This article positions types at the center of anthropological knowledge production, considering t... more This article positions types at the center of anthropological knowledge production, considering them both from the abstract, analytical perspective of expert typologies and from the tacit, phenomenological perspective of everyday practices of typification. Proposing what an “anthropology of types,” broadly construed and across these two scales, might look like, I examine the histories and uses of types and typological thinking in anthropology, highlighting the empirical, analytical, methodological, ethical, and political questions they have raised. I then describe the phenomenological foundations of typification, how sociocultural and linguistic anthropologists have approached it, and the accompanying challenges related to translation and representation. Finally, I review ethnographies of expert practices of type production, tracing the circuit of typification–typology–type and back again to show how forms of expertise institutionalize lay knowledge in ways that further solidify the misrecognition of types as natural, and examine visual and arts-based interventions that draw attention to these processes.
American Anthropologist 120(1): 153–162.
Since 2011, the University of Cincinnati's Critical Vi... more American Anthropologist 120(1): 153–162.
Since 2011, the University of Cincinnati's Critical Visions program has brought together students from multiple fields to teach them how to combine critical theory and social analysis with art, media, and design practices. Insistent that students “write and make from day one,” the program emphasizes the inextricable relationship between form and content. As a central maxim on the certificate capstone syllabus states: “Neither the written, nor the visual components should be afterthoughts; each informs the other.” The program trains students to find associative, nonlinear ways of approaching social issues so they can ask better questions and provoke nuanced discussions through considered, form-based aesthetic choices. Framed around challenging “dominant forms of seeing,” the program aims to keep students off balance: to condition them to work in the unsteady in-between of disciplines. This essay describes the origins and development of the program and its biennial publication, CVSN, as told by the founders and directors of the program and two recent alumni. It is written in two parts. The first, traces the practical, pedagogical, and institutional concerns of establishing and running the program to demonstrate how faculty can navigate university structures to create spaces for these kinds of collaborations. The second, details the kinds of labor and practices that go into creating these publications and how this has shaped students’ thinking and future work. Throughout the essay, and in these multiple voices, we reflect on key choices we made in designing and developing the program and what it means to work in this unsteady in-between.
Visual Anthropology Review 32(2): 122–32.
From age and body measurements to the number and kinds... more Visual Anthropology Review 32(2): 122–32.
From age and body measurements to the number and kinds of models featured in advertising campaigns and runway presentations, numbers are a seemingly less subjective way of monitoring aesthetic shifts and representational imbalances in the fashion industry. Yet an ethnographic investigation of how modeling agents actually use numbers in their everyday practices reveals something different. In this essay, I situate agents’ numerical performances within their local theories of mediation to explore how agents use numbers and measurements as a discursive resource for constructing models’ bodies as particular kinds of media.
In Fashion Studies: Research Methods, Sites & Practices. (Dress, Body, Culture Series) Edited by ... more In Fashion Studies: Research Methods, Sites & Practices. (Dress, Body, Culture Series) Edited by Heike Jenß, pp. 101–16. London, Bloomsbury, 2016
In Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology. Edited by John L. Jackson, Jr. New York, Oxford, DOI: 1... more In Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology. Edited by John L. Jackson, Jr. New York, Oxford, DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780199766567-0037, 2014
In Fashioning Models: Image, Text, and Industry. Edited by Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wissing... more In Fashioning Models: Image, Text, and Industry. Edited by Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wissinger, pp. 119–33. London, Berg, 2012
In Images in Time: Flashing Forward, Backward, in Front and Behind Photography in Fashion, Advert... more In Images in Time: Flashing Forward, Backward, in Front and Behind Photography in Fashion, Advertising and the Press. Edited by Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir, Michael A. Langkjær, and Jo Turney, pp. 123–30. Bath, Wunderkammer, 2011.
In Fashion as Photograph: Viewing & Reviewing Images of Fashion. Edited by Eugenie Shinkle, pp. 1... more In Fashion as Photograph: Viewing & Reviewing Images of Fashion. Edited by Eugenie Shinkle, pp. 141–53. London, IB Tauris, 2008
Field guides are reference books you take with you. They illuminate hidden or unknown features of... more Field guides are reference books you take with you. They illuminate hidden or unknown features of the world, allowing you to identify and articulate names for unfamiliar phenomena or ephemera in situ. This, of course, is not a typical field guide. CVSN Field Guide to Color is an experimental publication from the Critical Visions program at the University of Cincinnati. Meant to provide provocations more than answers, this book functions as a way of de-familiarizing and re-familiarizing the reader’s sense of color and place.
The twelve main essays and creative projects—along with eight interstitial ones—emerged out of a semester of thinking through, with, and about color. We visited local galleries and print shops, talked to scientists who study the genetics of human pigmentation, created our own color deception studies, watched and re-watched Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” and took deep dives into the histories, connotations, and contemporary uses of significant colors in art and society. Students re-examined their daily routines, neighborhoods, and recent events they thought they knew.
As a collective, we were adamant that the book not address color in a broad or abstract way, but rather root it in local, embodied, and affective experiences. The projects reflect this, exploring how color is multisensory and moves, while at the same can be rigid, used to police boundaries, code language, and obfuscate reality.
Cincinnati has a complicated relationship to color, especially regarding race. Bordering Kentucky, it was a key stop along the Underground Railroad, yet remains one of the most racially segregated cities in America. Similarly, Ohio is neither a red state, nor a blue state. The city embodies the fractured tension between the two.
Drawing on this history and present reality, the first section, Locations, examines how color shapes the memory of a place. Working across geological and historical time, projects in this section explore local politics of greenwashing and the limits of human perception. They examine the city’s color line and how the built environment, and its colors, reinforces these boundaries. Moving from the once-toxic nature preserve on the city’s outskirts to the rapidly gentrifying downtown neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine and finally, back up to UC’s campus, the projects here offer glimpses of how color structures local history and ways of moving through this place. The interstitial projects in particular examine how paranoia and fear are refracted through color and color names.
