Agents of Change - Summer Symposium 2024

Agents of Change: Process, Transformation and Decentring Art’s Histories

Join us for a one-day symposium of research from emerging scholars in the field with our keynote speaker Dr Christine Eyene, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art (Liverpool John Moores University) and Research Curator (Tate Liverpool).

Members of the Doctoral and Early Career Researcher (DECR) Committee Bea Gassmann De Sousa, Amy Melia, and Sonny Ruggiero are delighted to bring you Agents of Change, the Association for Art History’s 2024 Summer Symposium.

Held at Liverpool John Moores University, this gathering will bring together a group of emerging researchers thinking critically about how decentring approaches can incite significant changes in art and society alike. Each of the symposium’s selected speakers will focus on the themes of process, transformation and decentring in their research, exploring from a variety of perspectives, the underlying processes through which art can function as an agent of change.

In art history, significant change can be of material or social impact. Art emerges and evolves from complex subjective, material and social processes. These can often involve radical transformations and critical attempts to decentre art’s histories. What are the social or material processes of change artworks can embody, engendering and blending possibilities at the intersections of art and science, or art and activism? Which aesthetic or alchemical transformations can impact profoundly on known frameworks of art history? How do artists, cultural agents, and art movements inspire changes that shift focus away from the dominant narratives and discourses of art history, towards those historically characterised as being ‘in the periphery’ of the Global North? This symposium offers an opportunity to examine pivotal moments of change and explore their impact in detail.

Would you like to be a speaker at this event?

The Call for Papers for this event is can be found at CFP | AAH | SUMMER SYMPOSIUM 2024 | AGENTS OF CHANGE - For Art History - Deadline for paper proposals 24 May

The Doctoral and Early Career Research (DECR) Committee is a voluntary committee that drives the Association for Art History’s doctoral and early career research events and initiatives. Find out more .

Host or Publisher Association for Art History