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Image, Imagination, Communication: Exploring the Ethical as Natural or Artificial, Real or Surreal

The 18th Biennial Communication Ethics conference and the Silver Jubilee Anniversary Conference (2000-2025) of the will explore current research on the “image" and "imagination," broadly conceived, across the human sciences. Our focus is on the phenomenological, semiotic, rhetorical and ethical foundations of communication in the experience of embodied thinking, speaking and inscribing. We seek to explore the frontiers of natural and artificial sign-systems, encounter diverse manifestations of concrete reality and abstract surreality of human imagination, and discover future domains of conscious experience that found the art and practice of human communicating. We welcome a diversity of scholarly and creative approaches. Problematics that presenters may consider include, but are not limited to:

• What questions are raised by recent phenomenological, semiotic, rhetorical, and critical theories of visual and mental images, visibility and nonvisibility, presence and absence, perception and expression?
• Is there a general theory of image ethics? If so, what are its foundations and some of its value limitations (e.g., psychoanalysis, journalism, design, propaganda)?
• What does it mean to "see" oneself or another? What is a just distance from which to look?
• What social, political, economic and/or ethical contradictions have emerged with new convergences among art, media, software and the communication practices they afford?
• How is the rhetoric of visual images impacted (enhanced, limited, etc.) by networked media?
• What does artificial intelligence want from images? What do images want from AI? What constitutes personification in/of the media?
• In what ways do advertisers imagine consumers?
• What pasts, presents, and futures are depicted by the visualization of digital data?
• How can we reimagine the objectives of network and social media science? 
• What histories of communicology and communication ethics have yet to be written? What futures can we imagine?

The domains of the image and imagination encompass all the Arts and Sciences of expression and perception. These include, the Arts of Media: speaking, writing, painting, printing, sculpture, performance, voice; the Sciences of Media: social and media ecology, film and video, photography, screen/digital and legacy media; and Technological Media of Artificial Intelligence: ubiquitous computing, robotics, holographics and applied algorithms. Communication ethics theory, research and application corresponds with and enriches our critical understanding of each domain.