Critical & Visual Studies at Pratt Institute

Join us this Friday, May 1st at 5:30pm for our senior thesis presentations, featuring Olivia Reese’s work on fine motor skill development and Garrison Cunningham’s work on embodiment, biofeedback, knowledge and perception. These presentations are the culmination of the work our seniors have been doing all year—please join us in celebrating all their hard work!

Last weekend, our students had the opportunity to visit MoMA PS1 on a trip led by Dr. Stephanie Polsky! There, they visited the Greater New York exhibit, the sixth edition of the museum’s signature survey of artists living and working in the New York City area, followed by an engaging conversation on how the exhibit connects to their own practices as Crit Viz students.

Next Wednesday, please join us in the Alumni Reading Room for our Critical and Visual studies thesis presentations from 12:00pm to 2:00 pm!

Alexa Toner will present her final thesis entitled “Ritual Resistance: Syncretism and the Visual Iconography of Santería.” Her work explores how the visual iconography in the religion of Santería functions as a means of ritual resistance and a dynamic expression of syncretic identity, shaped through a history of colonial oppression, cultural resilience, and diasporic transformation. Through a historical examination of religious imagery, ritual practice, and material culture such as botánicas, altars, and sacred objects, her research investigates how practitioners continue to construct meaning and mediate ancestral connections through Santería. 

The rest of our seniors are presenting their midpoint reports on their thesis research thus far, covering a wide-ranging selection of topics representing their varied interests and deep intellectual curiosity. These presentations are a chance for the seniors to share their progress on their final thesis work as they move into their final months at Pratt and an opportunity to witness the Crit Viz thesis process in action.

We hope you will join us next Wednesday!

Join us this Thursday, November 6, with Professor Martin Dege for the latest installment in the Crit Viz 2025 talk series!

From Homo Narrans to Surplus-Enjoyment: The Crisis of Self-Narration

This talk examines how narrative, once celebrated as psychology’s cure for abstraction and loss of meaning, has itself entered into crisis. The initial promise was clear: by treating people as storytellers, psychology could return to subjectivity, temporality, and lived experience. Yet as narrative became central, it also took on burdens it could not sustain. Memory and identity are not stable archives but ongoing reconstructions, and in moments of social crisis, stories prove double-edged—capable of binding communities together, but equally prone to simplification, governance, and distortion. My argument is that narrative’s power lies less in guaranteeing coherence than in revealing the fractures and uncertainties it tries to smooth over. From this perspective, self-narration does not secure identity; it dramatizes its impossibility, often reproducing the very circuits of repetition and exhaustion it seeks to escape. The task, then, is not to tell better stories, but to shift our stance toward narrative itself: to use it critically, without being captured by its lure of coherence.

We hope to see you there!

Please join us for the 2025 B. A. Thesis presentations. Our students have been working diligently all year on thesis projects representing their interests and their deep intellectual curiosity. So, come listen and celebrate these wonderful investigations by our seniors into the meaning and uses of the Gothic, and an investigation into the survival of indigenous beliefs in Puerto Rico.

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Lucinda Graciela Cooper
Gothic: The Dark Side of Modernity

Alexa Sara Toner
Merging of Myths: Survival and Adaptation of Indigenous Beliefs in Puerto Rico
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The meeting will be live and streamed via zoom. Zoom link will be coming in a later announcement.

You are invited to participate in Pratt’s first ever field trip associated with the City Nature Challenge! On Sunday, April 27th we’ll be heading to Prospect Park to try to identify as many species as we can! The goal? To make it clear that our home city of New York is home to a lot of biodiversity!
Join us by meeting at the campus safety booth at 200 Willoughby Avenue at 11am or on the Prospect Park side of Grand Army Plaza at 12pm.
To participate, please register for this event using this form https://forms.gle/PnSck256KKTnJXhD9
(We’ll be providing guidance to those of you who are new to using iNaturalist in a bioblitz!)
Co-sponsored by the Departments of Math and Science and the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies' BA in Critical and Visual Studies.
Pratt Institute Biodiversity and Ecology Project:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/pratt-institute-biodiversity-and-ecology
PrattBioblitz 2024:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/pratt-bioblitz-2024

Wallabout Film Festival, May 3 & 4

Please save the dates for the upcoming Wallabout Film Festival. Students in the Class SS490-08 Wallabout Film Festival have worked all semester producing this year's Wallabout film festival, reviving the festival after several dormant years. We have had over 900 submissions from over 100 countries. From these submissions we have curated three screenings of truly impressive and inspiring work. Pratt students are also well represented.

