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This chapter argues that acquisition of visual literacy should enjoy a high priority in Catholic Studies practice, not simply because of the Catholic Church's familiar role in fostering visual arts, but also because across much of Christian history, spiritually-enriching visual materials were more accessible and more efficacious than written texts; these visual materials inspired theological reflection and helped shape Catholic devotional and liturgical practices. In treating religious architecture, this chapter further demonstrates how the construction of sacred space also shapes religious experience, modeling for readers opportunities for field work undertaken by students as an integral component of Catholic Studies pedagogy.

Tisha Brooks writes about a digital anthology assignment in her 200-level African American literature survey in which students act as “knowledge curators.” Brooks’s assignments use literary and visual texts to “bridge multiple literacies and historical gaps,” and to encourage students to think critically about representations of violence against black bodies. Student work culminates in a group digital anthology project that helps them “move from mere consumers of knowledge to critical thinkers who use the archive to make meaning of its artifacts and the history and literature connected to them.” By selecting multimedia artifacts across periods, students become adept at representing the historical continuities between past and present.

This chapter examines how colonial women amateur filmmakers often documented in detail their early and mid-twentieth century overseas travel and settlement experiences, jobs, sports and private and official events. Relying on cross-archival primary sources, it discusses the filmmakers’ simultaneous roles as vectors of colonising credos and commodified subalterns of imperial paternalism. It explores the historical discourse present across several colonial amateur films made by British women in South Asia, Africa, Papua New Guinea, and the Middle East between 1920s and 1940s. It also considers gender and racial hierarchies as shaped by imperial rule while confirmed or challenged by the filmmakers' prevailing perceptions of cinematic vocabulary and practice. Although traditionally seen as a predominantly male hobby, amateur filmmaking across the British Empire has been a pastime preferred by women too, almost on par with their male counterparts. It thus becomes possible to speak of a gender-based visual narrative identifiable across British colonial amateur filmmaking, one validated by the thematic choices made by women amateur filmmakers and their shared visual literacy. Finally, the chapter explores the differences and similarities in visual literacy between several amateur films made by British colonial women during the final years of the British rule in India.

This chapter explores how law should be ethically practiced and judgments justly rendered in a world of digital multimedia and visual displays. More specifically, it considers changes in law brought by digital technologies and how the quality of justice in a world increasingly dependent on visual displays may be enhanced. It begins by asking whether the expanding use of digital pictures and multimedia is a good thing for the law in general before discussing how courtroom rules and procedures might be framed and judges and jurors educated to promote accuracy and fairness. It then offers several recommendations for improving the visual literacy of all participants in the trial and proposes a set of ethical guidelines or best practices for legal visual communication and persuasion that takes into account the power and complexity of pictures. Finally, it examines law's digital visual transformation within a wider social context and argues that the public must take responsibility for the design and control of online adjudication so as to ensure the legitimacy of the legal system in a democratic society.

The preceding chapters discussed the imaging technology in the most common known fields such as art, mass media, film, and medical areas. This chapter describes the need for visual literacy across various other fields of expertise like humanities, biochemistry, astronomy, and other subjects. The author argues that university-wide courses on the study of images help to expand knowledge on diversified classifications of imaging practices. The chapter covers concepts such as what exactly is known as a picture, image quantification, the thicket of representation and visual abuses, and the extension of the picture. These discussions, represented as themes in the chapter, and the exploration of several kinds of images in special subject areas, cover the important aspects. The chapter concludes with an outline of the advantages of a university course on images.

Augusta Rohrbach details her collaborative work with six graduate students to build Digital Emerson: A Collective Archive. Rohrbach uses a set of theoretical and critical readings that engage students in reflections about Emerson’s conscious rupture of pedagogical barriers and how his philosophy might be realized in digital environments. Rohrbach and her students think outside argument-based rhetoric and explore the importance of visual literacy and design thinking. With these techniques, her graduate students imagine an audience beyond academia for their work, one that includes a broad community of interested readers.

Eudora Welty’s photographs from the 1939 Mississippi State Fair offer an exciting opportunity to teach students visual literacy and introduce them to performance, critical race, gender, and disability studies. Seeing, reading, and thinking critically are important skills for any student, and close looking at Welty’s photographs of sideshow banners, including “Mule Face Woman,” “Headless Girl,” “Rubber Man,” and “Hypnotized,” in coordination with close reading of her short stories “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden” and “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies” facilitates a richer understanding of diversity.

Simply, the answer to the question of how a visually literate empirical analysis of Krokodil allows us to extend and nuance our understanding of Soviet graphic satire beyond the concept of state-sponsored propaganda is that Soviet graphic satire was more complex, more diverse and more critical than interpretations based on the propaganda paradigm have acknowledged. Following the analyses of previous chapters, the Conclusion shows how moving beyond the binary oppositions of previous studies enables us to modify the "propaganda paradigm". It also indicates future avenues for research, and highlights the relevance of this study to a number of related fields, including Putin-era internet-age satire.

This chapter analyzes Faouzi Bensaidi’s high-tech love story WWW: What a Wonderful World as a meditation on the realized, partial, and failed connections of cultural and economic globalization. A cinematic tribute film that points to endless chains of meaning, to other movies rather than to social realities, WWW does not deliver a moral lesson, whether about film or the objects of its images. Rather, absurdist mash-ups of characters, scenes, and plot lines from sometimes incongruous film genres and social fantasies challenge our cinematic-visual literacy and our knowledge of cinematic value. This chapter shows how the film entertainingly places film and socioeconomic tropes on a collision course while detailing a love affair with cinema that persists even as the medium retreats from regional popularity.