IVLA 2026 Charleston: Full Schedule

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9:00am EDT

Wednesday October 7, 2026 9:00am - 10:00am EDT

Stephen L. Hayes, Jr. makes art—woodcuts, sculptures, installations small and large—from found materials that draw on social and economic themes ingrained in the history of America and African-Americans. His approach is simple: “If I can’t find it, I’ll make it. If I can’t make it, I’ll find it.”

Hayes grew up in Durham with his older brother, Spence, and his mother, Lender, who were pivotal in shaping and sparking his creative approach. When Hayes was in the first grade, he broke a remote-control car. His brother took it apart and attached the motor to a battery, bringing it back to life. Amazed, Hayes began breaking all kinds of things to see how they worked and what he could create with the pieces. By second grade, his mother had given him a real workbench; she and Hayes’ brother would also bring home abandoned equipment for tinkering. By high school, he learned to crochet.

He went to North Carolina Central University, aiming to transfer to North Carolina State University to study mechanical engineer. Instead, through a friend, he discovered graphic design. His new major led to a ceramics course, where his enthusiasm and skill led to being allowed as much time as he wanted on the wheel. He threw enough pots to develop a strong portfolio, leading to a residency at the acclaimed New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Hayes earned an M.F.A. in sculpture at Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta. His thesis exhibition, "Cash Crop," has been traveling and exhibiting for nearly a decade.

Frequently in his work, Hayes uses three symbols: a pawn, a corn, and a horse to explore America’s use (or misuse) of black bodies, black minds, and black labor. Artists, he believes, are as much translators as they are creators.

Speakers

Dana S. Thompson

Research and Instruction Librarian, Murray State University

Dana S. Thompson is a research and instruction librarian and associate professor at Murray State University. Dana currently serves as the President of the International Visual Literacy Association and has served as a member of the ACRL Visual Literacy Taskforce. Her research and teaching... Read More →

Katie Greer

Professor, Oakland University

Katie is the VP of IVLA

Stephen Hayes

Wednesday October 7, 2026 9:00am - 10:00am EDT
Lecture Hall

Keynote

10:30am EDT

What Gets Preserved When We Remediate: Accessibility as Visual Memory Work

Wednesday October 7, 2026 10:30am - 11:00am EDT

Lecture Hall

Accessibility remediation is often seen as a technical or compliance-focused process. This paper presents remediation as visual memory work. It involves a series of decisions that influence how visual images, interfaces, and institutional stories are preserved, changed, or hidden over time. Drawing on library web governance, digital systems cleanup, and Title II accessibility projects, this presentation explores how choices about layout, hierarchy, color, navigation, metadata visibility, and alternative text impact how patrons experience institutional knowledge and history. These decisions require weighing historical accuracy, current usability, and ethical responsibility. They raise questions about whose perspectives are prioritized and whose are ignored. By viewing accessibility as a practice of visual literacy and stewardship, this paper sees remediation as not just meeting requirements but as forward-thinking work that shapes how images, interfaces, and institutional stories are remembered, understood, and valued over time.

Speakers

Kelly Peter

Assistant Professor, Web & Systems Librarian, University of Wisconsin, La Crosse

Kelly Peter is the Web and Systems Librarian at Murphy Library, University of Wisconsin–La Crosse. With a background spanning IT systems administration and more than fifteen years of library leadership across public and academic libraries, Kelly brings a wide-ranging perspective... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 10:30am - 11:00am EDT
Lecture Hall

Paper

11:00am EDT

When Words Enhance Vision: The Role of Audio Description

Wednesday October 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:30am EDT

Lecture Hall

Following a brief introduction to audio description as a form of accessible intersemiotic translation, this paper advances the hypothesis that, although AD was originally conceived for individuals with visual impairments, this practice could be broadened to encompass a wider, general audience. This constitutes the central claim of our study.
To this end, we present, on the one hand, a fragment from a filmic work whose mise-en-scène features sculptures by a renowned artist, accompanied by various audio descriptions in different languages relating to the same excerpt. This presentation offers an opportunity to reflect on the intended audience, their cultural background, and the reach or dissemination of the artist as conveyed through cinema. On the other hand, we include the audio description of a building of significant architectural interest.
The translation of images makes it possible to introduce, in a brief and concise manner, specific information about the artist, the artwork, or its compositional elements, and even to clarify particular terms. In this sense, it constitutes a valuable tool in the service of education.
Such reflections ultimately serve to confirm or challenge the hypothesis proposed herein.

Speakers

María Valero Gisbert

Associate Professor, University of Parma

Associate Professor at Parma Universtiy (Italy). Research aereas: Audio description, Audiiovisual Translation; Lexicography.

