School staff
Malcolm Barnard is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture and an internationally recognized theorist of visual culture. He has degrees in philosophy and in sociology and his PhD concerned Derrida and other French philosophers.
He teaches at all levels of the School’s Critical and Historical Studies (CHS) modules, from PartA to Ph.D., and has recently been instrumental in developing projects which deliver theoretical content into studio delivery. He is Responsible Examiner for the PartC Art and Design Dissertation module and teaches history and theory of visual culture into all CHS modules.
His research concerns representation and communication. This means that he is interested in explaining what sort of communication art and design are and he is concerned to critique the common sender/receiver model of that communication. It also means that he is interested in art and design as representation, and to investigate the various ways in which they appear and operate as metaphor. And it indicates an interest in the ways in which the identity and social status of different cultural groups are constructed, reproduced and contested through their representation in art and design.
Teaching
SAC500 Art and Design Dissertation
Research
Malcolm’s research has been predominantly in the areas of fashion theory and graphic design theory. His approach is informed by Derrida’s philosophy and the various concerns of cultural studies. In practice, this means that he is interested in the ways in which meaning, identity and representation are produced and challenged through the forms of representation called art and design.
His major books include Fashion as Communication (Second Edition, Routledge, 2002), Graphic Design as Communication, (Routledge, 2005), and Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture, (Palgrave 2001, second edition forthcoming). The first two take a broadly cultural studies approach to their topics and explain communication via fashion and graphic design as the construction and contestation of meaning and cultural identity. Approaches is a critical survey of the main methods of studying visual culture and argues that they are all locatable on an epistemological spectrum that has phenomenology and hermeneutics at one end and structuralism at the other.
Recently, Malcolm has been invited to research and write about photography. Essays on Derrida’s accounts of photography, and on his critique of Barthes’ punctum, and on the relation between rhetoric and documentary in photography are forthcoming. These essays will investigate the nature of representation, the impossibility of the punctum and the ways in which what is understood and presented as documentary record is always a form of rhetoric.
Current Postgraduate Research Supervisions
Lingqi Kong, Wayfinding Systems in Beijing, Ph.D.: co-supervision with Dr Robert Harland
Anne Burns, Social Media, Gender and Photography, Ph.D.: co-supervision with Dr Jane Tormey
Salman Alhajri, Graphic Design Education and Creativity, Ph.D.: co-supervision with Simon Downs
Lena Darweesh Fallata, Culturally Appropriate Design, Ph.D.
Vlad Morariu, Institutional Critique, Ph.D.: co-supervision with Mel Jordan
Xumin Yao, Chinese Furniture Design and Production, M.Phil: co-supervision with Prof. Clive Edwards.
Featured Publications
Fashion, (2011) Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon. Four volume edited collection of theoretical and philosophical writings on fashion. I provide an introduction to the business of fashion theory and introductory essasy to each of the volumes.
“Semantics and Graphics” (2012) in Downs, S. (ed) The Graphic Communication Handbook, Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon. Essay outlining the ways in which meanings in visual communication produce, reproduce and challenge dominant ideologies.
“Looking Sharp: Fashion Studies”, (2012) in Heywood, I. and Sandywell, B. (eds) The Handbook of Visual Culture, Berg, Oxford. Essay charting and analyzing the rise of fashion studies from its beginnings in cultural studies and feminism to its current ecological and global contexts.
“Fashion Statements”, (2010) in Scapp, R. and Weitz, B. (eds) Fashion Statements, Palgrave, New York. Essay critiquing the sender/receiver model of communication as it is routinely applied to fashion.
Links
http://www.bergpublishers.com/?TabId=15010&v=1899070
http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=181/
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415462334/
Images
1. Cover of Barnard, M. (2005) Fashion as Communication, Routledge, Abingdon
2. Cover of Barnard, M. (ed) (2007) Fashion Theory, Routledge, Abingdon
3. Cover of Barnard, M. (2005) Graphic Design as Communication, Routledge, Abingdon
4. Cover of Scapp, R. and Seitz, B. (eds) (2011) Fashion Statements, Palgrave, New York, in which Barnard, M. “Fashion Statements: Culture and Communication” appears.
