Visual Sociology

The paper investigates the ethics of information transparency (henceforth transparency). It argues that transparency is not an ethical principle in itself but a pro-ethical condition for enabling or impairing other ethical practices or principles. A new definition of transparency is offered in order to take into account the dynamics of information production and the differences between data and information. It is then argued that the proposed definition provides a better understanding of what sort of information should be disclosed and what sort of information should be used in order to implement and make effective the ethical practices and principles to which an organisation is committed. The concepts of ''heterogeneous organisation'' and ''autonomous computational artefact'' are further defined in order to clarify the ethical implications of the technology used in implementing information transparency. It is argued that explicit ethical designs, which describe how ethical principles are embedded into the practice of software design, would represent valuable information that could be disclosed by organisations in order to support their ethical standing.

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...

The paper focuses on the football Ultras and their involvement
in the stadium as a social situation and contextual environment
from a sociolinguistical point of view. The tribes of the Ultras differ one from the other and the study focus on the Fiorentina Ultras as it is a very big community of football followers with an historical role in the Ultras phenomenon and also because the team has often been penalized by referees’ decisions.
Among the different means of communication and the many
ways of conceiving the Ultras Viola identity, the study focuses
on the analysis of the Fiorentina Ultras’ banners exposed in the
stadiums. The banners are, together with the choruses, the foremost mean adopted by the Ultras to communicate and they can be seen as a sort of crystallization of the Ultras’ messages. The
sample of banners analysed in the present study is made of 114
banners exposed by the Fiorentina Ultras from the season
2004/2005 to the present. The media has launched the concept
of a viola style (from club's taditional violet colour) that combines
passion for football and fair play: what does this style
consist in? A sociolinguistical analysis of the banners, both at
the Artemio Franchi stadium in Florence and in other stadiums,
allows us to identify the styles of communication and the different
ways of expression as well as the constitutional dynamics of
the Fiorentina Ultras’ identity.
The present study on this subgroup of Ultras applies it’s results
into the foremost theoretical contributions (sociology, sociolinguistics, sociosemiotics, etc.). The study aims also to open
up to a new research perspective (the analysis of the Ultras selfrepresentation) that could be implemented by investigating other Ultras groups, to study other communication means and to
conceive a comparative analysis of different Ultras communities.

Die im Dezember 2011 stattgefundene Tagung zu selbigem Thema ist organisiert worden, um eine Lücke in der aktuellen bildwissenschaftlichen Forschung zu schließen, wenngleich es eine Lücke sein mag, der sich die Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler, die sich explizit mit dem Phänomen des Bildes beschäftigen, kaum bewusst sein mögen. Der vorliegende Tagungsband fokussiert daher die zahlreichen Dimensionen des filmischen Bewegungsbildes in Orientierung an bildwissenschaftlichen Fragestellungen. Dies ist als dringendes Forschungsdesiderat zu sehen, da im aktuellen Diskurs der bildwissenschaftlichen Forschung vor allem das statische Bild im Zentrum des Interesses steht, während dem Bewegtbild bzw. dem Film bisher nur wenig Aufmerksamkeit zugekommen ist. Dies blieb – wenn auch nur im Ansatz explizit bildtheoretisch – den Medien- bzw. Filmwissenschaften vorbehalten.

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.

Dopo quasi dieci anni di attività, dodici opere visuali e un manifesto politico, il Laboratorio di Sociologia Visuale dell'Università di Genova torna a riflettere criticamente sulle proprie pratiche di ricerca, attraverso la ricostruzione del filo narrativo delle sue produzioni visuali.