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Visual Culture

Visual Culture involves a critical engagement with all types of visual expression and communication in society, ranging from the traditional fine arts such a painting and sculpture to recent visual media such as photography, advertising, fashion, film, and cyber-culture.

Various approaches are employed to explore the meaning of the visual. Some units emphasise the social and historical understanding of visual images, frequently drawing on the fields of recent gender or cultural studies, theories of ideology or postcolonial theory. Others consider the visual in the light of psychoanalysis or post-structuralism and methods of deconstruction pertinent to the discipline.

Research Strengths

Nineteenth and twentieth-century Australian visual culture, especially urban imagery in Australian art and visual culture, Australian war art, masculinities, Aboriginal Art and postcolonial revisions of nineteenth-century Australian visual culture.

Visual Culture Staff

Dr Leigh Astbury - MA (Univ. Melb) Dip. Ed (Univ. Melb) PhD (Monash)

Visual Culture at Undergraduate Level

Visual Culture is offered by the Faculty of Art & Design with a number of units being taught by the Faculty of Arts. ECPS Visual Culture (VSA) units are available to students in any undergraduate course provided that they meet unit and course requirements. You can choose to study our units just for interest or as part of an Arts minor or major. Individual unit enrolment is also available via single unit studies or cross-institutional studies (i.e. for credit towards a course at another tertiary institution).

Unit Offerings

ECPS offers the following units

For further information see ECPS Unit Offerings.

How to Enrol

Before you enrol in VSA units you need to enrol in an undergraduate course: see the Monash Future Students website for further information.

To enrol in units go to the Web Enrolment System (WES) or consult your Faculty about enrolment procedures for your course/faculty. See also Enrolment and Re-enrolment in the ECPS Student Services/Administrative Information section.

Visual Culture in Arts undergraduate and honours degrees

Students may complete single units, a major or minor in Visual Culture towards the core Arts component of their Bachelor of Arts degree or associated double degrees. Honours is also available. For information on how to build a major or minor or honours in Visual Culture see the Arts Current Students Area of Study website.

Visual Culture at Postgraduate Level

ECPS offers a range of graduate/postgraduate coursework and graduate research options.

Coursework

100% research

For further information see the ECPS Future Students webpage.

Contacts

Undergraduate unit enquiries

School of English, Communications and Performance Studies
Telephone: (03) 990 52140
Email: ECPS.Enquiries@arts.monash.edu.au

Postgraduate Program and Admission Enquiries

Graduate Studies Officer
Telephone: (03) 9905 2277
Email: ECPS.Enquiries@arts.monash.edu.au

School of ECPS

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