The projects in the second section, Expectations, explore the embodiment of color and color hierarchies, highlighting the connections between color and personhood. Navigating scales of families, nations, and global brands, the projects here examine the affective and relational dimensions of color. They offer alternative frameworks for critiquing color expectations and provide examples of how to do this: from social media activism and brandalism to historical deconstructions of race and kinship. The interstitial projects in this section likewise test the limits of color categories, reimagining Carole Jackson’s iconic Color Me Beautiful for dogs and exploring the non-fashion uses of optic yellow.
The third section, Integrations, examines how colors are mixed, both literally and figuratively, across sensoria, technologies, and modes of being. They draw on aural metaphors of noise and harmony, philosophical considerations of absence and presence, and non-visual ways of interacting with color. By showing how things fit together, the projects in this section provide methods for disassembling and reconfiguring color relations. In so doing, they question the social, ethical, and political implications of these new articulations, which are also examined in the minor projects on the transnational circuits of indigo and colors of urban renewal.
The final section, Disassociations, explores the limits of color as a symbolic system. These projects deconstruct spectrum thinking, the boundary between adulthood and adolescence, and the chromatic politics of avant- garde and Blaxploitation films. Offering new ways for thinking about sex, gender, race, and age, the work in this section explores themes of creativity, subjectivity, and inversion. They and the interstitial projects here offer new juxtapositions and propositions for the reader’s relationship to color.
This is the fifth year of the Critical Visions program. In that short time we have grown tremendously, piloting a graduate track, working with new co- and associate editors, and partnering with Special Collections Press to ensure the longevity of CVSN. As we continue to explore new genres with the publication, the core of the program remains the same: to challenge dominant forms of seeing through critical theory, social analysis, and art, media, and design practice. We invite you to join us in this endeavor and to explore color in the field.
CVSN, vol.2, is produced by a group of undergraduate students at the University of Cincinnati, a... more CVSN, vol.2, is produced by a group of undergraduate students at the University of Cincinnati, all born between 1991 and 1993. We represent a microgeneration and refuse to be defined by inaccurate generalizations that criticize us as unmotivated, overindulgent, and addicted to technology. Projections figure millennials as both the dream and nightmare of the future. Through critical theory, social analysis, and creative work, our publication invites readers to rethink and subvert these and other dominant forms of seeing.
***
CVSN is published periodically by the University of Cincinnati with funding from UC Forward and the Office of the Provost and support from the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning and the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences. It is produced as part of the Critical Visions Certificate program. The Critical Visions Certificate program is a joint endeavor between faculty from the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. The goal of the cross-college undergraduate curriculum is to teach students how to effectively combine critical theory and social analysis with art, media, and design practice.
Seeking to increase students’ understanding of what is at stake in how we see, including the social and political ramifications of advertising, art, media, popular culture and science, among other dominant and subversive visual forms and visualizing practices, the program also fosters the development of new artistic, media, or design forms and practices that will intervene in dominant ways of seeing and explaining the world. It is directed by Stephanie Sadre-Orafai in the Department of Anthropology and Jordan Tate in the School of Art.
Welcome to the first issue of CVSN, an experimental publication from University of Cincinnati und... more Welcome to the first issue of CVSN, an experimental publication from University of Cincinnati undergraduate students in the Critical Visions Certificate program. As co-directors and co-instructors, we presented the inaugural cohort with a daunting mission: to collectively conceptualize and create a publication that encourages readers to challenge dominant forms of seeing through individual and collaborative projects that balance elements of critical theory, social analysis, and art, media, and design practice. The students came from diverse academic backgrounds ranging from Fine Art, Anthropology, and Art History to E-Media, Liberal Arts, and Journalism. We charged them with the task of determining the theme, audience, format, tone, and design of the publication, and gave them the freedom to carry out that vision. They worked together and with an international team—an interdisciplinary advisory board and design, editorial, and production consultants—to create this issue on the theme of "space."
We designed the course to guide the students through the process of identifying and critiquing a dominant way of seeing that built on their individualized coursework in the program. While we spent considerable time developing the curriculum (both for the capstone course and the program itself), neither of us anticipated the difficulty inherent in striking a balance that did not privilege one discipline’s method over another. The rhythms of research were different. Our forms of evidence and representation seemed incompatible. Yet, through these struggles, we grew together, both as a class and as a program.
This endeavor would not have been possible without generous funding from UC Forward and the Office of the Provost. Thanks also to the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning and McMicken College of Arts and Sciences for their support, particularly the School of Art and Department of Anthropology for allowing us to team-teach this course. Special thanks to the editorial advisory board, many of whom also participated in LOOK BETTER symposium that helped launch the program, and our dedicated design and editorial and production consultants, Manuel Bürger and John Knechtel. SS + JT
How do the ways we look at and to one another shape our experiences and identities in the world? ... more How do the ways we look at and to one another shape our experiences and identities in the world? How is power shaped through our senses and appearances, not simply reflected in them? How can activists, artists, and scholars challenge and redirect assumptions about visual evidence and perception toward socially just ends? This course is an introduction to both visual culture and ethnographic approaches to visualizing practices and forms. Encouraging deeper reflection and critical appreciation of seeing as socially situated, culturally variable, and historically specific practice, it provides a toolkit for intervening in dominant, oppressive forms of seeing. Topics include looking prohibitions; state and expert visions like police, law, and science; vernacular and family photography; identity, documentation, and surveillance; and visual activism and bearing witness.
