IVLA 2026 Charleston: Full Schedule

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9:00am EDT

From Research to Empathy and Back Again: Reconstructing an Assignment to Improve Student Outcomes

Thursday October 8, 2026 9:00am - 9:30am EDT

This presentation reports on the third year of collaboration between an art librarian and a health sciences librarian for an acting for medical simulation course module that prompts students to empathize with patients facing bias while considering how images convey complex meanings. Two changes were made to the assignment: the professors limited the patient’s medical issue to pain and the final product was changed from a visual bibliography to a collage.
As in previous iterations, students rewrote a standardized case template to empathetically reflect on the biases encountered by patients with less power in the healthcare system based on their intersectionality. To increase the focus on the patient’s intersectionality, this time, the medical issue was limited to pain.
Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), an evidence-based method that promotes slow looking, improves diagnostic reasoning, and fosters practitioners’ empathy by enabling learners to surface and challenge assumptions was again incorporated into the lesson. However, visual annotated bibliographies were replaced by collages. This not only clarified expectations, it allowed students to creatively explore visual language through a familiar and unintimidating medium. Images were selected and arranged to communicate the social and cultural identity and pain experience of their fictional patients and reflected on how formal visual elements convey meaning.
This presentation will cover the rationale for the revisions made to the assignment, three-part lesson plan, learning outcomes, and practical best practices. Student examples will demonstrate how combining collage-based visual literacy with empathetic case rewrites focused on pain produces a richer understanding of patient experience. Attendees will learn how an interdisciplinary team of librarians and faculty have collaboratively designed and iteratively refined an assignment in enough detail that they could adapt it to their own cross-disciplinary work.

Speakers

Stefanie Hilles

Arts and Humanities Librarian, Miami University

Stefanie Hilles is the Arts and Humanities Librarian at Wertz Art and Architecture Library at Miami University where she liaises to the art, architecture and interior design, and theatre departments. Her instruction practice aims to embed information literacy into the creative processes... Read More →

Megan Jaskowiak

Health and Social Sciences Librarian, Miami University

Megan Jaskowiak Health and Social Sciences Librarian. She liaises with Criminology, Gerontology, Psychology, Sociology, Speech Pathology and Audiology, Family Science and Social Work, and the Physician Associate Studies program. She has a Masters of Library and Information Science... Read More →

Thursday October 8, 2026 9:00am - 9:30am EDT
Circular Church

Paper

9:30am EDT

Curating with Care: Visual Text Selection as a Culturally Responsive Literacy Practice

Thursday October 8, 2026 9:30am - 10:00am EDT

Circular Church

What does it mean to choose a book for a group of students you are still learning to know? This presentation examines text selection as a visual literacy practice, one that requires educators to read images, illustrations, and visual narratives not only for aesthetic quality but for whose identities, experiences, and ways of knowing they center or erase. Drawing on work with the Literacy Community Initiative (LCI) at NC State University, a program serving immigrant and refugee youth, we share a framework for curating picturebooks and mentor texts with intention and equity at the forefront. The framework integrates six criteria including mirrors, windows, and doors (Bishop, 1990); authorship and illustrator diversity; trauma-informed resonance (Dutro, 2019); linguistic and cultural affirmation; community alignment; and pedagogical fit, grounded in culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2014) and positive youth development (Lee, Picart & Mann, 2025).
We argue that text selection is never neutral. The images we bring into a learning space communicate to students who belongs in the story and, by extension, who belongs in the room. This session invites participants to examine their own text selection practices and consider how visual curation can become an act of care, community-building, and justice.

