CRITICAL PERSPECTIVESPHOTOGRAPHY, ARCHIVES, AND POLITICAL IMAGINATIONPhotography has never simply reflected the social and political worlds in which it operates. Its histories are deeply entangled with systems of classification, surveillance, colonial administration, and institutional authority, but also with practices of witnessing, activism, artistic intervention, and resistance. These different histories point to a fundamental tension: photography makes people, events, and experiences visible, while also participating in the structures that determine how they are seen, interpreted, and remembered.Critical Perspectives: Photography, Archives, and Political Imagination takes this tension as its starting point. The seminar considers photography and archival practices not simply as records of political and historical realities, but as part of the processes through which those realities acquire meaning. Attention is therefore directed beyond what photographs represent towards the institutions, technologies, cultural frameworks, and forms of circulation that shape their production and interpretation.Questions of visibility are central to this discussion. Photography has long been associated with transparency and evidentiary truth, yet making something visible is never a politically neutral act. The same medium that has enabled testimony and brought injustice into public view has also served systems of identification, classification, surveillance, and governance. Who is represented, who remains absent, who controls the image, and who has the authority to interpret it are consequently as important as what the photograph itself appears to show.The archive makes these questions particularly tangible. It is shaped by decisions about what is collected and preserved, made accessible, or left out. These processes influence what can subsequently be known about the past and whose experiences become part of historical memory. Photographic archives can therefore be understood as spaces where knowledge and authority are produced, but also where they may be questioned and renegotiated.This has become particularly evident in artistic, activist, and community-based engagements with archival material. Counter-archival practices, gestures of restitution, reenactment, repair, and speculative reconstruction have all offered ways of returning to inherited images and asking different questions of them. Such practices can expose omissions and exclusions within established historical narratives, while also raising difficult questions around authorship, ownership, responsibility, and the ethics of working with images shaped by unequal relations of power. Yet critical engagement with images and archives need not be limited to exposing or contesting existing structures. Visual practices can also participate in imagining other possibilities. Images have played an important role in protest, dissent, political mobilisation, and collective memory, but they can equally provide spaces for thinking through different forms of belonging, recognition, and collective life. Political imagination, in this sense, concerns the possibility of looking beyond established ways of organising the visible and asking what other histories, relations, and futures might become conceivable.Such questions have acquired renewed significance within contemporary digital environments. Social media, networked circulation, computational vision, algorithmic classification, artificial intelligence, and expanding systems of surveillance are transforming how images are produced, encountered, interpreted, and preserved. Greater access and circulation coexist with new forms of extraction, opacity, exclusion, and control. Many of the questions that have accompanied photography throughout its history therefore persist, even as the technological conditions through which they operate continue to change. Critical Perspectives explores these contradictions as a productive field of inquiry. Photography can document and administer, reveal and obscure, preserve and erase, reinforce existing structures and provide ways of challenging them. To understand these tensions requires looking beyond individual images to the wider systems through which they are produced, circulated, classified, displayed, archived, and reactivated. Across the programme, these questions provide a shared framework for examining how photography and archives participate in the construction of historical and political knowledge, while considering how critical, artistic, and research practices might open other ways of seeing, interpreting, and imagining the social world.Research DevelopmentThroughout the programme, participants will be encouraged to develop their individual projects through sustained engagement with theoretical and methodological questions raised by the seminar. Research development may take the form of an academic article, thesis or dissertation chapter, artistic or practice-led research project, curatorial proposal, archival investigation, or another research-oriented outcome appropriate to the participant’s field.The programme therefore approaches the seminar as a collective site of critical inquiry, where established assumptions about photography, archives, and political representation can be questioned and where alternative ways of seeing, interpreting, and producing historical and political knowledge can emerge.