This course is organized around enduring tensions and emerging concepts in contemporary anthropol... more This course is organized around enduring tensions and emerging concepts in contemporary anthropological theory. Working through a select list of keywords-practice and power, culture and agency; self and other; unsettling, decolonizing, and abolition; repair and refusal; affect and embodiment; the everyday and the ordinary; precarity and entanglements; scale and capital; assemblages and multispecies encounters; multimodality, publics, and infrastructures; norms and forms-we will explore the relationships between anthropological theory and methods, pedagogy, and form, including how institutions and infrastructures shape them. Our overarching course goal is to not just contextualize and historicize contemporary anthropological theory, but actively and creatively imagine its possible future trajectories.
What is it about beauty that makes it “such a likely conduit for racial—not just racist—imagining... more What is it about beauty that makes it “such a likely conduit for racial—not just racist—imaginings” (Cheng 2000: 195)? What is the relationship between processes of racialization and aestheticiziation? Is beauty only a technology for abstract equality that generates and veils material inequality, or might beauty also be a viable space for critique? This course will explore these questions through interdisciplinary readings in anthropology, sociology, history, and literary and social criticism and guided ethnographic inquiries of local aesthetic industries and practices.
The course is designed to guide students through the process of identifying and critiquing a domi... more The course is designed to guide students through the process of identifying and critiquing a dominant way of seeing that builds on their individualized coursework in critical theory, social analysis, and art, media, or design practice. Each student's project will synthesize these core elements (critical theory, social analysis, and art, media, and design practice) and function both independently as individual projects and collaboratively as part of work organized around a single theme identified by each cohort. The theme for the fourth issue of CVSN is surface—both the outer appearance of things and their emergence. Course activities will include research and discussion of project concepts, identification of a unifying group theme, individual and group critiques of the developing projects, and final execution and display of the projects in a forum that will encourage broad university engagement. This course is the required capstone for Critical Visions Certificate students.
This course is organized around enduring tensions and emerging concepts in contemporary anthropol... more This course is organized around enduring tensions and emerging concepts in contemporary anthropological theory. Working through a select list of keywords—including practice and power, culture and agency, ethnography and representation, subjectivity, performance and performativity, affect, the everyday and the ordinary, precarity, scale and capital, human, non-human, and multispecies ethnography, and public anthropology—we will explore the relationships among anthropological theory, methods, pedagogy, and form. Our goal is to not just contextualize and historicize contemporary anthropological theory but also actively and creatively imagine its possible future trajectories.
This course offers a critical analysis of race from an anthropological perspective that integrate... more This course offers a critical analysis of race from an anthropological perspective that integrates both biological and socio-cultural subfields/approaches. We will draw on a range of ethnographic case studies and scientific papers to explore topics such as the historical, social, and cultural contingency of racial categories and their consequences; the evolution and patterning of human biological variation; the use of genomic information to refute and reinforce the salience of race as a biological concept; and the enduring impact of race and racism in American culture and individuals' constructions of their identities. Seeking to move beyond social constructionist and biological determinist arguments about race, we will explore how the biological is cultural, and vice versa. Through site visits to local institutional contexts where data about race is collected (including university labs and hospitals and corporate research and development laboratories), students will observe directly how race is made real in Cincinnati. Building on a series of applied writing assignments that integrate these visits with course readings and discussions—including memos to government officials, op-eds, a job letter, and plans for science curricular reform—the seminar will culminate with students designing community engagement projects that translate their discoveries about race for local audiences.
This article positions types at the center of anthropological knowledge production, considering t... more This article positions types at the center of anthropological knowledge production, considering them both from the abstract, analytical perspective of expert typologies and from the tacit, phenomenological perspective of everyday practices of typification. Proposing what an “anthropology of types,” broadly construed and across these two scales, might look like, I examine the histories and uses of types and typological thinking in anthropology, highlighting the empirical, analytical, methodological, ethical, and political questions they have raised. I then describe the phenomenological foundations of typification, how sociocultural and linguistic anthropologists have approached it, and the accompanying challenges related to translation and representation. Finally, I review ethnographies of expert practices of type production, tracing the circuit of typification–typology–type and back again to show how forms of expertise institutionalize lay knowledge in ways that further solidify the misrecognition of types as natural, and examine visual and arts-based interventions that draw attention to these processes.
American Anthropologist 120(1): 153–162.
Since 2011, the University of Cincinnati's Critical Vi... more American Anthropologist 120(1): 153–162.
Since 2011, the University of Cincinnati's Critical Visions program has brought together students from multiple fields to teach them how to combine critical theory and social analysis with art, media, and design practices. Insistent that students “write and make from day one,” the program emphasizes the inextricable relationship between form and content. As a central maxim on the certificate capstone syllabus states: “Neither the written, nor the visual components should be afterthoughts; each informs the other.” The program trains students to find associative, nonlinear ways of approaching social issues so they can ask better questions and provoke nuanced discussions through considered, form-based aesthetic choices. Framed around challenging “dominant forms of seeing,” the program aims to keep students off balance: to condition them to work in the unsteady in-between of disciplines. This essay describes the origins and development of the program and its biennial publication, CVSN, as told by the founders and directors of the program and two recent alumni. It is written in two parts. The first, traces the practical, pedagogical, and institutional concerns of establishing and running the program to demonstrate how faculty can navigate university structures to create spaces for these kinds of collaborations. The second, details the kinds of labor and practices that go into creating these publications and how this has shaped students’ thinking and future work. Throughout the essay, and in these multiple voices, we reflect on key choices we made in designing and developing the program and what it means to work in this unsteady in-between.
Visual Anthropology Review 32(2): 122–32.
From age and body measurements to the number and kinds... more Visual Anthropology Review 32(2): 122–32.
From age and body measurements to the number and kinds of models featured in advertising campaigns and runway presentations, numbers are a seemingly less subjective way of monitoring aesthetic shifts and representational imbalances in the fashion industry. Yet an ethnographic investigation of how modeling agents actually use numbers in their everyday practices reveals something different. In this essay, I situate agents’ numerical performances within their local theories of mediation to explore how agents use numbers and measurements as a discursive resource for constructing models’ bodies as particular kinds of media.
