Invisibility Studies

This interdisciplinary collection examines how the boundary between the seen and the unseen is shifting across contemporary culture. Its chapters follow these shifts through several cultural fields and consider what they mean, with examples such as openness and privacy in city buildings and the quiet spread of surveillance tools into daily routines.

The volume argues that seeing and being seen form an exchange shaped by physical and social surroundings. Those surroundings open some ways of being visible and visual while shutting others out. Because this terrain is so layered, the editors maintain that no single discipline could map it alone.

To address this, the book gathers scholars from architectural history and theory, art, film and literature, philosophy, cultural theory and contemporary anthropology, along with work by a collective of artists.