This has been a wonderfully interdisciplinary collaboration that demonstrates the exceptional range of skills and talents of our students. Please join us if you can. (QR code to rsvp for either or both days will follow next week).

The experimental screening will be held on Saturday, May 3rd at the e-flux screening room: https://www.e-flux.com/film/screening-room/ on Classon Ave. from 3:00PM - 6:00PM.

And both the animation and main screenings will be on Sunday, May 4th at the Pratt screening room in the Film and Video building on campus - doors open at 4:30.

2025 Wallabout Film Festival page and submission link!

We are absolutely thrilled to announce the return of our student-run Wallabout Film Festival!

Named after a historic area in Brooklyn, and presented annually from 2007-2018, this festival is organized by Pratt students (including several of our own Crit Viz majors) to create an opportunity for student filmmakers and recent grads to showcase their work. We're looking for submissions now so share the call and tell your friends, share it on your socials, and above all, submit!
hashtag hashtag
https://filmfreeway.com/WallaboutFilmFestival

Don’t miss “Why Narrative? And Why Now?” with Jens Brockmeier of the American University of Paris on February 19th!

“Narrative forms and activities have become an important issue in many areas of our cultural life. From literature and the arts to the humanities and social sciences, narrative is an omnipresent subject. This is also reflected by the emergence of new disciplines such as “narrative medicine,” “narrative psychology,” and “narrative psychiatry.” Along similar lines, there is a remarkable increase of narrative formats in visual and performative art productions.

Against this backdrop, I take a look at one important aspect of what has been called the “narrative turn”: narrative is no longer exclusively localized in texts, pictures, films, or mental structures, but it is viewed as an active, in fact, enactive part of the cultural reality of life. Using a concept by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, I suggest understanding narrative as cultural “form of life” in Wittgenstein’s sense.”

VIDEO - Martin Dege. "Benjamin Brecht Žižek / Living and Dying in Dark Times" - Critical and Visual Studies Symposium
November 21, 2024

The video for Martin Dege's talk is now available for viewing/listening via our Youtube channel at

Martin Dege. Benjamin Brecht Žižek / Living and Dying in Dark Times. Martin Dege.Benjamin Brecht Žižek / Living and Dying in Dark Times.Critical and Visual Studies Symposium Thursday, November 21, 2024, 5-6:30PM Why do we do w...

VIDEO - McKenzie Wark. Raving / Writing: Dancing in Darkest Times. Critical and Visual Studies Symposium. The video for McKenzie Wark's talk "Raving / Writing: Dancing in Darkest Times" is now available for viewing/listening on our Youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5scIGXH0p3U

McKenzie Wark
Raving / Writing: Dancing in Darkest Times
North Hall, Room 110
November 14, 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5scIGXH0p3U

"In the dark times / will there also be singing?" Brecht said "Yes, there will be singing / about the dark times." Only these are not dark times. They're the darkest times. There is no known precedent for the climate disruption happening all over the world. In the darkest times, there will at least be dancing, which might temporarily create a different kind of time. Building on my work in the book Raving, I'll expand on the aesthetics of sideways time, as that which a good rave induces. It's not Walter Benjamin's "emergency brake," which still leaves us stranded on the subway. Nor is it acceleration, which just speeds up the crash.

McKenzie Wark is the author, among other things, of Reverse Cowgirl (Semiotexte), Raving (Duke) and Love and Money, S*x and Death (Verso). Wark is Professor of Media and Culture at Eugene Lang College, The New School.