In Fashion Studies: Research Methods, Sites & Practices. (Dress, Body, Culture Series) Edited by ... more In Fashion Studies: Research Methods, Sites & Practices. (Dress, Body, Culture Series) Edited by Heike Jenß, pp. 101–16. London, Bloomsbury, 2016
In Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology. Edited by John L. Jackson, Jr. New York, Oxford, DOI: 1... more In Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology. Edited by John L. Jackson, Jr. New York, Oxford, DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780199766567-0037, 2014
In Fashioning Models: Image, Text, and Industry. Edited by Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wissing... more In Fashioning Models: Image, Text, and Industry. Edited by Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wissinger, pp. 119–33. London, Berg, 2012
In Images in Time: Flashing Forward, Backward, in Front and Behind Photography in Fashion, Advert... more In Images in Time: Flashing Forward, Backward, in Front and Behind Photography in Fashion, Advertising and the Press. Edited by Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir, Michael A. Langkjær, and Jo Turney, pp. 123–30. Bath, Wunderkammer, 2011.
In Fashion as Photograph: Viewing & Reviewing Images of Fashion. Edited by Eugenie Shinkle, pp. 1... more In Fashion as Photograph: Viewing & Reviewing Images of Fashion. Edited by Eugenie Shinkle, pp. 141–53. London, IB Tauris, 2008
Field guides are reference books you take with you. They illuminate hidden or unknown features of... more Field guides are reference books you take with you. They illuminate hidden or unknown features of the world, allowing you to identify and articulate names for unfamiliar phenomena or ephemera in situ. This, of course, is not a typical field guide. CVSN Field Guide to Color is an experimental publication from the Critical Visions program at the University of Cincinnati. Meant to provide provocations more than answers, this book functions as a way of de-familiarizing and re-familiarizing the reader’s sense of color and place.
The twelve main essays and creative projects—along with eight interstitial ones—emerged out of a semester of thinking through, with, and about color. We visited local galleries and print shops, talked to scientists who study the genetics of human pigmentation, created our own color deception studies, watched and re-watched Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” and took deep dives into the histories, connotations, and contemporary uses of significant colors in art and society. Students re-examined their daily routines, neighborhoods, and recent events they thought they knew.
As a collective, we were adamant that the book not address color in a broad or abstract way, but rather root it in local, embodied, and affective experiences. The projects reflect this, exploring how color is multisensory and moves, while at the same can be rigid, used to police boundaries, code language, and obfuscate reality.
Cincinnati has a complicated relationship to color, especially regarding race. Bordering Kentucky, it was a key stop along the Underground Railroad, yet remains one of the most racially segregated cities in America. Similarly, Ohio is neither a red state, nor a blue state. The city embodies the fractured tension between the two.
Drawing on this history and present reality, the first section, Locations, examines how color shapes the memory of a place. Working across geological and historical time, projects in this section explore local politics of greenwashing and the limits of human perception. They examine the city’s color line and how the built environment, and its colors, reinforces these boundaries. Moving from the once-toxic nature preserve on the city’s outskirts to the rapidly gentrifying downtown neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine and finally, back up to UC’s campus, the projects here offer glimpses of how color structures local history and ways of moving through this place. The interstitial projects in particular examine how paranoia and fear are refracted through color and color names.
The projects in the second section, Expectations, explore the embodiment of color and color hierarchies, highlighting the connections between color and personhood. Navigating scales of families, nations, and global brands, the projects here examine the affective and relational dimensions of color. They offer alternative frameworks for critiquing color expectations and provide examples of how to do this: from social media activism and brandalism to historical deconstructions of race and kinship. The interstitial projects in this section likewise test the limits of color categories, reimagining Carole Jackson’s iconic Color Me Beautiful for dogs and exploring the non-fashion uses of optic yellow.
The third section, Integrations, examines how colors are mixed, both literally and figuratively, across sensoria, technologies, and modes of being. They draw on aural metaphors of noise and harmony, philosophical considerations of absence and presence, and non-visual ways of interacting with color. By showing how things fit together, the projects in this section provide methods for disassembling and reconfiguring color relations. In so doing, they question the social, ethical, and political implications of these new articulations, which are also examined in the minor projects on the transnational circuits of indigo and colors of urban renewal.
The final section, Disassociations, explores the limits of color as a symbolic system. These projects deconstruct spectrum thinking, the boundary between adulthood and adolescence, and the chromatic politics of avant- garde and Blaxploitation films. Offering new ways for thinking about sex, gender, race, and age, the work in this section explores themes of creativity, subjectivity, and inversion. They and the interstitial projects here offer new juxtapositions and propositions for the reader’s relationship to color.
This is the fifth year of the Critical Visions program. In that short time we have grown tremendously, piloting a graduate track, working with new co- and associate editors, and partnering with Special Collections Press to ensure the longevity of CVSN. As we continue to explore new genres with the publication, the core of the program remains the same: to challenge dominant forms of seeing through critical theory, social analysis, and art, media, and design practice. We invite you to join us in this endeavor and to explore color in the field.
CVSN, vol.2, is produced by a group of undergraduate students at the University of Cincinnati, a... more CVSN, vol.2, is produced by a group of undergraduate students at the University of Cincinnati, all born between 1991 and 1993. We represent a microgeneration and refuse to be defined by inaccurate generalizations that criticize us as unmotivated, overindulgent, and addicted to technology. Projections figure millennials as both the dream and nightmare of the future. Through critical theory, social analysis, and creative work, our publication invites readers to rethink and subvert these and other dominant forms of seeing.
