Vicki Gagiano

BIOGRAPHY

Vicki Gagiano is a Visual Arts educator, interdisciplinary researcher, and creative practitioner with professional experience across IB MYP and DP programmes. She holds an MA in English and an Honours degree in Visual Arts, PGCE in English and Visual Arts didactics, and currently teaches at SEK International School Qatar in Doha. Her work sits at the intersection of visual culture, education, and critical theory, with a strong focus on care, power, and representation in contemporary cultural systems. Gagiano’s research interests extend across film studies, visual arts practice, pedagogy, and cultural analysis, with an emphasis on practice-based and interdisciplinary methodologies.

RESEARCH

Gagiano’s doctoral research explores what she terms the “dark economy of care”, thus the ways in which care is mobilised, aestheticised, and instrumentalised within systems of power, legitimacy, and extraction. Drawing on film, visual culture, and contemporary cultural texts, the research examines how narratives of protection, sacrifice, and responsibility are used to justify control, discipline, and inequality, particularly within gendered and colonial frameworks.

The study engages with cinematic optics, visual aesthetics, and narrative structures to analyse how care operates not as a purely ethical force, but as an infrastructural mechanism that can both sustain and constrain subjects. Methodologically, the research combines critical theory with visual analysis and includes a practice-based component, positioning creative practice as a form of scholarly inquiry.

The project contributes to interdisciplinary debates across visual studies, film theory, cultural studies, and education, offering new conceptual tools for understanding how care functions within contemporary social, political, and cultural systems.