"We live in a world flooded with ever more data and images-which are increasingly not pictures, but data images. Practices of Looking is devoted to introducing a critical understanding and interpretation of the codes, meanings, rights, and limits that make images and looking practices matter so much in our encounters in the world. Looking can be restricted and controlled-it can be used to manipulate ideas and beliefs, but it can also be used to affirm one's own subjectivity in the face of a political system that controls and regulates looking and the flow or restriction of images and data. In all of these senses, looking is implicated in the dynamics of power, though never in straightforward or simple ways. This book aims to provide an understanding of the specificity of looking as a social practice, and to introduce a range of approaches to interpreting different modes of visuality and the place of images in systems of social and geopolitical power in which looking matters. We hope that readers will use this book to approach making images and studying the ways in which visual images and visuality are negotiated in an array of frameworks: in art history and art practice, in architecture, design, and design studies, in work with communication and information systems, in journalism and social media, in advocacy and activism-and in everyday making, doing, and living. Practices of Looking supports the development of critical skills that inform your negotiation of life in a world where looking, images, and imaging practices are highly regulated and commodified. Looking and images make a difference, from your everyday life at home, in public, and at work to your hopes and dreams. The chapters in this book seek dialogue with you in a world where visuality comes into play in almost every domain, whether you are a maker of visual things and visual tools, an interpreter and analyst of the visual world, someone who works in a field where visuality and images routinely come into play, or someone who is simply curious about the roles that looking plays in a world rife with screens, devices, images, and displays. We engage with the visual in all of these ways. This book is designed to invite you to think in critical ways about how our engagement with images, appearances, and looking practices unfolds in a world that is increasingly made, or constituted, through visual forms of mediation. We introduce reflexive, meta, insightful, and analytic approaches that enrich and deepen our lives with meaning and insight, and open us up to changing how we think. We invite you to find pleasure in thinking about something so profoundly pervasive as looking and imaging practices"--