Hardwick Weston teaches philosophy and human rights at Bard College in upstate New York, where he directs the program in gender and sexuality studies. Based in Ramallah from 2009 to 2011, Hardwick Weston helped establish the Al-Quds-Bard Honors College in Abu Dis, Palestine, where he taught and served as academic dean. While living in Palestine, he began to explore alternative, image-based approaches to social analysis, applying scholarly research methods to the systematic tracking and documentation of socially mediated images representing daily life under Israeli occupation. Over the past decade he has assembled an extensive digital archive that organizes tens of thousands of images collected from the profiles of thousands of Facebook users in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, and catalogues them according to distinct cultural patterns that recur with regularity across digitally mediated social networks. these expanding archives supply images for ongoing experiments with “visual criticism,” a form He explores in response to Walter Benjamin’s call for Bilderkritik—criticism not of, but through images. Adapting Benjamin’s experiments with montage as method for producing history and social critique, Hardwick Weston’s projects seek to document, analyze, and represent complex social and political realities through the juxtaposition of images. These projects endeavor to reveal how image-based criticism can illuminate aspects of social reality and culture that have proven resistant to conventional methods of sociology, ethnography, or cultural analysis. To this end, his work redeploys analog techniques of photo-montage pioneered during the historical avantgarde by artist-critics like John Heartfield and Hannah Höch, who recognized in montage as political weapon and developed the form into an extremely effective instrument of social critique.