Welcome to this themed issue of journal of visual culture entitled 'Disability-Visuality'. There are all kinds of things that editors can do with themed issues of journals. The three previous themed issues of journal of visual culture have offered three distinctive prototypes: 'The Current State of Visual Culture Studies' edited by Martin Jay ( 2005) proposed a discursive and perhaps even meta-discursive reflection on the current state of Visual Culture Studies as a field of inquiry. 'Fantasies of Childhood: Visual Culture and the Law' edited by Marquard Smith ( 2004) instigated an interdisciplinary collision by thinking about how the domain of the visual is made subject to the force of law, and in return how the legal realm is made subject to the demands of the visual. 'Televisual Space' edited by Anne Friedberg and Raiford Guins (2004) put forward a proposition, stating that 'televisual space is both the space of the televisual and the changes produced by the televisual to space itself (p. 131)'. This was proposed in order to spark a paradigm shift in the study of visual cultures. On each of these occasions, the editors sought to struggle with the questions, challenges, limitations, and possibilities offered by Visual Culture Studies, the analysis of vision and visuality, and the objects, subjects, media and environments of visual culture. 1 'Disability-Visuality' is no exception. In fact, we'd say that this themed issue, following in the wake of those that have come before it, works towards replaying aspects of all three of these previous models. This issue is concerned with testing the temperature of Disability Studies and Visual Culture Studies. It also proposes that something interesting will come from bringing these areas of study (and their principal interest, 'disability' and 'visuality') into contact with one another. And finally, it provides us with the opportunity to consider how this productive dialogue does in fact bring about a paradigm shift of sorts.'Disability-Visuality' functions as a meeting place. 2 The contributing scholars and practitioners combine a diverse range of thoughtful, engaging, creative, even barbed contributions.

Visual culture studies is a contemporary, emerging interdisciplinary field of inquiry that employs a variety of approaches to analyze and interpret visual images. Visual culture studies does not designate a discipline so much as what John Walker and Sarah Chaplin call “a hybrid, an inter‐ or multi‐disciplinary enterprise formed as a consequence of a convergence of, or borrowing from, a variety of disciplines and methodologies” (1997: 1). Visual culture studies borrows from many disciplines in the arts and humanities, such as art history, cultural studies, media studies, literary criticism, feminism, queer studies, postcolonial theory, anthropology, and sociology. As a result of these borrowings or convergences, visual culture studies offers us a variety of interpretive ways of engaging with our past and present visual cultures – including semiotics, Marxism, feminism, historiography, social history, psychoanalysis, queer theory, deconstruction, postcolonial studies, ethnography, and museology. From these interpretive strategies, visual culture studies enables a wider range of analyses. It sustains investigations that are concerned with the production, circulation, and consumption of images; the changing nature of subjectivity; the ways in which we visualize or reflect upon or represent the world to ourselves; what Irit Rogoff (1998) has called “viewing apparatuses,” which include our ways of seeing and practices of looking, knowing, and doing, and even sometimes our misunderstandings and unsettling curiosity in imagining the as yet unthought.

This article interferes in the often all-too-smooth emergence of Visual Studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry in the British and North American University system. It does so by drawing attention to some of the unacknowledged grey areas between ‘doing’ visual culture and what has become the ‘study’ of Visual Studies. Interested in the historical, conceptual, and morphological distinctions between ‘doing’ and ‘studying’, it confronts the implications of that difference for inter-, cross-, and in-disciplinary pedagogy, research, writing, and thought. (In so doing, it responds to W.J.T. Mitchell’s article ‘Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture’ published in the journal of visual culture, August 2002, by both welcoming Mitchell’s text as a necessary starting point for any serious effort to initiate and critically engage with studies of visual culture and Visual Studies, and draws attention to a lacuna in the argument therein.) While in general glad to see in research, writing, and teaching, an ongoing curiosity in and attention to our encounters with visual cultures that marks a sustained commitment to ways of seeing and looking and knowing as doing, as practice, this article claims that the accelerated professionalization and bureaucratization of Visual Studies is in danger of bringing about an ossification of thought.

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