Sumários
Special Lecture on Photography & Media Archive
17 Março 2026, 11:00 • Marzia D'Amico
Today’s session featured a guest lecture by Dr Sandra Camacho (NOVA) on photography from a technical and historical perspective. She outlined key developments in the medium and emphasised how technological processes shape photographic outcomes. The lecture also introduced the concept of the media archive, highlighting how photographs function as archival objects within systems of storage, classification, and power.
The Oppositional Gaze
13 Março 2026, 11:00 • Marzia D'Amico
Starting from Berger, whose idea of the gaze was radically reconsidered through the feminist film theory notion of visual pleasure and the male gaze developed by Mulvey, we moved into bell hooks’s text “The Oppositional Gaze”, thereby introducing the expansive racial dimension into feminist critique, and focusing on the forms of pleasure in non-identification proposed by hooks.
Oral Presentation Example & The Male Gaze
10 Março 2026, 11:00 • Marzia D'Amico
The lecture opened with a special visit from Madalena Bentes, a student from the previous academic year, who reprised her oral presentation in order to explain to the class the type of work expected of them in the month of May. The discussion that followed the presentation proved instrumental in understanding how gender stereotypes are incorporated and reproduced over the years in the magazine covers of popular periodicals (e.g. Cosmopolitan).
Subsequently, the lecturer introduced to the class the theory of the “male gaze”, as articulated in the assigned reading of Laura Mulvey’s essay. The concept was received with clarity and a degree of productive scepticism regarding its applicability to the contemporary context – particularly with respect to Mulvey’s call for a rupture with identification – thereby generating a fruitful discussion on the representation of female subjects in today’s film industry.
Ways Of Seeing
6 Março 2026, 11:00 • Marzia D'Amico
The first and second episodes of the well-known television programme Ways of Seeing, created by John Berger for BBC, were viewed together and discussed through the theoretical tools previously acquired. The second episode – dedicated to the female figure as an object rather than a subject of artistic representation – provides the bridge to the next lecture, which will focus on the concept of the Male Gaze.
Foucault (Panopticon)
3 Março 2026, 11:00 • Marzia D'Amico
In addition to further developing the concept of truth in relation to the dynamics of power, following Michel Foucault’s insight, we examined in detail the Panopticon through a close engagement with the assigned reading, which is essential for the written examination. Particular attention was given to the application of a social condition of panopticism through CCTV and social media. The collective reflection focused on regimes of visibility and invisibility, and on the datafication of the contemporary landscape, particularly through technologies of reproduction that centralise visuality.