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Refract: An Open-Access Visual Studies Journal publishes its third volume

Refract Journal Volume 3 cover
January 11, 2021

Refract: An Open-Access Visual Studies Journal is thrilled to announce the publication of its third volume, “Hauntings and Traces.” We are excited by the creativity with which our contributors have approached this theme, and look forward to continuing the dialogue at our upcoming symposium, scheduled for January 25-30, 2021. 

This digital event will feature conversations between many of the scholars and artists whose work animates volume 3, and will address such topics as memory; technology and site-specificity; genealogy and familial relationships; and interventions in the interdisciplinary field of visual studies. We hope you will be able to attend, and will be sharing more information about registration in the near future. 

Refract is an online journal founded and operated by graduate students and dedicated to conversations about visual culture, non-canonical methodologies, and divergent histories. We publish early-career and established scholars, students, and artists, in the genres of the academic essay, critical review, creative work, and experimental artist statement/essay. We are interested in work that employs visuality as a lens to engage geographies and histories that diverge from U.S. political and academic empire, and uses the tools and methods of visual studies and artistic practice in pursuit of equity and justice. We encourage submissions from multiple academic fields, expansive considerations of artistic practice/s, and multiple ways of knowing. We seek pieces that theorize, dream, and imagine as intervention, as well as pieces that challenge the author's, artist's, and editorial board’s intellectual commitments as they reflect on the visual as a site of encounter, entanglement, and social change.