Wednesday October 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:30am EDT
Lecture Hall

Paper

11:30am EDT

The Memory Body: Where Awe, Symbolism, and the Body Meet in the Work of Healing-Centered Education

Wednesday October 7, 2026 11:30am - 12:30pm EDT

Lecture Hall

What if images don't just represent memory? What if the body remembers through them?
This session introduces the concept of the "memory body": the proposition that visual symbols encountered in landscapes, natural environments, and daily life activate not only cognitive memory but somatic, emotional, and energetic memory and that this insight has direct implications for how we understand and sustain the well-being of educators and caregivers.

The presentation synthesizes two bodies of work previously presented at IVLA 2025: a self-study of emblematic symbolism using a Symbolic Field Guide methodology rooted in awe, nature-based encounter, and reflective journaling; and mixed-methods research on energy healing's impact on emotional resilience and nervous system regulation in caregiving professionals. Across both studies, an identical transformation arc emerged — Curiosity → Sensation → Reflection → Clarity → Renewal — revealing that visual encounter and embodied practice share the same living rhythm of meaning-making.

Grounded in scholarship on awe (Keltner, 2023), archetype (Campbell, 1949), and nature symbolism (Andrews, 1993/2021), and informed by participant narratives describing warmth, imagery, emotional release, and somatic recalibration, this session argues that visual literacy must expand to include the body as a site of memory rooted in place. A feather found on a trail, light through trees, a recurring pattern in a landscape. These are mnemonic anchors carrying forward personal narrative and embodied knowledge that the body knows before the mind names.

From this ground, the session pivots to practice, introducing the emerging shape of a healing-centered professional development framework for educators integrating visual journaling, symbolic encounter, awe practices, and somatic grounding. Participants engage in a brief dual-lens exercise (visual analysis + somatic practices) using a prototype reflection prompt, experiencing the "memory body" in real time and leaving with a tool they can adapt for their own practice.

Speakers

Dr. Karen F. Tardrew

Professor, Chair of Learning Sciences in Education, National Louis University

Dr. Karen F. Tardrew is a tenured Professor and Chair of Learning Sciences in Education at National Louis University, where she has served for over 33 years as a scholar, leader, and innovator in educator development. Her teaching and research explore the intersections of visual... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 11:30am - 12:30pm EDT
Lecture Hall

Campfire

1:30pm EDT

What Spaces Remember: Sensing Time Through Film, Sound, and Perception

Wednesday October 7, 2026 1:30pm - 2:00pm EDT

Lecture Hall

What does it mean for a space to remember? And how might that memory be sensed rather than simply observed?

This presentation explores how film and sound engage the layered memory of place, not as a fixed historical record, but as a perceptual experience. Drawing from work across filmmaking, music, and visual direction, it examines how architecture, atmosphere, and sonic presence shape the way time is felt within a space. Projects include a documentary centered on St. James Church (Los Angeles, est. 1920), alongside additional works that explore how environments carry and transform lived experience.

Across these works, sound operates not as accompaniment, but as a force that alters attention, emotion, and spatial awareness. The presence of choral sound serves as one example of how resonance can bridge past and present within a single environment.

Through this creative practice, Justin Baker-Rojas developed the Four Pillars of Human Perception—Presence, Resonance, Meaning, and Movement—as a framework for understanding how individuals engage with image, sound, and space. These pillars emerged through interdisciplinary work and reflect how perception unfolds through the interaction of external stimulus and internal experience.

By sensing time through space, this session invites a shift from interpretation alone toward a more embodied encounter with the environments we inhabit and the memories they continue to hold.

Speakers

Justin Baker-Rojas

Owner, Fuzzy Image Media

Justin is the media coordinator for IVLA

Wednesday October 7, 2026 1:30pm - 2:00pm EDT
Lecture Hall

Paper

2:00pm EDT

Destabilized Places of Memory: Hudeček’s Painting from the Perspective of Visual Literacy

Wednesday October 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:30pm EDT

Lecture Hall

Aleš Hudeček’s painting opens the problem of memory where the image does not preserve the past as a reconstructable event but organizes it through destabilized place. Rooms, façades, staircases, patterned partitions, decorative floors, sculptural residues, and figures remain clearly recognizable, yet they do not consolidate into one stable site, one historical layer, or one closed narrative. Destabilized place names a situation in which spatial cues remain descriptively strong while staying referentially unsettled.
Against this material, the question becomes what form visual literacy may take when the image remains visually exact but referentially unclosed. Visual literacy is therefore not reduced to the simple ability to ‘read’ an image; it is approached as a practice of seeing that distinguishes among recognition, spatial testing, historical inference, and return to the material surface of painting. Hudeček’s works make it possible to observe why the question of visual literacy becomes especially acute when an image offers many culturally legible cues while resisting rapid interpretive stabilization.
Late-modern and late-socialist design elements enter here into tension with ornamental and baroque-monumental residues. In the Czech context, such forms carry not only stylistic memory but also historiographic and ideological burden. The image thus does not function as a document of one recoverable past, but as a field in which different temporal regimes, experiences, and visual habits collide. Hudeček’s figurative painting therefore opens a productive space for the theory and teaching of visual literacy whenever memory, place, and representation remain in lasting tension without definitive closure.