Speakers

Amber Moore

Doctoral student, North Carolina State University

Amber L. Moore is a doctoral candidate in Teacher Education and Learning Sciences, with a concentration in Literacy and English Language Arts, at North Carolina State University. Her research sits at the intersection of visual methodologies, embodied literacies, and alternative literacy... Read More →

Haleema Khalil

Doctoral Candidate, North Carolina State University

Haleema Khalil is a doctoral candidate in Teacher Education and Learning Sciences at North Carolina State University, where she is advised by Dr. Jackie Relyea. She holds a master's degree from Vanderbilt University and brings a transnational perspective to her scholarship, having... Read More →

Thursday October 8, 2026 9:30am - 10:00am EDT
Circular Church

Paper

10:30am EDT

Memory as Compost: Food as Visual Material for MESI Sense-Making

Thursday October 8, 2026 10:30am - 11:00am EDT

Circular Church

Memory is often treated as archival—stable, stored, and retrievable (Schacter, 1996). This paper challenges that assumption by engaging memory through the metaphor of compost: a generative process in which fragments of lived experience decay, intermingle, and are reassembled into new meaning over time.
Drawing on Musically Enhanced Self-Inquiry (MESI), a multimodal, autoethnographic methodology that engages sound, visuals, and embodied reflection (Ramirez, 2024), three scholars in thought partnership (Akogeryam & Ramirez, 2026) explore how everyday objects—specifically food as visual and sensory material—become sites through which memory, place, and representation emerge and are reconfigured.
Through three reflexive memos centered on distinct food objects, we demonstrate how sensory engagement (taste, smell, sight, touch, and sound) surfaces layered, shifting memories rather than fixed recollections. These memos, analyzed through visual reflection, storytelling, metaphor, and arts-based practices, function as compost materials: everyday artifacts that, when engaged through MESI, generate complex intersections of identity, culture, labor, migration, and belonging.
Across these cases, we show how food operates not merely as sustenance but as visual and sensory material through which dominant assumptions of authenticity, family, and representation—often embedded in material and visual culture—are destabilized and reinterpreted through lived experience. In this way, memory is not retrieved but emerges as a fluid, relational, and constructed process.
We argue that MESI offers a framework for engaging the “messy” processes of sense-making, where multimodal and sensory engagement opens new reflexive possibilities. By positioning food as visual material, this work expands visual literacy to include how we engage visual phenomena through our senses as critical sites of analysis.
This paper invites visual literacy scholars to reconsider memory as compost, opening new possibilities for multimodal inquiry, critical reflection, and meaning-making. In this space, MESIness offers room for reflection, healing, and the naming of lived experiences as we process and embody authenticity, performance, and belonging.

Speakers

Emmanuel Anyetei Kojo Akogyeram

Doctoral Student, North Carolina State University

Emmanuel Anyetei Kojo Akogyeram is a doctoral student in Educational Leadership, Policy, and Human Development, with a concentration in higher education opportunity, equity, and justice, and a student affairs professional in higher education. Originally from Ghana, Emmanuel brings... Read More →

Naomi Ramirez

Lecturer, San Diego State University

Dr. Naomi Ramirez teaches at multiple colleges, where she uses a critical multimodal lens to challenge Eurocentric ways of knowing and create more humanizing, inclusive learning spaces. She holds a PhD in Education from San Diego State University and Claremont Graduate University... Read More →

Kaylen Alexandra

MFA student, Lindenwood University

Kaylen Alexandra is a Master of Fine Arts student at Lindenwood University studying creative writing. Her interests include researching a variety of ways to practice emotional intelligence and leveraging creativity as a tool for healing. Her Substack publication, The Fifth Pillar... Read More →

Thursday October 8, 2026 10:30am - 11:00am EDT
Circular Church

Paper

11:00am EDT

Between the Local and the Global: Rural Visual Literacies, Study Abroad, and Sustainability