***
CVSN is published periodically by the University of Cincinnati with funding from UC Forward and the Office of the Provost and support from the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning and the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences. It is produced as part of the Critical Visions Certificate program. The Critical Visions Certificate program is a joint endeavor between faculty from the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. The goal of the cross-college undergraduate curriculum is to teach students how to effectively combine critical theory and social analysis with art, media, and design practice.
Seeking to increase students’ understanding of what is at stake in how we see, including the social and political ramifications of advertising, art, media, popular culture and science, among other dominant and subversive visual forms and visualizing practices, the program also fosters the development of new artistic, media, or design forms and practices that will intervene in dominant ways of seeing and explaining the world. It is directed by Stephanie Sadre-Orafai in the Department of Anthropology and Jordan Tate in the School of Art.
Welcome to the first issue of CVSN, an experimental publication from University of Cincinnati und... more Welcome to the first issue of CVSN, an experimental publication from University of Cincinnati undergraduate students in the Critical Visions Certificate program. As co-directors and co-instructors, we presented the inaugural cohort with a daunting mission: to collectively conceptualize and create a publication that encourages readers to challenge dominant forms of seeing through individual and collaborative projects that balance elements of critical theory, social analysis, and art, media, and design practice. The students came from diverse academic backgrounds ranging from Fine Art, Anthropology, and Art History to E-Media, Liberal Arts, and Journalism. We charged them with the task of determining the theme, audience, format, tone, and design of the publication, and gave them the freedom to carry out that vision. They worked together and with an international team—an interdisciplinary advisory board and design, editorial, and production consultants—to create this issue on the theme of "space."
We designed the course to guide the students through the process of identifying and critiquing a dominant way of seeing that built on their individualized coursework in the program. While we spent considerable time developing the curriculum (both for the capstone course and the program itself), neither of us anticipated the difficulty inherent in striking a balance that did not privilege one discipline’s method over another. The rhythms of research were different. Our forms of evidence and representation seemed incompatible. Yet, through these struggles, we grew together, both as a class and as a program.
This endeavor would not have been possible without generous funding from UC Forward and the Office of the Provost. Thanks also to the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning and McMicken College of Arts and Sciences for their support, particularly the School of Art and Department of Anthropology for allowing us to team-teach this course. Special thanks to the editorial advisory board, many of whom also participated in LOOK BETTER symposium that helped launch the program, and our dedicated design and editorial and production consultants, Manuel Bürger and John Knechtel. SS + JT
How do the ways we look at and to one another shape our experiences and identities in the world? ... more How do the ways we look at and to one another shape our experiences and identities in the world? How is power shaped through our senses and appearances, not simply reflected in them? How can activists, artists, and scholars challenge and redirect assumptions about visual evidence and perception toward socially just ends? This course is an introduction to both visual culture and ethnographic approaches to visualizing practices and forms. Encouraging deeper reflection and critical appreciation of seeing as socially situated, culturally variable, and historically specific practice, it provides a toolkit for intervening in dominant, oppressive forms of seeing. Topics include looking prohibitions; state and expert visions like police, law, and science; vernacular and family photography; identity, documentation, and surveillance; and visual activism and bearing witness.
This course is organized around enduring tensions and emerging concepts in contemporary anthropol... more This course is organized around enduring tensions and emerging concepts in contemporary anthropological theory. Working through a select list of keywords-practice and power, culture and agency; self and other; unsettling, decolonizing, and abolition; repair and refusal; affect and embodiment; the everyday and the ordinary; precarity and entanglements; scale and capital; assemblages and multispecies encounters; multimodality, publics, and infrastructures; norms and forms-we will explore the relationships between anthropological theory and methods, pedagogy, and form, including how institutions and infrastructures shape them. Our overarching course goal is to not just contextualize and historicize contemporary anthropological theory, but actively and creatively imagine its possible future trajectories.
What is it about beauty that makes it “such a likely conduit for racial—not just racist—imagining... more What is it about beauty that makes it “such a likely conduit for racial—not just racist—imaginings” (Cheng 2000: 195)? What is the relationship between processes of racialization and aestheticiziation? Is beauty only a technology for abstract equality that generates and veils material inequality, or might beauty also be a viable space for critique? This course will explore these questions through interdisciplinary readings in anthropology, sociology, history, and literary and social criticism and guided ethnographic inquiries of local aesthetic industries and practices.
The course is designed to guide students through the process of identifying and critiquing a domi... more The course is designed to guide students through the process of identifying and critiquing a dominant way of seeing that builds on their individualized coursework in critical theory, social analysis, and art, media, or design practice. Each student's project will synthesize these core elements (critical theory, social analysis, and art, media, and design practice) and function both independently as individual projects and collaboratively as part of work organized around a single theme identified by each cohort. The theme for the fourth issue of CVSN is surface—both the outer appearance of things and their emergence. Course activities will include research and discussion of project concepts, identification of a unifying group theme, individual and group critiques of the developing projects, and final execution and display of the projects in a forum that will encourage broad university engagement. This course is the required capstone for Critical Visions Certificate students.
This course is organized around enduring tensions and emerging concepts in contemporary anthropol... more This course is organized around enduring tensions and emerging concepts in contemporary anthropological theory. Working through a select list of keywords—including practice and power, culture and agency, ethnography and representation, subjectivity, performance and performativity, affect, the everyday and the ordinary, precarity, scale and capital, human, non-human, and multispecies ethnography, and public anthropology—we will explore the relationships among anthropological theory, methods, pedagogy, and form. Our goal is to not just contextualize and historicize contemporary anthropological theory but also actively and creatively imagine its possible future trajectories.
