Dr Agnese Sile
Job title:
Lecturer in Design and Screen Cultures
Role:
Exam Board Convener for PGT Design; D&SC Coordinator for PGT
Office:
K11, North-East Studio Building
Biography
I am a Lecturer in Design and Screen Cultures at Edinburgh College of Art. I have a BA Hons in Graphic and Media Design from London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London and an MSc by Research in Interdisciplinary Creative Practices from the University of Edinburgh. I completed a PhD in Modern Thought at the University of Aberdeen in November 2016.
My thesis, entitled The Space of Love in Photographic Essays of Illness Narratives, aimed to investigate and reveal what kind of knowledge is contained within a number of photographic essays that have been produced by selected professional photographers and writers since the mid-1980s. The corpus included written and visual accounts of illness, both physical and mental, and disability, and through intermedial analysis I explored ways in which these can inform existing scientific and advocacy paradigms.
My recent research interests concern New Materialism, critical and posthuman disability studies, and visual illness narratives.
Course Organiser for Undergraduate courses:
DESI08151 Introduction to Body Studies
DESI10061 Multi-Sensory Cultures
DESI08087 Visual Narratives in Design and Screen Cultures
Postgraduate courses:
DESI11092 Multi-Sensory Cultures
DESI11176 Body, Identity and Technology
DESI11099 Disseminating Design Practices
Research
Research
My main research interests are visual narratives of illness experiences in the intersection between medical science, critical theory and creative practice, especially photography; and intervenes in the debates relating to ethics of visual representations, perception, care practices and on the meanings imbedded in the photographic act. My interdisciplinary approach draws on sources inside and outside visual culture studies and includes art history, phenomenology, anthropology, digital media, and medical humanities.
The most recent publications include: a book chapter 'Entangled subjectivities in Lisa Lindvay's photographic project Hold Together'., published in Routledge Handbook of Health and Media, edited by Therese Jones and Lester D. Friedman (2022). ; a book chapter ‘Gestures of care in Briony Campbell’s photographic essay “The Dad Project”’ in Discourses of Care: Care in Media, Medicine and Society (eds.) Amy Holdsworth, Karen Lury and Hannah Tweed, Bloomsbury Publishing (2020); a journal article ‘Exploring Intimacy in Collaborative Photographic Narratives of Breast Cancer’ in Humanities 9 (1), 27, 2020; ‘Echo and the Failure of Knowing in Judith Fox's Photographic Project “I Still Do: Loving and Living with Alzheimer’s”’ in the Journal of Medical Humanities (published online 26 April 2018).I have delivered talks and contributed to several conferences, including, International Health Consortium Conference Frankenstein@200, University of Stanford; Curating Health: Graphic Medicine and Visual Representations of Illness, University of Stockholm; 3rd European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, University of Edinburgh; 9th International Health Humanities Conference in October, which was to be held in Tokyo, Japan at St. Luke's International University.
PhD Supervision Topics
- Visual illness narratives
- Ethics of visual representation in medical humanities
- Phenomenology of illness and visual culture
- Intersectionality in visual narratives of Illness
- Embodiment and medical technologies