In the age of smart technologies, artificial intelligence, social media and digitally mediated communication, images of various kinds have become an inherent part of our daily lives. Photographs, advertisements, infographics, charts, drawings, graphs, icons, maps, posters, memes, and other visualizations, as well as multimodal texts with visual elements are omnipresent in each context of the everyday. Today’s society is highly visual, and visual imagery is no longer supplemental to other forms of information. The role of images in contemporary culture has changed what it means to be literate. Today, literacy can be equally achieved through images as well as texts and numbers.
In my research, I have been particularly interested in the concept of visual literacy, understood as a set of skills in visual reading and writing, as well as in thinking and learning in terms of images. Visual literacy is a multidisciplinary area of knowledge, closely connected with media literacy and visual education, visual communication, culture studies, and information design. The main questions I have been interested in are how we see and how we know what we see — how we learn seeing and how our interaction with visual information develops.
Over the years, I worked in various multidisciplinary projects, analyzing visual imagery. Currently, the primary focus of research is on visual literacy and visual pedagogies in the higher education context. I am also interested in various aspects of visual cultures, press photography interpretation, digitally mediated communication (mobile apps, affordances), transnational communication, and multilingualism. I aim to develop visual research methods and methodologies, both from research and pedagogical perspectives.
Joanna Łucja Kędra 