Syrian uprising: the first set of visual data includes a montage of 13 YouTube videos claiming to show the aftereffects of the 21 August 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria; the visual analysis in section two centers upon a selection of 15 short documentary films produced by the Syrian Abounaddara Collective. Theoretically, the study advances the value of witnessing in the re-envisioning of documentary film. My research demonstrates the relative weakness of both legalistic and journalistic approaches to depicting war that treat visual material primarily as recorded fact or evidence. In its place, the report advances a new form of documentary with a higher degree of interpretive acumen based on the "emergency cinema" model developed in Syria -- what I term "documentary-as-witness." / text

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In the cultural upheaval of the 1920s, Canadians became particularly invested in looking at and debating women???s images in public. This dissertation looks at how English-Canadians debated, accepted, and challenged modernity through public images of women. In analysing the debates over cultural rituals of looking it seeks to show how the discussions about images reveal the power of vision in ordering and understanding modernity as well as social and cultural changes. Through five case studies on the flapper, the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation, two beauty contests, an art exhibition including nudes, and the relationship between film and automobiles this study reveals how important images of the body were to the cultural developments and debates on the post-World War One modern world. By the 1920s urban visual culture was dominated by various images of women and an analysis of those images and the debates around them reveal underlying tensions related to gender, class, age, social order, and race. Anxieties over changes in these areas were absorbed into the broader concerns over the pleasures and perils associated with being modern. This dissertation looks at Canadian visual culture in terms of what it can reveal about modernity and the problems, perils, and pleasures associated with it.

This thesis examines the exotic performances and representations of Icelanders and 'the North' (borealism) in both contemporary mediums and daily life focusing on their practice within intricate power-relations and transnational folkloric encounters. It sets forth theory in understanding the dynamics, agency and ironies involved with performing one's identity and folklore and a corresponding methodology of fieldwork and audio-visual documentation. It looks at the representation of the North through the produced and widespread images of Icelanders. It sheds light on the dynamics behind these representations and the coalescence of personal experience; everyday cultural expression; modes of commodification; and folkloric contexts from which many of these images emerge. The primary case study is an ethnography of Icelandic expatriates in Europe and North America that explores the roles of identity and folk culture in transcultural performances. In approaching the questions of differentiation and the folklore of dislocation everyday practices such as oral narrative and food traditions are studied as an arena of the negotiation and performance of identity. Interlinking theoretical and methodological concerns the thesis brings to bear how expressive culture and performance may corrode the strategies of boundary making and marginalisation re-enforced by exotic imagery by tactical re-appropriation. Finally the thesis explores the concept of ironic, as opposed to 'authentic', identities.