Visual Sociology

Las lógicas del cuidado infantil. Entre las familias, el Estado y el mercado, edited by Valeria Esquivel, Eleonor Faur, and Elizabeth Jelin. Buenos Aires: Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social - IDES; Fondo de Población de las Naciones Unidas - UNFPA; Fondo de Naciones Unidas para la Infancia – UNICEF, 2012. This book’s main premise is that care is crucial to well-being. As such, the study of care as a dimension of development and welfare needs no justification. Rather, what is needed are studies that reveal the ways in which care is provided, as well as the deficits and the spaces where public interventions are required in order to ensure well-being, social equity, and human development. In turn, the logics of care respond to social and cultural patterns of relations between genders and between social classes. It is in this latter sense that the ways in which societies faces the provision of childcare has significant implications for the achievement of gender equality, by enab...

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.