Thursday October 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:30am EDT

Circular Church

Rural students’ K-12 schooling experiences are influenced by discourses of learning to leave, which perpetuate harmful myths that rural students must leave their home communities to find success. These discourses also shape rural students’ transitions to higher education. Study abroad is a high-impact educational practice that has documented benefits for rural students’ positive college experiences. However, study abroad experiences can perpetuate the same discourses of leaving, further contributing to rural outmigration. Instead, this research wonders how study abroad might be a tool of rural sustainability. This presentation shares insights into three rural students’ experiences in a rural-focused, critical place-based study abroad program in Southern Switzerland and Northern Italy in March 2025. These women’s photodocumentation demonstrated that their rural backgrounds and relationships to place functioned as a juxtaposition against which all other place-based discourses were measured. This consistent reflexivity nuanced their perspectives on rurality and rooted them firmly in their rural homeplaces. These rural visual literacies suggest rural-focused, critical place-based study abroad’s potential as a tool for rural sustainability.

Speakers

Josh Thompson

Thursday October 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:30am EDT
Circular Church

Paper

1:00pm EDT

Mnemonic Watercolors: Reconstructing Childhood Scenes Amidst Pandemic Isolation

Thursday October 8, 2026 1:00pm - 1:30pm EDT

Circular Church

Recent advances in media technology have reinforced a culture of visual immediacy and digital archiving. Images are routinely captured and stored—yet rarely revisited—outsourcing memory to technological repositories rather than engaging with it actively. This paper explores a counter‑gesture: reconstructing childhood memories through analogue practices as a form of mnemonic resistance.

During pandemic isolation, the author undertook watercolor exercises to reimagine childhood scenes without photographs or archival materials, drawing solely on 35–40 years of personal memory. The resulting watercolors depict domestic and neighborhood spaces—suburban fringes reframed through adulthood and crisis-afflicted affect (Derrida, 1996). These paintings prioritize textures, colors, and spatial atmospheres over photographic accuracy, resisting erasure in a culture driven by instantaneous documentation (Sontag, 1977). This method foregrounds spatial revealing within architecture: how scale and temporal perception shape remembered environments (Pallasmaa, 2012). It examines suburban forms not as generic backdrops but as repositories of identity, memory, and belonging, revealing how architecture mediates subjective experience.

In this context, the threat of pandemic death far from home heightened the need to anchor memories—a search for meaning and emotional refuge within remembered spaces. The slow, corporeal engagement of painting stands in contrast to the disembodied speed of digital media, emphasizing affective labor and embodied recollection. Dialogues with relatives who shared these spaces reveal the dialogic nature of memory, highlighting its collective as well as individual dimensions (Halbwachs, 1992). Thus, painting from memory becomes a meditative act of recollection—a reclaiming of subjective, embodied dimensions in an era dominated by automated visuality.

By engaging Memory Studies, Media Theory, and Architecture, this paper contributes to debates on the materiality of memory, the aesthetics of recollection, and the cultural implications of digital mediation. It demonstrates how mnemonic watercolors serve as a site for reasserting depth, affect, and spatial consciousness amidst mediated immediacy.

Speakers

Gonzalo Munoz-Vera

Assistant Professor, Virginia Tech

Thursday October 8, 2026 1:00pm - 1:30pm EDT
Circular Church

Paper

about Gonzalo Munoz-Vera is an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at Virginia Tech and Ph.D. in History and Theory of Architecture from McGill University. Since 2005, he has studied the influence of images as a globalizing tool for shaping cultures and cities through aesthetics and appearances. His doctoral research studied the role of visuals in the construal of cities and cultures in a nineteenth-century Western visuality installing the foundations of current seeing conventions. He has previously taught in architecture schools in Chile, Colombia, and Canada.

1:30pm EDT

Talking Trees: A-bombed “Witness Trees" Teach Peace

Thursday October 8, 2026 1:30pm - 2:00pm EDT

Circular Church

Eighty years ago, one uranium bomb destroyed Hiroshima. Three days later, a plutonium bomb devastated Nagasaki. Among the ruins of both cities lay tens of thousands of casualties. Rumors spread that an “atomic plague” would leave Hiroshima barren for 75 years. Yet, by mid-September, fireweed and morning glory wound their way through the rubble and bloomed with vigor. In the months and years that followed, a few blackened trees sprouted new growth, giving hope to survivors.

