Social Links (Asynchronous Session)
The Latinx Gaze: Considering the Possibilities and Limitations of Latinidad as a Gaze and Seeing Beyond the Gaze View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mayra Cano
In an interview with The Advocate, Showrunner of Vida, Tanya Saracho claimed her show enacts a Latinx gaze. However, the use of this phrase evades the complexities and heterogeneous nature of Latinidad. While Saracho does not define the phrase, her comment questions the possibility of enacting a gaze that represents and embodies Latinidad. If a Latinx gaze is possible, it’s important to consider the implications of the gaze as it relates to power, visibility, affectivity, and the futurities implied in our continued investment in Latinidad. This project considers how Latinidad is molded into a gaze and defines Latinx manifestations of gender, sexuality, and race. Moreover, my work seeks to interrogate the idea of Latinidad itself by examining how Latinidad is constructed and becomes legible to U.S. Latinx and an international audience. Lastly, my work moves towards alternatives to the gaze by proposing new ways of seeing/being that exist beyond a settler-colonial imaginary.
Multi-modal Collaboration around Portrait Photography View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sara Dorow
Photography speaks its own language, while also conversing intertextually with oral and written stories, embodied and material relations, and everyday soundscapes. In this paper, we use our experience in a photographer-sociologist collaboration to reflect on the fruitful and sometimes challenging dynamic between 'the image on its own terms' and the image as 'just one' kind of text among many. Our project builds from Workspace Canada, Martin Weinhold’s singular collection of documentary photographs of more than 600 Canadians at work, created over the space of fifteen years. Weinhold uses analog black-and-white photography to create portraits of working people with attention to iconic gestures, material spaces, and environmental setting. Through our collaboration, called Work-Life in Canada, we are returning to dozens of his original participants to collect a second set of portraits along with oral interviews and recordings of workplace sounds. Our goal is to create an interactive multimedia collection that explores the meaning of work among diverse working people—from ranchers and machinists to musicians and physical therapists. In this paper, we reflect on the process of 'building out' from the image and of creating a methodological dialogue among visual, written, and audio modes of capturing and conveying work-life in Canada. We address our process of working in distinct-yet-dialogic modes, deploying sound and word in dialogue with ‘old’ and ‘new’ portraits, and imagining a multimedia digital extension of an existing photo collection.
Performing Offense : Redrawing the Lines of Political Cartoons View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Snehal P Sanathanan, Vinod Balakrishnan
Offense lurks behind the political cartoon like its shadow capable of creating mixed reactions in the target. Cartoonists are perceived as sometimes adopting a cavalier attitude and, at other times, choosing to be cautious. As a result, cartoons cause intentional and unintentional offense, respectively. This paper examines the performance of intentional and inadvertent offense, as well as the aspects of the political cartoon that facilitate offense giving, before arriving at its central argument that there must be an earnest attempt at delimitation of offense giving. In order to emphasize this ethical turn, the authors perform a delimitation exercise by experimenting with five selected controversial cartoons.
Syntropia - from Simplicity to Complexity in the Amazon View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Celia Kinuko Matsunaga Higawa, Clara Maria Ortolani Smith
In this paper we present the project developed in the Scientific Initiation Program PIBIC/CNPq at the University of Brasília, Brazil. During the research, we sought to understand the vision of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon toward non-human beings and how the harmonious coexistence between them is built. The investigation emerged from the concept of syntropia, disseminated by the farmer and researcher Ernst Götsch, and from the definition of sympoiesis, defended by the ecofeminist Donna Haraway. Indigenous cosmological perspectives were analyzed from two ethnographic focuses: that of the Yanomami, who live in northwest Brazil, and the Munduruku community, in the Lower Tapajós River. The reflection made was based on the available literature that elucidated indigenous understandings about non-human beings, from rivers and forests to animals and shamanic deities.
A Tinkered Democracy: New Modes of Visual Politics and DIY Citizenship in South Korea View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Minhyoung Kim
Due to our hybridized media lives and civic engagement, today’s general public more often represent their social and political identities and visions in a language borne directly from popular culture and through mechanisms and practices of fandom, that is an emerging space where people are both implicitly and explicitly working through historical experiences and social diversity. This study explores under-theorized perceptions of widespread cultural engagement by fans often entering civic discourse as the most active segment of the media audience. Also examined is the new relationship between fan activism and participatory politics, which cultivate a particular mode of maker identities and enable emergent forms of fan-based cultural production. As preliminary research, this study selects visual performativity as a core concept of participatory politics, focusing on internet memes and do-it-yourself citizenship. In particular, this study pays close attention to a recent South Korean case, including appreciative, appropriative, resonant memes, most of which originated from the Korean fandom culture and continued to evolve as resistant memes toward South Korea’s Candlelight Revolution and its DIY citizenship.
Women In Chemistry: A Transdisciplinary Collaboration Between Undergraduate Art and Design Students and Molecular Chemists View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lisa Winstanley
The Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous group of feminist artists, rose to fame by raising the question: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?” Their argument underscored the disproportionate amount of male artists’ work on display compared to the number of female nudes, thus emphasising the underrepresentation of women in art. This gender disparity is also very apparent in science. Accordingly, this paper reviews a pedagogical case study of how illustration can be leveraged to communicate gender inclusivity through a transdisciplinary collaboration between the applied arts and science. Undergraduate Art, Design, and Media students worked closely with Molecular Chemists to conduct lab-based, observational studies, from which they could draw inspiration once back in the design studio. The creative outcomes proved successful, providing tangible documentation of gender roles in chemistry, and these were subsequently disseminated through physical and online exhibitions and publication in top-tiered scientific literature. Of equal importance were the intangible outcomes of the project, such as increased student engagement and synthesis of research methods, all of which helped to forge deeper connections between project stakeholders. Developing the relationships between art and science is essential in cultivating a more humanistic approach to science communication, and there is an expanding body of research to support this approach. From the perspective of deepening connections, this project challenged students to question what currently exists and then to look towards what could be or, perhaps more importantly, what should be, for the future of women in science.
