Seeing Matters

Sarah H. Awad is Associate Professor of sociocultural psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark. She received her Ph.D. in cultural Psychology from Aalborg University and her M.Sc. in social and cultural psychology from London School of Economics and Political Science. She studies processes by which individuals make sense of change through visual and narrative tools and the influence of visual culture on identity, collective memory and politics within a society. She has coordinated different art facilitation programs and public service visual campaigns in cooperation with the United Nations Development Program and the British Council. Her most recent co-authored books include Remembering as a Cultural Process (2019), Street Art of Resistance (2017), and The Psychology of Imagination (2017).

• Part I. The Image and What We Do With It: 1. Why a Psychology of the image?; 2. Theoretical conception of the image; 3. What we do with the image; Part II. The Social Life of Images: An Analytical Framework: 4. The birth of the image; 5. The body of the image; 6. The Environment of the image; 7. The viewing of the image; 8. The development of the image; 9. The death and after-life of the image; 10. Concluding thoughts – The mattering of the image; Appendix I.

Seeing Matters is a masterful exploration of the pervasive power of images. With keen psychological insight, Sarah Awad reveals how the images we create and encounter shape our minds, emotions, and the very fabric of our shared reality. Vlad Glaveanu, Professor of Psychology, Dublin City University