{"word_count": 282, "character_count": 1916}
Images lead multiple lives. Variances in real-time perception, combined with differing recalls, reproductions, appropriations, and remixes, all complicate any stabilization of images into a fixed set of meanings and purposes. Images are not so easily captured. And yet, even in this permanently emergent state, images “matter.” They “do” things, both to usand to one another, inciting desire, reinforcing memory, influencing understanding, and building dense affective landscapes across media and the lived world. In the era of digital technology, images circulate with a speed and frequency once nearly unimaginable, increasingly replace text as our primary mode of mediated communication, and matter in ways we can only begin to understand.This panel is intended to examine the rich “social lives” of images today, their circulation and exchange, their easy movement across borders and screens, and their interaction with one another, not just as manipulated objects of human social actors, but as “actants” in their own right, setting chains of events in motion and holding real consequence for their creators and perceivers. Building on insights from Visual Anthropology, Visual Culture Studies, and Science and Technology Studies, the papers in this panel will explore various understandings of “social lives” as applied to images—from the role of images in social media like Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr, to the impact of images on day-to-day social relationships among dancers, photographers, and designers. Images, the presenters argue, can no longer afford to be afterthoughts of social analysis. They have moved to the foreground of social life, and this panel takes them seriously as the unwieldy contributors to social action that they have become.Please email paper abstracts (250 words) to Jonathan S. Marion(jsmarion@gmail.com) and Brent Luvaas (luvaas@drexel.edu) by January 2nd for consideration.