First journeying to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 2008, I discovered a lush and vibrant landscape. Stumbling upon yellow-tagged “A-bombed trees” on that first visit, I later discovered a registry indexing some 160 hibakujumoku—literally "explosion-affected trees”—preserved within Hiroshima and some 60 trees in Nagasaki. Unable to shake the impact of my first encounter, I returned to Japan in 2013, camera in hand, seeking more of these green witnesses. Returning four more times, most recently in April 2025, I have crisscrossed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, returning to favorite trees and seeking to discover others, aiming to represent the indomitable spirit of these arboreal witnesses.

As many of the trees live on school grounds, friends in Hiroshima and Nagasaki have helped me arrange visits with principals, teachers and students. On one of these visits I met Hiroshima’s “Tree Doctor,” Chikara Horiguchi, who has been caring for the A-bombed trees for 60 years. These trees withstood unspeakable horrors and survived, grounding the stories that remind us of the importance of peace and working through our differences. My paper, accompanied by photographs, elaborates upon the connections between practices of care, the witness trees, and hope for the future through peace education.

Speakers

Katy McCormick

Associate Professor, School of Image Arts, Toronto Metropolitan University

Katy McCormick is a photo-based artist and educator born in Kansas City, Missouri, and based in Toronto. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A member of the Atomic Photographers Guild since 2014, her work examines commemorative sites, revealing narratives... Read More →

Thursday October 8, 2026 1:30pm - 2:00pm EDT
Circular Church

Paper

2:30pm EDT

Artifacts of Becoming: Autoethnographic Inquiry into the Higher Education Experience Across Identity, Place, and Time

Thursday October 8, 2026 2:30pm - 3:30pm EDT

Circular Church

Doctoral scholars and graduates document their own becoming constantly, in objects carried, images made, and texts written across the margins of academic life. This panel brings together three scholars (present and alumni) from the NC State College of Education to present autoethnographic inquiries anchored in personal visual and material artifacts, each one a record of a journey that institutional measures of progress cannot fully capture.
The first presenter examines a charm necklace built incrementally across a doctoral journey, each charm marking a milestone, from conference presentations to completed semesters, analyzing it as an alternative literacy artifact and a wearable autoethnographic document of what counts as growth. The second presenter draws on his critical autoethnographic study of his experiences as a Black Ghanaian student-athlete navigating NCAA Division I athletics, centering visual and multimodal artifacts including photographs, Adinkra symbols, and scholarship appeal letters as primary data that honor African diasporic ways of knowing (Akogyeram, 2025). The third presenter reflects on personal journals kept across a migration from Puerto Rico to rural North Carolina, analyzing them as artifacts of linguistic, cultural, and geographic negotiation within doctoral education and her teaching profession that serves as the anchor of her dissertation.
Together, these presentations argue that graduate scholars are already documenting their experiences in ways that exceed institutional recognition, and that autoethnographic methods (Ellis et al., 2011; Chang, 2008) offer a framework for taking those documents seriously as knowledge. The panel connects directly to the conference theme by treating each artifact as an image that has traveled through time, accumulating meaning, memory, and identity across the shifting landscapes of higher education.

Speakers

Amber Moore

Doctoral student, North Carolina State University

Emmanuel Anyetei Kojo Akogyeram

Doctoral Student, North Carolina State University

Dr. María Heysha Carrillo Carrasquillo

Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education, University of Hawai`i, West O'ahu

Dr. María Heysha Carrillo Carrasquillo is a scholar, educator, and storyteller whose work sits at the intersection of language, place, and social identity in multilingual education. María Heysha is an assistant professor of early childhood education at the University of Hawai`i... Read More →

Thursday October 8, 2026 2:30pm - 3:30pm EDT
Circular Church

Panel