Visual & Material Culture Research Centre
Situated within its Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Kingston University's Visual and Material Culture Research Centre provides a staff and student focus for energetic interdisciplinary research in visual and material culture, and the histories of art, design, and architecture.
The Centre enables academics, emerging scholars, and students to conduct research within a stimulating and collegiate environment that actively seeks to shape the future of Visual and Material Culture as field of inquiry. Committed to the continuing development of a wide range of interdisciplinary research methods and activities, the Centre provides an intellectual infrastructure through which researchers engage with both individual and collaborative projects.
The Centre has a shared emphasis on Modernity and its futures. Its distinct albeit inter-animating areas of study are:
Historical and Critical Studies
Staff and students untangle the knotty historiographical and methodological questions of the past, present, and future of the history of art, architecture, and design. Interests and expertise include: History and Genre Painting; patronage, dealers, and the art market; English and European avant-gardes; the history of the art school; inter- and cross-disciplinarity; archives; and the practice of 'research' itself in the Arts and Humanities.
Place, Space, and Global Futures
Researchers are committed to interrogating the historical and theoretical comprehension of local, national, and international identity, of located-ness and dis-location in our contemporary global visual and material cultural context. Interests and expertise here include: Museum and Gallery Studies; public sculpture; art beyond the gallery; transcultural practices; Arab women artists; Japanese popular culture; contemporary Chinese art; Orientalism and the Middle East; the global art market.
Gender, Technology, and the Human Image
Staff and students engage with thorny discourses of gender, technology, and the human image in our volatile, mediated, and often traumatising visual, material, and immaterial cultures. Interests and expertise include: beauty; fashioning the body; performance art; feminism; masculinity and conflict; heterosexuality; mass media; new media; photography, film, and informational networks; technological reproducibility; and our bio-cultural futures.
Cultural Activism Research Group
Art has a long and celebrated history in struggles for social change. Drawing on and working across the thematic and critical areas above, this research group brings together researchers and artists to engage with the historical and theoretical connections between artists and social movements, the cultural production of social movements, and the many important but often overlooked practices which occupy a liminal space between these disciplinary positions.