Speakers

Tomáš Koudela

assistant professor and vice-dean, University of Ostrava

Tomáš Koudela is an assistant professor and Vice-Dean for Communication and Creative Activities at the Faculty of Education, University of Ostrava. He serves as the head of the Visual Studies Centre and leads the interdisciplinary Visual Literacy Research Team. His research focuses... Read More →

Timotej Blažek

postdoctoral researcher, University of Ostrava

Mgr. Timotej Blažek, Ph.D. (*1989) is an art educator and theorist in the field of art education. Since 2022, he has been working at the National Institute of Education and Youth, focusing on research and development in the educational area of Art and Culture, particularly art education... Read More →

Tereza Čapandová

researcher assistant, University of Ostrava

Tereza Čapandová is a research assistant at the Faculty of Education, University of Ostrava, and a member of the Visual Literacy Research Team. She is currently completing her Ph.D. in Art Education, focusing on the concept of originality in the context of post-production theory... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:30pm EDT
Lecture Hall

Paper

3:00pm EDT

Social Media Elicitation as a Methodology

Wednesday October 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:30pm EDT

Lecture Hall

Research on media theory and media literacy has long held that mediated messages can help shape the way audiences come to view the world. To date, researchers have looked at how film and television depictions of teachers, classrooms, and students play a role in shaping how pre-service teachers come to think about and prepare for their students. However, the widespread use and adoption of social media represents a significant shift in how media are disseminated, consumed, produced, and reproduced - and this shift, which blurs the once starkly-drawn line between producer and consumer, is one that also affects how today's pre-service teachers think about and prepare for their future classrooms. As part of my dissertation study on critical social media literacy skill development amongst pre-service teachers, I gathered date using media elicitation interviews. In such interviews, media are used to elicit responses by helping ground the interview within the subject matter. In this case, I asked participants to gather examples of relevant social media to bring in and discuss as part of their interviews. Thus far, social media elicitation is a methodology that has the potential to be messy. This methodology has proven promising - participants revealed that in engaging with social media, they generally take on the role of consumer and actively search for positive messaging about teaching. They also reveal that while they are mindful of the affect of the algorithim on their viewing habits, they are less critical of content creators who present themselves as "real educators". However, I am interested in proposing a session in which attendees can discuss the methodology and share experiences with using social media as a learning tool.

Speakers

Alicia Burnette Whitley

Graduate Student, North Carolina State University

Alicia Whitley is a PhD Candidate from North Carolina State University whose work focuses on pre-service teacher education and critical media literacies.

Wednesday October 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:30pm EDT
Lecture Hall

Paper

4:30pm EDT

Journal of Visual Literacy Editorial Session

Wednesday October 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:15pm EDT

Lecture Hall

This interactive editorial session offers conference participants an opportunity to engage directly with the editorial vision, expectations, and publication processes of the Journal of Visual Literacy (JVL). Led by Editor-in-Chief Maria Avgerinou, the session will discuss current directions in visual literacy scholarship, emerging themes in the field, and the evolving role of visuals in an AI-mediated world.

Participants will gain practical insight into what makes a strong manuscript submission, common reasons manuscripts are rejected, and how authors can better position their work for successful peer review. The session will also address issues such as conceptual alignment with visual literacy scholarship, methodological rigor, theoretical framing, ethical use of AI in academic writing, and publishing expectations in interdisciplinary research.

The session will include:

* An overview of JVL’s current editorial priorities and scope
* Guidance for first-time and emerging authors
* Discussion of special issues and future publication opportunities
* Q&A with attendees regarding submissions, peer review, and scholarly publishing

Faculty, graduate students, researchers, artists, designers, and practitioners interested in publishing visual literacy research are warmly invited to attend.

Speakers

Maria D. Avgerinou

Faculty and Director- MA in Learning Design and Technology, The American University of Greece- Global Campus

Dr. Avgerinou is the Program Director for the MA in Learning Design and Technology at the American University of Greece- Global Campus. She holds an MA and PhD in Education from the University of Bath (UK) and has over 25 years of experience as a certified online educator and academic... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 4:30pm - 5:15pm EDT
Lecture Hall

Panel