Mobility and Circulation

Creativity springs from the movement of people, ideas, and objects across space and time. Tracing and mapping these movements can reveal patterns of positive cultural encounter as well as the unequal power relations produced by networks of exchange. Objects of visual culture move through these networks by various means: as objects, as reproductions, as digital images, or in the form of written description. Understanding how these flows of production and consumption play out yields insight into the encounters, possibilities, conflicts, and power relations embedded in these networks of exchange.

• What might it mean to imagine an object’s journey as a “biography?” 
• How do the transnational encounters so often occasioned by material objects change the cultures they bring together?
• Why do humans move cultural objects vast distances around the globe?