Department Website:
https://www.haverford.edu/visual-studies-minor

The Interdisciplinary Visual Studies Minor invites students both to investigate their place in a global system of images and make images, objects, and digital artifacts with critical awareness. Additionally, the program trains students in interdisciplinary rigor and encourages them to examine the relationship between the visual and various structures of power.  

Located in the new Visual Culture, Arts and Media facility (VCAM), Visual Studies links elements of the curriculum, campus, and broader community, highlighting the intersections between courses, faculty, students, departments, and Centers engaging the visual.

Learning Goals

• To teach students visual literacy
  Students of Visual Studies will investigate their place in the global system of images. Through a Visual Studies framework students have the ability to describe, analyze, and negotiate an increasingly complex world of information technologies; the impact of these technologies on art, culture, science, commerce, policy, society, and the environment; and the interrelationship of these technologies with historical and material forms.
• To engage students in critical making
  Visual Studies creates curricular opportunities for students to make images, objects, and digital artifacts with critical awareness of their powers and limitations. Critical making, or thinking with process, encourages students to develop production skills which, when coupled with theoretical training and analytical rigor, will broaden their ability to improvise and problem-solve in a variety of disciplinary contexts.
• To train students in interdisciplinary rigor
  Visual Studies encourages conversation between scholars working on the relationship between text and the visual, the nature of perception, cognition and attention, and the historic construction of looking. Visual Studies can help students perceive when disciplines are essential to understanding a subject, and when they can be combined for a more expansive or more precise critical engagement.
• To guide students in an “ethics of the visual”
  Visual Studies invites a return to the liberal arts as a process of creativity, critique, and reflection. It links creative expression to cultural analysis and social engagement, training a generation of theoretically informed makers, artists, innovators, teachers, and civic leaders. We invite students to examine the relationship between the visual and structures of power, to analyze the role of images in making consumers and to attend to the role that images play in constructing “others” through race, gender, or disability.

Haverford’s Institutional Learning Goals are available on the President’s website, at http://hav.to/learninggoals.

Curriculum

The Visual Studies curriculum is organized to help students develop critical and creative engagement with visual experience across media, time, and cultures.

All students are required to take an introductory gateway course and a senior-level capstone course. The introductory course will cover a variety of disciplinary approaches to the field of Visual Studies, and will include guest lectures, field trips for hands-on learning, and an introduction to some form of making. The capstone course will consolidate a student experience of the interdisciplinary minor that integrates visual scholarship, making, and public engagement. Students will select their four elective courses from three categories: Visual Literacy, Labs/Studio Courses and The Ethics of the Visual.

Students interested in the Interdisciplinary Visual Studies Minor should plan their course schedule in consultation with the Director of Visual Studies and with their major advisor. Please note: currently no more than one of the six minor credits may count towards the student’s major.