This course offers a critical analysis of race from an anthropological perspective that integrate... more This course offers a critical analysis of race from an anthropological perspective that integrates both biological and socio-cultural subfields/approaches. We will draw on a range of ethnographic case studies and scientific papers to explore topics such as the historical, social, and cultural contingency of racial categories and their consequences; the evolution and patterning of human biological variation; the use of genomic information to refute and reinforce the salience of race as a biological concept; and the enduring impact of race and racism in American culture and individuals' constructions of their identities. Seeking to move beyond social constructionist and biological determinist arguments about race, we will explore how the biological is cultural, and vice versa. Through site visits to local institutional contexts where data about race is collected (including university labs and hospitals and corporate research and development laboratories), students will observe directly how race is made real in Cincinnati. Building on a series of applied writing assignments that integrate these visits with course readings and discussions—including memos to government officials, op-eds, a job letter, and plans for science curricular reform—the seminar will culminate with students designing community engagement projects that translate their discoveries about race for local audiences.
The course is designed to guide students through the process of identifying and critiquing a domi... more The course is designed to guide students through the process of identifying and critiquing a dominant way of seeing that builds on their individualized coursework in critical theory, social analysis, and art, media, or design practice. Each student's project will synthesize these core elements (critical theory, social analysis, and art, media, or design practice) and function both independently as individual projects and collaboratively as part of work organized around a single theme identified by each cohort. Course activities will include research and discussion of project concepts, identification of a unifying group theme, individual and group critiques of the developing projects, and final execution and display of the projects in a forum that will encourage broad university engagement. This course is the required capstone for Critical Visions Certificate students.
Using hipsters as a case study, this course introduces students to anthropological approaches to ... more Using hipsters as a case study, this course introduces students to anthropological approaches to studying cultural groups. Drawing on methods used by both cultural anthropologists and archaeologists to study and define cultural groups—technologies, material culture, shared practices—this course asks what happens when a group rejects a category of identification. Drawing on both popular and scholarly examples, students will engage with multiple methodological approaches to studying identity groups, considering the different interpretations that result from disparate data sets. Topics will include irony and individuality; taste, class, and cool; fashion and cultural appropriation; music and media; technology, early adopters, and remediation; race and gentrification; and the globalization of the hipster phenomenon.
This is a crowd-sourced (i.e. developed by a number of people) syllabus created by faculty at the... more This is a crowd-sourced (i.e. developed by a number of people) syllabus created by faculty at the University of Cincinnati who stand in solidarity with #theIRATE8 (www.theirate8.com). #TheIRATE8 are a group of University of Cincinnati students challenging institutionalized racism at the university.
Please use this syllabus however you'd like to engage your classes in a critical analysis of race, racism, white supremacy, power asymmetries and the development of methods of challenging oppression.
An ethnographic approach to a range of visualizing practices and forms, emphasizing seeing as a s... more An ethnographic approach to a range of visualizing practices and forms, emphasizing seeing as a socially situated, culturally variable, and historically specific practice. Topics include image, imagination, and power; visual economies; expert-visions; moral and social implications of forms of seeing; the intersection of visual, material, discursive and embodied practices. (3 credits, SE)
The course is designed to guide students through the process of identifying and critiquing a domi... more The course is designed to guide students through the process of identifying and critiquing a dominant way of seeing that builds on their individualized coursework in critical theory, social analysis, and art, media, or design practice. Each student's project will synthesize these core elements (critical theory, social analysis, and art, media, or design practice) and function both independently as individual projects and collaboratively as part of work organized around a single theme identified by each cohort. Course activities will include research and discussion of project concepts, identification of a unifying group theme, individual and group critiques of the developing projects, and final execution and display of the projects in a forum that will encourage broad university engagement. This course is the required capstone for Critical Visions Certificate students.
The course is designed to guide students through the process of identifying and critiquing a domi... more The course is designed to guide students through the process of identifying and critiquing a dominant way of seeing that builds on their individualized coursework in critical theory, social analysis, and art, media, or design practice. Each student's project will synthesize these core elements (critical theory, social analysis, and art, media, or design practice) and function both independently as individual projects and collaboratively as part of work organized around a single theme identified by each cohort. Course activities will include research and discussion of project concepts, identification of a unifying group theme, individual and group critiques of the developing projects, and final execution and display of the projects in a forum that will encourage broad university engagement. This course is the required capstone for Critical Visions Certificate students.
LETStudio seminar held on October 28-29, 2014 at the University of Gothenburg and co-organized wi... more LETStudio seminar held on October 28-29, 2014 at the University of Gothenburg and co-organized with Stephanie Sadre-Orafai
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Since 2011, the University of Cincinnati's Critical Visions program has brought together students from multiple fields to teach them how to combine critical theory and social analysis with art, media, and design practices. Insistent that students “write and make from day one,” the program emphasizes the inextricable relationship between form and content. As a central maxim on the certificate capstone syllabus states: “Neither the written, nor the visual components should be afterthoughts; each informs the other.” The program trains students to find associative, nonlinear ways of approaching social issues so they can ask better questions and provoke nuanced discussions through considered, form-based aesthetic choices. Framed around challenging “dominant forms of seeing,” the program aims to keep students off balance: to condition them to work in the unsteady in-between of disciplines. This essay describes the origins and development of the program and its biennial publication, CVSN, as told by the founders and directors of the program and two recent alumni. It is written in two parts. The first, traces the practical, pedagogical, and institutional concerns of establishing and running the program to demonstrate how faculty can navigate university structures to create spaces for these kinds of collaborations. The second, details the kinds of labor and practices that go into creating these publications and how this has shaped students’ thinking and future work. Throughout the essay, and in these multiple voices, we reflect on key choices we made in designing and developing the program and what it means to work in this unsteady in-between.
From age and body measurements to the number and kinds of models featured in advertising campaigns and runway presentations, numbers are a seemingly less subjective way of monitoring aesthetic shifts and representational imbalances in the fashion industry. Yet an ethnographic investigation of how modeling agents actually use numbers in their everyday practices reveals something different. In this essay, I situate agents’ numerical performances within their local theories of mediation to explore how agents use numbers and measurements as a discursive resource for constructing models’ bodies as particular kinds of media.