Allen, L. A. (2009). ‘Martyr Bodies in the Media: Human Rights, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Immediation in the Palestinian Intifada’. American Ethnologist 36 (1): 161–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.01100.xAppadurai, Arjun (2003). “Archive and Aspiration.” Eds. Brouwer J. and Mulder A, Information is Alive. Rotterdam: V2_Publishing/NAI Publishers. 14–25.Azoulay, A., (2015). Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography. 2 ed. London & New York: VersoButhpitiya, V. (2026). A Volatile Picture: War and the Political Work of Photography. Seattle WA: University of Washington Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.42890866 Çelikaslan, Özge. (2024). Archiving the Commons: Looking Through the Lens of bak.ma. Barcelona: dpr-barcelona.Ghani, M. (2015). “‘What we left unfinished’: the artist and the archive”. In Dissonant Aarchives : contemporary visual culture and contested narratives in the Middle East, ed. by Downey, A. I. B. Tauris. pp.43-64.Gómez, Liliana. (2023). Archive Matter: A Camera in the Laboratory of the Modern. Zürich: Diaphanes/Think Art.Gómez-Barris, M. (2017). Chapter 3: “An Archive for the Future” The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Duke University Press.Hartman, Saidiya. (2008). “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, 12(2), 1–14.Hochberg, Gil Z. (2021). Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future. Durham: Duke University Press.Kalantzis, K. (2019). Tradition in the Frame: Photography, Power, and Imagination in Sfakia, Crete. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.Karinkurayil, M. S. (2020). ‘Reading Aspiration in Kerala’s Migrant Photography’. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 43(4). https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2020.1759000Mbembe, Achille (2002). “The Power of the Archive and its Limits.” In Refiguring the archive. Springer: pp. 19–26.Pad.ma. (2010). “10 Theses on the Archive.”Pinney, C. (2023). ‘Introduction: Photographing; or The Future of the Image’. In Citizens of Photography, edited by Christopher Pinney, The PhotoDemos Collective, Naluwembe Binaisa, Vindhya Buthpitiya, Konstantinos Kalantzis, Ileana L. Selejan, and Sokphea Young, 1–61. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478024590-001.Raheja, N. (2023). ‘Visualizing Citizenship in a Bureaucratic Frame’. Visual Anthropology Review, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 268–87. https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12290Strassler, K., (2010). Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press.Strassler, Karen. (2019). Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia. Durham NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478005544.Tagg, J., (1993). The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Minneapolis MI: University of Minnesota Press.

Submission of Applications​Applications should be submitted as a single PDF file named [Surname_AARS26], containing the following materials:Application formProject abstract (max. 500 words)Indicative bibliography (optional)Writing sample (max. 1,500 words)Biographical note (max. 150 words)Short CV highlighting relevant academic and professional experience from the last five years (max. two pages)deadline: 15 Oct 2026Early Bird Registration (See tab 'FEES & REGISTRATION') deadline: 31 Oct 2026Standard Registration (See tab 'FEES & REGISTRATION')Upon notification of acceptance, selected participants will be invited to confirm their participation by completing the registration process and paying the applicable programme fee.Participants whose tuition fees are funded by a university, research institution, or other organisation may request an invoice issued directly to the funding institution. Payment instructions will be provided together with the acceptance notification.Unless otherwise agreed in advance, late payments will incur a 10% monthly administrative charge on the outstanding balance.Check FEES & REGISTRATION for more information.

MODULE 0128 JAN - 25 FEBCoordinated by Dr Ana Catarina PinhoCRITICAL PERSPECTIVESPHOTOGRAPHY, ARCHIVES, AND POLITICAL IMAGINATION INTRODUCTORY MODULE This introductory module sets the framework for the programme and opens a collective discussion around its central themes: photography, archives, and political imagination. Through a series of seminars, readings, and discussion groups, participants will engage with some of the questions that will be developed across the subsequent modules.As the opening stage of the programme, the module also introduces participants to one another’s research interests and establishes the basis for collective discussion throughout the seminar. Participants will be encouraged to begin identifying connections between the questions raised in the sessions and their own research or practice, preparing the ground for the mentored modules that follow.MODULE 0204 MAR - 01 APRMentored by Professor Gil PasternakPHOTOGRAPHY AND POLITICAL IMAGINATIONDEMOCRACY, POPULISM AND THE LIMITS OF POSSIBILITYThis module introduces political imagination as a way of thinking about what photography does within political life. Rather than treating photographs simply as representations of political events, the module asks how images contribute to the ways in which political realities are established, contested and understood. Photography can provide evidence, expose injustice, construct political identities, legitimise authority, mobilise publics and shape collective understandings of events. At the same time, its political effects are never automatic as images acquire meaning and influence through their circulation among citizens, journalists, institutions, political movements and states.The module approaches these questions through the contrasting political contexts and perspectives of liberal democracy, populism and political realism. Liberal-democratic politics foregrounds photography's relationship to publicity, accountability, citizenship and public debate. Populist politics demonstrates how images can construct ideas of "the people", political enemies and collective belonging, while political realism draws attention to power, institutional interests, strategic behaviour and the material conditions that constrain political action.Against this background, political imagination is understood pragmatically as the capacity to envisage forms of political life that are not yet fully realised, and to make such possibilities appear credible, desirable or contestable. The module therefore asks not simply whether photography represents political reality, but when and how it can contribute to changing perceptions of what is politically possible—and where its capacity to do so encounters the limits imposed by existing structures of power.Against this background, political imagination is understood pragmatically as the capacity to envisage forms of political life that are not yet fully realised, and to make such possibilities appear credible, desirable or contestable. The module therefore asks not simply whether photography represents political reality, but when and how it can contribute to changing perceptions of what is politically possible—and where its capacity to do so encounters the limits