2027 SPE Annual Conference: Community in Contrast
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print this pageMeaning Making and Resilience: Community, Authorship, Visual Literacy Across Shared (Un)Realities
Niku Kashef; Micol Hebron; christy roberts berkowitz
Saturday, November 07 - 9:00AM to 10:15AM
Mariposa 1000
The medium of photography is interwoven with evidence, memory and truth. As arts, entertainment, and education become rapidly re-shaped by AI, social media, and the rapid evolution of digital platforms, questions of truth, authorship, and meaning become more complex. This panel considers how artists, educators, and cultural organizers are responding to these changes by building community, support networks, and collaborative forms of creative practice.
Rather than treating technology as the central issue, the discussion focuses on the social structures that support creative practice, including community, mentorship, mutual aid, and shared knowledge. Panelists will discuss digital and analog projects that challenge traditional ideas of authorship and artistic authority at a moment when AI increasingly complicates questions of image production, authenticity, and trust.
Through community media, feminist organizing, educational initiatives, and collaborative art projects, the panelists examine how meaning is shaped through collective engagement and how communities create shared points of reference in increasingly fragmented visual and informational environments.
The panel also considers how hierarchies within the art world are being re-evaluated. Who gets to shape cultural narratives? How are expertise and visibility are assigned? What alternative structures can support more equitable forms of participation?
Bringing together perspectives from art, photography, education, media, and social practice, the session offers a broader understanding of meaning-making in contemporary visual culture. Panelists propose that resilience is not an individual response to change but a collective practice built through networks of care, collaboration, and shared responsibility.
The panel suggests that discussions of photographic truth must also address the social conditions in which images are made, viewed, and interpreted. We consider how artists and educators cultivate critical visual literacy, helping audiences navigate the relationships between photographic evidence, synthetic imagery, and competing narratives of truth while exploring how shared meaning can be sustained in an era of increasingly fragmented realities.
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