The twelve main essays and creative projects—along with eight interstitial ones—emerged out of a semester of thinking through, with, and about color. We visited local galleries and print shops, talked to scientists who study the genetics of human pigmentation, created our own color deception studies, watched and re-watched Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” and took deep dives into the histories, connotations, and contemporary uses of significant colors in art and society. Students re-examined their daily routines, neighborhoods, and recent events they thought they knew.
As a collective, we were adamant that the book not address color in a broad or abstract way, but rather root it in local, embodied, and affective experiences. The projects reflect this, exploring how color is multisensory and moves, while at the same can be rigid, used to police boundaries, code language, and obfuscate reality.
Cincinnati has a complicated relationship to color, especially regarding race. Bordering Kentucky, it was a key stop along the Underground Railroad, yet remains one of the most racially segregated cities in America. Similarly, Ohio is neither a red state, nor a blue state. The city embodies the fractured tension between the two.
Drawing on this history and present reality, the first section, Locations, examines how color shapes the memory of a place. Working across geological and historical time, projects in this section explore local politics of greenwashing and the limits of human perception. They examine the city’s color line and how the built environment, and its colors, reinforces these boundaries. Moving from the once-toxic nature preserve on the city’s outskirts to the rapidly gentrifying downtown neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine and finally, back up to UC’s campus, the projects here offer glimpses of how color structures local history and ways of moving through this place. The interstitial projects in particular examine how paranoia and fear are refracted through color and color names.
The projects in the second section, Expectations, explore the embodiment of color and color hierarchies, highlighting the connections between color and personhood. Navigating scales of families, nations, and global brands, the projects here examine the affective and relational dimensions of color. They offer alternative frameworks for critiquing color expectations and provide examples of how to do this: from social media activism and brandalism to historical deconstructions of race and kinship. The interstitial projects in this section likewise test the limits of color categories, reimagining Carole Jackson’s iconic Color Me Beautiful for dogs and exploring the non-fashion uses of optic yellow.
The third section, Integrations, examines how colors are mixed, both literally and figuratively, across sensoria, technologies, and modes of being. They draw on aural metaphors of noise and harmony, philosophical considerations of absence and presence, and non-visual ways of interacting with color. By showing how things fit together, the projects in this section provide methods for disassembling and reconfiguring color relations. In so doing, they question the social, ethical, and political implications of these new articulations, which are also examined in the minor projects on the transnational circuits of indigo and colors of urban renewal.
The final section, Disassociations, explores the limits of color as a symbolic system. These projects deconstruct spectrum thinking, the boundary between adulthood and adolescence, and the chromatic politics of avant- garde and Blaxploitation films. Offering new ways for thinking about sex, gender, race, and age, the work in this section explores themes of creativity, subjectivity, and inversion. They and the interstitial projects here offer new juxtapositions and propositions for the reader’s relationship to color.
This is the fifth year of the Critical Visions program. In that short time we have grown tremendously, piloting a graduate track, working with new co- and associate editors, and partnering with Special Collections Press to ensure the longevity of CVSN. As we continue to explore new genres with the publication, the core of the program remains the same: to challenge dominant forms of seeing through critical theory, social analysis, and art, media, and design practice. We invite you to join us in this endeavor and to explore color in the field.
***
CVSN is published periodically by the University of Cincinnati with funding from UC Forward and the Office of the Provost and support from the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning and the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences. It is produced as part of the Critical Visions Certificate program. The Critical Visions Certificate program is a joint endeavor between faculty from the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. The goal of the cross-college undergraduate curriculum is to teach students how to effectively combine critical theory and social analysis with art, media, and design practice.
Seeking to increase students’ understanding of what is at stake in how we see, including the social and political ramifications of advertising, art, media, popular culture and science, among other dominant and subversive visual forms and visualizing practices, the program also fosters the development of new artistic, media, or design forms and practices that will intervene in dominant ways of seeing and explaining the world. It is directed by Stephanie Sadre-Orafai in the Department of Anthropology and Jordan Tate in the School of Art.
We designed the course to guide the students through the process of identifying and critiquing a dominant way of seeing that built on their individualized coursework in the program. While we spent considerable time developing the curriculum (both for the capstone course and the program itself), neither of us anticipated the difficulty inherent in striking a balance that did not privilege one discipline’s method over another. The rhythms of research were different. Our forms of evidence and representation seemed incompatible. Yet, through these struggles, we grew together, both as a class and as a program.
This endeavor would not have been possible without generous funding from UC Forward and the Office of the Provost. Thanks also to the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning and McMicken College of Arts and Sciences for their support, particularly the School of Art and Department of Anthropology for allowing us to team-teach this course. Special thanks to the editorial advisory board, many of whom also participated in LOOK BETTER symposium that helped launch the program, and our dedicated design and editorial and production consultants, Manuel Bürger and John Knechtel. SS + JT
Since 2011, the University of Cincinnati's Critical Visions program has brought together students from multiple fields to teach them how to combine critical theory and social analysis with art, media, and design practices. Insistent that students “write and make from day one,” the program emphasizes the inextricable relationship between form and content. As a central maxim on the certificate capstone syllabus states: “Neither the written, nor the visual components should be afterthoughts; each informs the other.” The program trains students to find associative, nonlinear ways of approaching social issues so they can ask better questions and provoke nuanced discussions through considered, form-based aesthetic choices. Framed around challenging “dominant forms of seeing,” the program aims to keep students off balance: to condition them to work in the unsteady in-between of disciplines. This essay describes the origins and development of the program and its biennial publication, CVSN, as told by the founders and directors of the program and two recent alumni. It is written in two parts. The first, traces the practical, pedagogical, and institutional concerns of establishing and running the program to demonstrate how faculty can navigate university structures to create spaces for these kinds of collaborations. The second, details the kinds of labor and practices that go into creating these publications and how this has shaped students’ thinking and future work. Throughout the essay, and in these multiple voices, we reflect on key choices we made in designing and developing the program and what it means to work in this unsteady in-between.
