Department of American Studies
Coordinators: Mary Corbin Sies and Psyche Williams-Forson
The Material Culture/Visual Culture Working Group was founded during 2000-2001 as an interdisciplinary group of faculty and graduate students engaged in research on the material culture and visual culture of America. The group has several goals: to build a learning community within which we can share and critique each others’ research, think cross-disciplinarily about important issues of common interest in our fields, and exchange information about courses, resources, and events in each others’ units. Since our founding, we have been focusing generally on the material and visual culture of marginalized subgroups of North America. We have organized theme years on African American material and visual culture, on queer sights/cites/sites, and on the material and visual culture of heritage tourism in the U.S. and abroad. We have co-sponsored programming, in addition, on U.S. Latino/a visual and material culture, and on the themes of art, politics, expressive culture, and representation. The working group seeks to publicize the value of material and visual evidence for understanding the cultures of everyday life of American subcultures and to foster an environment in which students and scholars from different backgrounds can explore and refine research and theories for working with material and visual culture.
In the past, MC/VC has sponsored several kinds of activities during a given year: invited speaker colloquia series on our theme; “dinner seminars,” for speakers to meet exclusively with graduate students over lunch or dinner for conversation and exchange of ideas; mini-symposia to bring research and issues connected with material and visual culture to the community beyond the campus; research, reading, or pedagogy seminars or discussions. We have also participated in regional and national conferences, sponsoring, for example, a Washington, D.C. "museum crawl" at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, co-sponsoring CHASA Annual Meetings, and participating in symposia organized by the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity.
The MC/VC WG explores how people negotiate and experience differences of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality in and through their material and visual worlds. Doing so helps scholars better understand cultural, social, and economic constructions of identity, difference, power, and marginality. In the fields of visual and material culture, there is clearly a pressing need to do this work. Collection and documentation of resources is relatively undeveloped for African American material and visual resources (with some key exceptions that belong mostly in the realm of high art). While we aspire to sophisticated understandings of intersectionality in relation to material and visual culture, we are also interested in the more basic steps of collection, documentation, and bibliographic control of the resources we need to do our research. Many of these resources are endangered.
On every level, our activities demonstrate that people work out issues of cultural identity in intimate connection with their material and visual worlds (including their own bodies).
Some of the foundational questions we developed to organize MC/VC in 2001 were:
• How do African Americans and members of other racial-ethnic groups in the Americas express themselves in and through their material and visual culture?
• How do people deploy material and visual resources to embody and express political cultures?
• How does power permeate the material world?
• What would you like to learn about how people interact with their visual, material, and spatial worlds?
• What kinds of events and activities would you like to see the MC/VC WG sponsor?
CONTACT INFORMATION
Coordinators: Mary Corbin Sies
Department of American Studies
1102 Holzapfel Hall
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
Phone: 301.405.1361
Fax: 301.314.9453
marycorbinsies@yahoo.com |
Psyche Williams-Forson
Department of American Studies
1102 Holzapfel Hall
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
Phone: 301.405.6931
Fax: 301.314.9453
pwforson@umd.edu |
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