LU konference
The contemporary world is saturated with images, screens, and visual data, yet the question of what it truly means to see is becoming increasingly pressing. The symposium invites collective reflection on the concepts of the image and seeing in philosophy, education, the arts, and other fields of the humanities, highlighting the shift from passive looking to conscious, critical, and creative seeing.
The symposium is intended for PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and early-career scholars, as well as professors, educators, artists, theorists, designers, and practitioners in the humanities and arts. Interdisciplinary and cross-institutional proposals are especially encouraged.
Organisers invite submissions of academic papers, visual essays or performative lectures, pedagogical or philosophical experiments, as well as dialogues and workshops. Work-in-progress contributions are also welcome, with an emphasis on shared inquiry and creative academic engagement.
At the symposium, visual literacy will be approached as the capacity not only to “read” images but also to engage with them reflectively, critically, and creatively, thereby shaping meaning, knowledge, and creative practice. The aim of the event is to create an international academic space for discussion on how visuality influences thinking, teaching, learning, research, and cultural processes.
Discussions at the symposium will be structured around three closely interconnected thematic strands. The first focuses on perception and the senses, exploring how the transition from aesthetic and sensory experience to knowledge and deeper understanding takes place.
The second strand emphasises visual culture and visual literacy, analysing how art media, algorithms, and images generated by artificial intelligence shape contemporary practices of seeing, creating, and interpreting visual material.
The third thematic strand—learning to see differently—highlights the role of education in the humanities and the arts in expanding ways of seeing within a globalised world characterised by cultural and identity diversity.
Submission of proposals (in English): by 15 March 2026.
Notification of acceptance: by 22 March 2026.
Further information: Zane Ozola zane.ozola@lu.lv ; Austra Avotiņa austra.avotina@lu.lv .
. The symposium is organised by the UL FORTHEM Art and Aesthetics Lab. Proposals for participation may be submitted until 15 March 2026. ){kind=link}