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The ICA Visual Communication Studies Division is an active, diverse and integrative group of scholars who seek to enhance the understanding of visual communication in all its forms. Learn more in our mission statement!

If you are new to ICA or renewing your ICA membership, follow the instructions on ICA’s Join Us page. During the sign-up/renewal process, simply add the Visual Communication Studies division to your cart. If you are already a member of ICA, please contact membership@icahdq.org to add Visual Communication Studies to your division affiliations.

Find your scholarly home with the ICA VCS Division

Visual communication pervades everyday life and is increasingly important in the digital environment. We seek to understand the visual in all its forms, from aspects of visuality and human vision to all sorts of visual objects and representations. We study everything from images to artefacts to human interaction and the built environment and our research has ramifications for other fields, such as health, politics, science, ethics, and social media. Our division is interdisciplinary and welcomes qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Our division is extremely supportive of students and early-career scholars, with opportunities for leadership and pre-conferences that offer support and feedback for research, as well as travel grants to ensure equitable participation.

Join us and unlock these valuable benefits:

• Achieve recognition from your peers. The ICA VCS Division annually sponsors a number of awards, including for top student and non-student papers and posters during the annual conference, top dissertation, and top reviewer. In addition, we also support as a Division nominations for the Association-wide awards, such as its Outstanding Book Award . These honors are one way of demonstrating international recognition for your scholarly work and can inform hiring/promotion and other award decisions.
• Go global. The ICA VCS Division has been recognised by association leadership as one of the most active on the internationalization front. Join our taskforce (https://icavisualcommunicationstudies.com/about-our-divisions-internationalization-efforts/) with members from under-represented regions and work to make our scholarship and approaches more inclusive, representative, and just. We’ve also developed a reviewers’ best practice guide with a focus on internationalization and inclusion so that our feedback is helpful, relevant, and constructive.
• Find your interdisciplinary home. Whether you research particular technologies, processes, experiences, identity attributes, or historical traditions, your scholarship has a home in Visual Communication Studies. The diversity of our membership and their disciplinary traditions is one of our greatest strengths and a constant opportunity for inspiration and creative thinking.
• Increase exposure to your work & to the latest scholarship. Our members bookshelf, Division listserv, and private social media groups give you access to amplify your latest research outputs and keep abreast of your colleagues’ cutting-edge contributions. The Division has also negotiated with SAGE a reduced subscription rate to Visual Communication for its membership.
• Hone your skills and develop your connections. Our events, including during the annual conference and beyond it, provide a platform to develop specific research methods skills, obtain feedback on works-in-progress research, and seek guidance and advice from other scholars with a similar focus. We are a supportive community that values intimate and productive encounters throughout the year and regularly work with our membership to identify opportunities for connection and collaboration.

For members

The Division has negotiated a reduced subscription rate to Visual Communication for its membership with SAGE. Be sure to check out this offer.