Anne Strachan Cross and Matthew Fox-Amato reflect on the history of the 1863 “Scourged Back” photograph by McPherson & Oliver, depicting a formerly enslaved man, Peter/Gordon, considering ethics of viewing.

Patricia Hayes engages with an archive of interviews with Santu Mofokeng (1956-2020), who posed critical questions about environmental activism in South Africa while exposing older problems around race and exclusion.

Ileana Selejan reflects on civic movements in Latin America, considering the manifold ways members of the public have deployed photography for justice-seeking purposes.

Darren Newbury examines how the U.S. Information Agency presented civil rights protests as a form of "democracy in action”, as the Cold War took hold and many countries in the global south began to break free of colonial rule.

Debates on forced migration often assume that one is either a refugee or a citizen. Thy Phu considers visual forms of “refugee citizenship”, which denotes alternative forms of citizenship that challenge nation-state frameworks.

Brenna Wynn Greer considers how iconic photographs – representative of Black people, the Black past, and Black protest – function as an archive of Black iconicity, the central motif of which is the seated Black subject.

This lecture, drawn from Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography, focuses on Carrie Mae Weems’ collaborative series Constructing History, which reenacted photographs from the U.S. Civil Rights era.