Distinguished lecture with Dr. David Herman Jr. of Temple University

Existing bodies are never alone. We live with histories and forces of the temporal that pushes and pulls on the relations of worlds and bodies. In the lecture, Witnessing Gestures: Spatial aspects of Black Visualities in the Cinematic Image, Dr. Herman speaks on the interstitial spaces critical to understanding asymmetrical aspects of our seeing out, seeing in and seeing through as a way to illuminate the potentialities of the cinematic image and how images can reveal nuanced perspectives of visualities concerned with Black Life.

David Herman Jr. is Assistant Professor of art education at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. He is a lens-based exhibiting artist, educator and scholar whose work explores the relations between the perceptual and the social as a political endeavor. His research and scholarly interests are grounding in a belief that the social is inherently political and that arts education provides distinct and critical opportunities to engage and understand the affective nature of social life and the being with difference. Herman’s current work seeks to understand the perceptual experiences of preadolescents through a phenomenological framework he refers to as the Perceptual Rite of Passage (PRoP).

Part of the Testimony: Visual and Embodied Gateways to Black Histories event series hosted by the Simone de Beauvoir Institute and co-hosted by the Department of History and the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling.