The 46th International Conference of the Austrian Association for American Studies was hosted by the Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, on November 22-24, 2019. I gave a talk as a panelist in a session on “The Photographic Construction of Mountains” called “The Power of Collective Vision: Landscape, Visual Media, and the Production of American Mountains.”
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The Power of Collective Vision: : Landscape, Visual Media, and the Production of American Mountains
Conference Theme
The theme of the conference was was “Mediating Mountains.”
Mountains confront us in many guises. They visualize space and provide geopolitical orientations that address questions of historical, cultural, social, national, and individual identity. Mountains are subjects of philosophical reflections, environmental meditations, and ecocritical ontologies. They serve as means of spiritual invigoration, scientific experimentation, medical therapy, and recreation. They are also the sources and resources of technological and artistic innovations, of human and nonhuman exploitations. Mountain spaces are often borderlands and contested zones of war and migration. They are sites of tourism and industrialization, deposits of waste, and repositories of cultural memory….
The conference “Mediating Mountains” set out to explore mountains as objects and agents of mediation in all artforms and media, including painting, literature, theater, music, film, television, performance and video art, video gaming, photography, and architecture.
Paper
Published a paper based on this talk in the Journal of Cultural Geography. (LINK)
