This book came together in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, shocking governments, shutting businesses, straining families and individuals, and touching many of us with the tragedy of lives cut short. We would like to thank our contributors, who have been more than generous and patient over the long gestation of this collection. We thank them for believing in this book and persisting through the many stages. We hope they find the results fruitful and gratifying. The book you are holding is a unique cross-disciplinary experiment. It is a collection of essays with diverse locations in terms of geographies of thought, scholarly backgrounds, and orientations. It can be used to think about visual pedagogies in various fields such as art history, education, visual communication, and visual anthropology and even visual studies though it pushes back on the rehearsed or accepted conceptualizations therein.
Many reviewers of chapter manuscripts provided extensive and engaged feedback that served to sharpen and deepen the work, and clarify many issues. We thank them for their time and encouragement, knowing that some of them persisted through their own bouts with Covid-19 and there is no doubt the collection is stronger thanks to their suggestions. The editors would also like to thank Joanna Kędra for her efforts in the early stages of the project.
This manuscript continues a brilliant series on Visual Pedagogies, thanks to the support of John Bennett at Brill, who has been flexible with pandemic timelines and a complete pleasure to work with.