imposed by existing structures of power.The module provides a conceptual foundation for examining photography’s subsequent relationships with archives, institutions, activism, technology and political power.By the end of the module, participants should be able to:Critically assess the relationship between photography, political representation and the construction and contestation of political reality.Distinguish between different political uses and functions of photography, including documentation, evidence, advocacy, mobilisation, political communication and the construction of collective identities.Apply liberal-democratic, populist and realist perspectives to analyse how photographic practices operate within political systems, institutions and conflicts.Analyse photography's relationship to political imagination, including its capacity to make alternative political possibilities visible, credible or contestable, while recognising the political, institutional and material constraints on such possibilities.Develop a politically informed analysis of a photographic case or project, identifying the actors, institutions, narratives, interests and forms of political agency involved, and assessing what the photography makes politically possible—or difficult to imagine.MODULE 0308 APR - 06 MAYMentored by Dr Vindhya ButhpitiyaLIBERATION BY CAMERAPHOTOGRAPHIES OF STATE AND RESISTANCEWhat role does the camera play in the rival hands of oppressors and dissidents? How do governments wield photography in state-building and citizen-making projects? Conversely, what can the medium achieve for revolutionary endeavours, realising aspirations for self-determination, truth and justice seeking efforts in the aftermaths of mass violence, or envisioning political futures and alternatives? How then might we conceive of the camera’s use as a tool of enumerating, evidencing and witnessing in generative conversation with photography’s ‘eventfulness’ and interlinked potentials for momentum and amplification, and/or contradictory or expected re-inscription? In this module, we will examine the divergent uses of the camera, interrogating how photography has conformed to and confronted colonial, state-endorsed hierarchies and violences, and regimes of optical ordering, securitization and militarization. By drawing on unruly empirical insights from diverse ethnographies of photographic practice revealing how it is enthusiastically enlisted in expression, subversion and opposition, alongside its contradictorily theorised civic, authoritarian and exploitive capacities, we will collectively explore the scales and effects of photography’s political work in how it is concurrently wielded in the everyday as a means of repression, resistance, solidarity and articulating political possibility.By the end of the module, participants should be able to:Gain a foundational understanding of the key theoretical debates and relevant ethnographic literature related to the political uses of photography.Develop an understanding of the methodologies associated with the anthropological study of photographic practices.Grasp the ethical and representational complexities associated with the political uses of photography and its study.Assess critical perspectives on the political life of photographic practices and the limitations and challenges to studying the medium’s mobilisation.MODULE 0413 MAY - 10 JUNMentored by Dr Özge ÇelikaslanENTANGLED MEMORIES REIMAGENING ARCHIVAL ECOLOGIESThis module approaches archives as entangled and transformative ecologies in which human and non-human actors participate in the making of memory and knowledge. Archival objects, images, collections, lists, categories, and digital infrastructures do not simply hold information; they also shape how memories are encountered, brought into relation, interpreted, and made shareable. In this sense, the archive is not a neutral container but a shifting field of relations in which materials, people, technologies, and forms of knowledge continually affect one another.Taking Saidiya Hartman’s notion of “working with and against the archive” as a point of departure, the module follows artistic, activist, decolonial and community-based practices that work both within and beyond the archive, attending to its gaps, absences, and exclusions. We will consider counter-archival practices alongside forms of reactivation, repair, reenactment, speculative reconstruction, and collective care. Rather than treating these practices simply as ways of challenging established archives, we will ask what else they might open up: How do archival ecologies and entangled memories come into relation? How might archival practices create space for memories and histories that have been overlooked, fragmented, or silenced? And how might archives become living ecosystems for imagining other forms of belonging, care, and collective life?Drawing on critical archival studies, artistic research, and examples from activist and collective archives, the module brings conceptual discussion into close engagement with these practices. It invites participants to move away from thinking of archives as bounded collections and instead approach them as ongoing, entangled practices and infrastructures where people, materials, technologies, memories, and forms of knowledge come together, shift, and sometimes come apart.By the end of the module, participants should be able to:Develop a critical understanding of archives as evolving and intertwined ecologies;Examine how archival practices shape what is remembered, preserved, accessed, and made visible;Become familiar with key approaches to working with and against the archive, including artistic and collective archival practices;Develop practical approaches to working with archival materials in their own research and artistic practices;Explore how archival materials can be reinterpreted, reactivated, and brought into new relations.MODULE 0517 JUN - 29 JULCoordinated by Dr Ana Catarina PinhoFROM CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES TO CRITICAL PRACTICERESEARCH, POSITIONALITY, AND POLITICAL POSSIBILITYThe concluding module returns to the research developed by participants over the course of the programme. Following the three mentored modules, participants will present their work to the group and discuss how their projects have developed in relation to the questions, readings, and exchanges that have shaped the seminar.These final discussions offer an opportunity to reflect on changes in research questions, conceptual frameworks, methodologies, and approaches to photographic or archival material. Participants will consider what has emerged through the programme, which questions remain unresolved, and how their research might develop beyond the seminar. Bringing the projects together at this stage will also allow common concerns and different positions to be discussed across the group.The programme concludes with a curated public event in which participants share selected aspects of their research and some of the ideas that have emerged from the seminar. The event is not conceived as a presentation of finished projects, but as an opportunity to communicate research in development and to extend the discussions generated within the programme to a wider audience.

