Call for Papers: Science, Imagination, and the Illustration of Knowledge

Call for Papers: Science, Imagination, and the Illustration of Knowledge

Call for Papers: Science, Imagination, and the Illustration of Knowledge

4th International Illustration Symposium

Organised by Illustration Research, in collaboration with University of Oxford Museums and Collections Oxford, UK

7 – 8 November 2013

‘Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the imagination.’
John Dewey

The Science, Imagination and the Illustration of Knowledge symposium will consider the contemporary and historical role of illustration in relation to the collection, processing, understanding, and organisation of knowledge and associated questions of epistemology and pedagogy.

The symposium is organised by Illustration Research in collaboration with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the Museum of the History of Science and these world famous collections will provide an important context for the exploration of these issues alongside presentations from curators.

We therefore invite submissions of papers on any of the following themes, and/or the suggestions of panels (three speakers).

  • Drawing as a means of investigating the world
  • Diagrams, working drawings and field notes
  • Books and manuals, info-graphics, instructional and pedagogic material
  • Visual taxonomies, classification and differentiation of categories of knowledge
  • Visualising the invisible
  • Visualising the body
  • Phantasms, grotesques, shadows: the imagined body
  • Science and magic
  • Healing images
  • Darwin’s legacy

Papers are invited from practising illustrators, from scientists and from academics.

Please submit 500 word proposals for papers and/or panels to Adrian Holme by Friday July 5, 2013.

The Journal of Illustration

Papers selected for presentation will also be considered for submission to the forthcoming Journal of Illustration (Intellect).

Illustration Research

Illustration Research is an international network of academics, researchers and practitioners in the field of illustration. It has held annual International Symposia for the past three years: 2010 (Cardiff), 2011 (Manchester MMU), 2012 (Krakow Ethnographic Museum, Poland).


March 19, 2013
image by Ian Whadcock