Practices of Looking

Name: Practices of Looking
Price: 89.22 USD
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ISBN: 9780197627150

An Introduction to Visual Culture

by Marita Sturken, Lisa Cartwright

4th Edition

Publisher: Oxford University Press

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Book Details

Print ISBN	9780197627150
eText ISBN	9780197627181
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Publishing Year	2025
Edition	4th Edition
Language	English
Pages	608

The textbook Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, 4th Edition, co-authored by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, analyzes how images carry meaning in everyday life. Published by Oxford University Press, this course resource bridges visual studies, communication studies, media studies, and cultural studies to evaluate visual artifacts, technologies, and viewing practices.

The volume investigates how visual forms operate across social relationships, political institutions, and contemporary public communications. It connects theoretical concepts with historical and modern visual practices to explore image production, spectator relationships, and media networks across diverse institutions.

This 608-page print volume provides structured instructional support for academic coursework, establishing critical frameworks for analyzing visual culture across historical periods and contemporary environments.

Chapter 1: Images, Power, and Politics
- • Representation
- • Vision and Visuality
- • The Myth of Photographic Truth
- • Myth, Connotation, and the Meaning of Images
- • Semiotics and Signs
- • Images and Ideology
- • Image Icons
Chapter 2: Viewers Make Meaning
- • Producers' Intended Meanings
- • Aesthetics and Taste
- • Value, Collecting, and Institutional Critique
- • Reading Images as Ideological Subjects
- • Viewing Strategies
- • Appropriation and Re-Appropriation
Chapter 3: Modernity: Spectatorship, the Gaze, and Power
- • Modernity and the Modern City
- • Modernism
- • The Concept of the Modern Subject
- • Spectatorship and the Gaze
- • Power and the Surveillance Gaze
- • The Other
- • Gender and the Gaze
- • Gaming and the Gaze
Chapter 4: Realism and Perspective: From Renaissance Painting to Digital Media
- • Types of Realism
- • Perspective
- • Perspective and the Body
- • The Camera Obscura
- • Challenges to Perspective
- • Perspective in Digital Media
Chapter 5: Visual Technologies: Image Reproduction, Generation, and the Copy
- • Visualization and Technology
- • Visual Technologies
- • The Reproduced Image and the Copy
- • Walter Benjamin and Mechanical Reproduction
- • The Politics of Reproducibility
- • Ownership and Copyright
- • Reproduction and the Digital Image
- • 3D Reproduction and Simulation
Chapter 6: Media Culture
- • Media, Singular and Plural
- • Propaganda and the Media Environment
- • Popular Culture Studies
- • Media Geographies
- • Media Infrastructures
- • Media as Nation and Public Sphere
- • Citizen Journalism
- • Global Media Events
Chapter 7: Brand Culture: Visual Culture and the Spaces of Consumption
- • Consumer Societies and the Spaces of Modern Consumerism
- • Brands as Image, Symbol, and Icon
- • Brand Ideologies and Commodity Fetishism
- • The Knowing Consumer
- • Selling Social Awareness
Chapter 8: The Postmodernism Condition and Twenty-First Futurisms
- • The Postmodern Condition
- • Poststructuralism in the Wake of the Holocaust
- • Atomic Media
- • Postmodern Architecture in Social Context
- • Kitsch and the Vernacular
- • Futurisms and Simulation
- • Reflexivity And Distanced Knowing
- • Appropriation and Postmodern Subjectivity
- • Remix, Parody, and Pastiche
Chapter 9: Visual Cultures of Data and Science
- • Numbers and Structures of Feeling
- • Modern Western Science and the Data Body
- • Evidence, Classification, and Normative Science
- • Bodily Interiors and Biomedical Personhood
- • Biopower and the Quantified Self
- • The Genetic and Digital Body
- • Data in the Global Pandemic
- • The Infodemic: Data in the Service of Propaganda
- • The Sensory Body, the Cyborg, and Disability
Chapter 10: The World Image and Globalization
- • Being in the World
- • The Universal Image: A Star is Born
- • The World Image
- • Geolocation
- • The Digital Twin and the Point Cloud
- • The World Ocean
- • The Cloud Image
- • Concepts of Globalization
- • Social Movements and Visual Activism
- • The Global Museum
- • Refugees and Borders