GIL PASTERNAKPhotographic History Research CentreDe Montfort University Leicester, United KingdomGil Pasternak is Professor of Photographic Cultures and Heritage at De Montfort University (UK), where he is Director of the Photographic History Research Centre and Interim Research and Innovation Director of the Institute of Arts, Design and Performance. Alongside his roles at DMU, he is Europe and UK Editor of the peer-reviewed quarterly Photography & Culture and serves as advisor to several cultural heritage archives, visual culture organisations, and government agencies, across multiple countries. His research focus explores intersections of photography, cultural heritage and political formations, with particular attention to domestic photography, community archives, migration, and cultural conflict. He edited The Handbook of Photography Studies (Routledge 2020), bringing together interdisciplinary approaches to the study of photography, and has led major national and international projects, including the European Commission-funded Digital Heritage in Cultural Conflicts and the UKRI-funded Picturing Untold Migration Experiences. His current work includes a monograph on domestic photographs and their political incorporation into digital heritage initiatives, and two forthcoming co-edited volumes on censorship and visual culture, exploring the complex reciprocal relationship between visual practices, political power, and socio-cultural transformation.VINDHYA BUTHPITIYAUniversity of St AndrewsUnited KindomVindhya Buthpitiya is an anthropologist working at the intersection of politics and visual culture. Her research is focused on ethno-nationalist conflict, political violence and state terror in Sri Lanka, examining the local and global aftermaths of civil war and insurrection through the making and moving of images. Her recent projects have explored the transnational visual economies of war, interlinked iconographies of justice and accountability, and the state control and appropriation of public infrastructure during periods of armed conflict and militarized counter-insurgency. She is the author of 'A Volatile Picture: War and the Political Work of Photography in Sri Lanka' (2026) and the co-editor of 'Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination' (2023).ÖZGE ÇELIKASLANMedia Scholar, Artist, ArchivistGermany / TurkeyÖzge Çelikaslan is a transdisciplinary scholar, archival practitioner and artist-researcher working across moving image, archival practice, and visual culture. Her research and artistic practice engage with overlooked audiovisual materials, exploring questions of memory, contested territories and archival ecologies. Through archival assemblages and other forms of artistic and research-based practice, she explores how gaps in the archive can become spaces of possibility for working with silenced narratives and contested histories. Her work is grounded in feminist and decolonial approaches to memory, media, and archival practice.She is co-founder of bak.ma, a collaborative digital archive of social movements founded in 2014, and remains actively involved in its collection creation. Her research on archives as commons culminated in the publication of Archiving the Commons: Looking through the Lens of bak.ma (2024). She holds a PhD in Media Studies from the Braunschweig University of Art (HBK) and currently teaches film and media studies at universities in Germany. She develops socially engaged projects, audiovisual works and digital archival practices across artistic, academic, and activist contexts and has presented her research and artistic work internationally through exhibitions, conferences, talks, workshops and research collaborations.COORDINATIONANA CATARINA PINHOARCHIVO DirectorHead of programmesIHA, Nova University of Lisbon, Portugal Ana Catarina Pinho is an Associate Researcher at the Institute of Art History, NOVA University Lisbon. Her research examines the relationships between archives and photographic cultures, with a particular focus on vernacular imagery, the historiographies of violence, and the visual regimes of propaganda and conflict. She is currently developing the research project "A War of Images", funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. In 2026, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University, and was awarded the Nadir Mohamed Postdoctoral Fellowship at The Image Centre, Toronto Metropolitan University. Since 2012, Pinho has been the founder and director of ARCHIVO, an international platform dedicated to photography, archives, and visual culture that connects theory and practice through research programmes, symposia, and advanced study initiatives.

FormatThe Seminar runs from January to July 2027 through weekly sessions, comprising a total of 55 contact hours. The programme is structured around complementary session formats, each designed to support both individual research development and collective critical inquiry.Active participation and openness to dialogue are central to the Seminar’s pedagogical approach:Lectures and webinars establish the conceptual and theoretical foundations of the programme. Reading groups foster collective engagement with key texts and encourage shared critical reflection. Project presentations and Group discussions support the development of individual research trajectories through peer exchange, critical feedback, and collective discussion.ScheduleApplicants should ensure that they are able to attend the online sessions, which take place once every week, starting at 5:00 pm and lasting until 7:00 or 8:00 pm (UK time), depending on the scheduled activity.