The approach to images as cultural documents and testimonies of collective history, as well as instruments of social shaping, formed a central feature of early cultural theories. Aby Warburg, the founder of the Cultural Studies Library, referred to the fundamental role of images in cultural history and cultural studies very early on; in particular, he analysed images not only as symbolic representations of cultures, but also as carriers and storages of affective expression. Warburg, like most members of the Warburg Circle, established a new form of cultural-history and cultural-study based primarily on pictorial theories. They all understood images as cultural testimonies and studied their potentials to transform societies and cultures along “Migration Routes” through space and time. It should be noted that this perspective, in turn, mobilized a paradigm shift within the humanities, which eventually led to the development of the modern interdisciplinary Cultural Studies.

The joint and interdisciplinary panel of the sections Image and Cultural Studies at the German Association for Semiotics revisits the tradition mentioned above and focuses on studying the dynamic relationships between images and cultures.

In particular, the panel would like to address questions such as:

• How do images participate in the transformation of cultures?
• How can we explain the agency of images influencing cultural processes? What constitutes this agency?
• How is it possible that images – like Warburg already assumed – have a sufficient potential, especially when looking at processes of cultural transformation?
• How do images represent cultural transformation?
• What role do images play in cultural and social changes and shifts caused by globa- lization, migration, climate crises or, so-called post-democratic or post-factual era?
• How do images contribute to the transformation of knowledge within memory cultures?
• How can the cultural capability of images be conceptualized within the framework of multimodal configurations?

Information on organization and procedures:
The congress will take place from 22 to 26 September 2020 at the Chemnitz Universi- ty of Technology. Please send your abstract in German or English largely unformat- ted and in an editable format (ideally Word): Martina Sauer <ms150@web.de>. The deadline for submission is 1.12.2019. Your abstract should include: Title of the pre- sentation, name of the speaker, description of the planned presentation (max. 300 words), institution, e-mail address, short CV (as continuous text) and up to five rele- vant publications of the speaker. Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes in length. A publication of selected lectures is planned.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Jacobus Bracker (jaco- bus.bracker@unihamburg.de), Klaus Sachs-Hombach (klaus.sachs-hombach@uni-tu- ebingen) and Martina Sauer (ms150@web.de) on the part of the Image Section and Elize Bisanz (elize.bisanz@ttu.edu) and Stephanie Schneider (stephanie.schneider@- stud.leuphana.de) on the part of the Culture Section at the German Association for Semiotics.