From age and body measurements to the number and kinds of models featured in advertising campaigns and runway presentations, numbers are a seemingly less subjective way of monitoring aesthetic shifts and representational imbalances in the fashion industry. Yet an ethnographic investigation of how modeling agents actually use numbers in their everyday practices reveals something different. In this essay, I situate agents’ numerical performances within their local theories of mediation to explore how agents use numbers and measurements as a discursive resource for constructing models’ bodies as particular kinds of media.
The twelve main essays and creative projects—along with eight interstitial ones—emerged out of a semester of thinking through, with, and about color. We visited local galleries and print shops, talked to scientists who study the genetics of human pigmentation, created our own color deception studies, watched and re-watched Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” and took deep dives into the histories, connotations, and contemporary uses of significant colors in art and society. Students re-examined their daily routines, neighborhoods, and recent events they thought they knew.
As a collective, we were adamant that the book not address color in a broad or abstract way, but rather root it in local, embodied, and affective experiences. The projects reflect this, exploring how color is multisensory and moves, while at the same can be rigid, used to police boundaries, code language, and obfuscate reality.
Cincinnati has a complicated relationship to color, especially regarding race. Bordering Kentucky, it was a key stop along the Underground Railroad, yet remains one of the most racially segregated cities in America. Similarly, Ohio is neither a red state, nor a blue state. The city embodies the fractured tension between the two.
Drawing on this history and present reality, the first section, Locations, examines how color shapes the memory of a place. Working across geological and historical time, projects in this section explore local politics of greenwashing and the limits of human perception. They examine the city’s color line and how the built environment, and its colors, reinforces these boundaries. Moving from the once-toxic nature preserve on the city’s outskirts to the rapidly gentrifying downtown neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine and finally, back up to UC’s campus, the projects here offer glimpses of how color structures local history and ways of moving through this place. The interstitial projects in particular examine how paranoia and fear are refracted through color and color names.
The projects in the second section, Expectations, explore the embodiment of color and color hierarchies, highlighting the connections between color and personhood. Navigating scales of families, nations, and global brands, the projects here examine the affective and relational dimensions of color. They offer alternative frameworks for critiquing color expectations and provide examples of how to do this: from social media activism and brandalism to historical deconstructions of race and kinship. The interstitial projects in this section likewise test the limits of color categories, reimagining Carole Jackson’s iconic Color Me Beautiful for dogs and exploring the non-fashion uses of optic yellow.
The third section, Integrations, examines how colors are mixed, both literally and figuratively, across sensoria, technologies, and modes of being. They draw on aural metaphors of noise and harmony, philosophical considerations of absence and presence, and non-visual ways of interacting with color. By showing how things fit together, the projects in this section provide methods for disassembling and reconfiguring color relations. In so doing, they question the social, ethical, and political implications of these new articulations, which are also examined in the minor projects on the transnational circuits of indigo and colors of urban renewal.
The final section, Disassociations, explores the limits of color as a symbolic system. These projects deconstruct spectrum thinking, the boundary between adulthood and adolescence, and the chromatic politics of avant- garde and Blaxploitation films. Offering new ways for thinking about sex, gender, race, and age, the work in this section explores themes of creativity, subjectivity, and inversion. They and the interstitial projects here offer new juxtapositions and propositions for the reader’s relationship to color.
This is the fifth year of the Critical Visions program. In that short time we have grown tremendously, piloting a graduate track, working with new co- and associate editors, and partnering with Special Collections Press to ensure the longevity of CVSN. As we continue to explore new genres with the publication, the core of the program remains the same: to challenge dominant forms of seeing through critical theory, social analysis, and art, media, and design practice. We invite you to join us in this endeavor and to explore color in the field.
***
CVSN is published periodically by the University of Cincinnati with funding from UC Forward and the Office of the Provost and support from the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning and the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences. It is produced as part of the Critical Visions Certificate program. The Critical Visions Certificate program is a joint endeavor between faculty from the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. The goal of the cross-college undergraduate curriculum is to teach students how to effectively combine critical theory and social analysis with art, media, and design practice.
Seeking to increase students’ understanding of what is at stake in how we see, including the social and political ramifications of advertising, art, media, popular culture and science, among other dominant and subversive visual forms and visualizing practices, the program also fosters the development of new artistic, media, or design forms and practices that will intervene in dominant ways of seeing and explaining the world. It is directed by Stephanie Sadre-Orafai in the Department of Anthropology and Jordan Tate in the School of Art.
We designed the course to guide the students through the process of identifying and critiquing a dominant way of seeing that built on their individualized coursework in the program. While we spent considerable time developing the curriculum (both for the capstone course and the program itself), neither of us anticipated the difficulty inherent in striking a balance that did not privilege one discipline’s method over another. The rhythms of research were different. Our forms of evidence and representation seemed incompatible. Yet, through these struggles, we grew together, both as a class and as a program.
This endeavor would not have been possible without generous funding from UC Forward and the Office of the Provost. Thanks also to the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning and McMicken College of Arts and Sciences for their support, particularly the School of Art and Department of Anthropology for allowing us to team-teach this course. Special thanks to the editorial advisory board, many of whom also participated in LOOK BETTER symposium that helped launch the program, and our dedicated design and editorial and production consultants, Manuel Bürger and John Knechtel. SS + JT
Please use this syllabus however you'd like to engage your classes in a critical analysis of race, racism, white supremacy, power asymmetries and the development of methods of challenging oppression.