Visualizing Toxic Subjects

This group will serve as a collaborative workspace for participants of Visualizing Toxic Subjects -- the design project component of the Center for Ethnography’s 2018-2019 annual program, Visualization in Ethnography.

Over the course of the project, participants will publish three iterations of Photo Essays to the group for review by other participants (See PECE Resources below). Photo Essays will include one to three images (found images or original creations) along with a 200-400 word caption and a design statement discussing how and why visualizations were selected or produced, interpreted, and used to convey ethnographic understanding. Each iteration of the Photo Essay will also be assigned for review by other participants using the annotation function of PECE. This elaborate review process, extending from November 2018-February 2019, is intended to facilitate the collaborative development of an appropriate analytic language for assessing ethnographic images. In the final round, each participant will submit their final selections of one to three captioned images along with design statements describing why the image is an exemplary ethnographic visualization. There will be a two-stage (internal and external) review process in March and April. A gallery exhibit will be held in mid-May. The final digital exhibit will be published in mid-June.

PECE Resources and VTS Style Guide:

  • Made in America? Racial Capitalism in the Great Lakes
  • Visualizing Taiwan's Formosa Plastics
  • VtS Storage Essay
  • Visualizing Toxic Subjects Viewpoint Gallery Exhibit Posters
  • Visualizing Toxic Subjects Viewpoint Gallery Exhibit
  • Visualizing Toxic Subjects Project Page
  • Capturing Toxicity: Archiving Palestinian Social Worlds
  • Corporeal Landscapes: Discourse, Memory, and Embodiment In Mexico's Changing Climate
    View essay

    Rain, Family, and Sensory Experience: Imagining Quotidian Climate Change

    Caption: Brother and Sister Escape Rain Storm. 

    This image is of Pancha and Chon Alanis, brother and sister, taken during my preliminary feildwork in Coamiles, Nayarit, Mexico. I chose this image particularly because it does something that I have difficulty capturing textually, it vividly captures weather as well as bodily/sensorial experience. It also gives the observer an opportunity to visualize the field as an affective plane, where affect is being transmitted through environment, bodies present, and bodies viewing. 

    As my project attempts to articulate the everyday experiences, memories, affects, and embodiments that eventually become the foundations for which farmers are able to describe, pinpoint, and make real climate change, I fixate on images like these which capture moments which eventually become memories of "climate change." These visualizations are thus intended to be images of retrospect, in which climate change becomes articulated as the changes within one's lifetime. 

    Imagining Climate Change

    Caption: Collage of "Climate Change" Google Search. 

    This collage brings together numerous images from goolge searches of "climate change" in order to visualize how climate change is being popularly imagined, explained, and experienced. In many instances, these images appear right away, often indicating the most recent news reports on climate change. Through these searches one can see how climate change, at a quick glance, is  being represented through juxtapositions between quotidian imagery and foreboding descriptions. Images of children, farmers, and icebergs are coupled with descriptors such as "grim," "dire," and "crisis." 

    By using this as one of my own ethnographic images I hope to illustrate how climate change happens simultaneously in our imaginaries as apocalyptic specticle and everyday slow violence. I also hope to drive forward the question: how can we bridge the gap between the spectacular and the everyday? 

  • ELIMINATING TOXIC CITIZENRY: TRANSNATIONAL ADOPTION FROM SOUTH KOREA
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    Found Image: Removing 'Ostricized' Korea Brown Babies 1953-1960s

    Substantive Caption: The image is a US State Department advertisement that was printed in Jet Magazine, a magazine with a predominantly African-American readership, on March 24, 1955. The advertisement titled, “State Department seeks to help ‘ostracized’ Korea brown babies,” describes the racial discrimation that mixed-race children (whose fathers were American GI soldiers in South Korea) face in South Korean orphanages. According to the ad, mixed-race children were at risk of starvation since, according to the ad, Korean caretakers prefer to feed non-mixed Korean children first. The ad attempts to recruit African-American families to adopt these children, promising government support to adoptive families.

    Design Statement: I am interested in understanding the use of adoption by the South Korean state to control "toxic citizenry," or those members of the nation that threaten the state's biopolitical agenda in nation-building projects. After the Korean War, both the South Korean government and the U.S. government, under the banner of "benevolence," sought to remove mixed-race children, sure that they would face racial discrimination in a "racially homogeneous" society such as South Korea. Of course, the adoption of mixed-race South Korean babies to the United States failed to recognize the racism that they would later experience in the US, as well as provided a blueprint for a relationship between a feminized South Korea and paternalistic United States (McKee). It also set a precedent for the South Korean state to eliminate social issues such as racial discrimination through attempts to remove racial difference, rather than through attempts to expand notions of Koreanness. This pattern would later be repeated through the removal of children from poor families and children from single parent households. 

    Jet Magazine. March 24, 1955. Found online. https://dreamwaterchildren.net/2017/07/17/maintaining-exporting-protecti...

    Found Image: Removing 'obstacles' to economic development 1960s-1970s

    Substantive Caption: Although dominant adoption rhetoric has often framed the practice of adoption as charitable, I am interested in examining the way that international adoption operates within the global flow of capital. In the case of this graph, it is clear to see that international adoption brought in much needed foreign capital at a time when the country was undergoing rapid economic development. Not only did international adoption become a profitable industry within the country, it also spared the South Korean government from needing to create a social welfare structure to support vulnerable children and families. In other words, the “siphoning overseas of ‘surplus’ and ‘unwanted’ children allowed South Korea to direct most of its resources to national security and economic development” (Oh 2015, 195). To date, the South Korean government continues to have one of the lowest levels of social welfare spending of any OECD country. 

    Design Statement: Although dominant adoption rhetoric has often framed the practice of adoption as charitable, I am interested in examining the way that international adoption operates within the global flow of capital. In the case of this graph, it is clear to see that international adoption brought in much needed foreign capital at a time when the country was undergoing rapid economic development. Not only did international adoption become a profitable industry within the country, it also spared the South Korean government from needing to create a social welfare structure to support vulnerable children and families. In other words, the “siphoning overseas of ‘surplus’ and ‘unwanted’ children allowed South Korea to direct most of its resources to national security and economic development” (Oh 2015, 195). To date, the South Korean government continues to have one of the lowest levels of social welfare spending of any OECD country. 


    Source: Oh, Arissa H. 2015. To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption. Stanford University Press.

    Created image: Removing 'illegitimate' children 1980s-present

    Substantive Caption: I created this image using an archive photo from Yonhap News and a personal photo. The photo on the left is of the "Babybox" located in Seoul. The "Babybox" photo shows the following text (in Korean) displayed on a window above which says, "For children with disabilities or of unwed mothers that there is no way you can raise. Instead of abandoning your baby, grab the handle below and place them here." Below the window and above the handle, the text from Psalms 27:10 can be seen, "For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the LORD will take me in." Below the image of a rainbow and a baby and a box, "Jesus loves you" is written (in English). 

    The photo on the right is of two banners hanging on the outside of the offices of Social Welfare Society (SWS) adoption agency located in Seoul. The banner on the left says, "We will listen to each word from an unwed mother" with an image below of a woman holding an infant and smiling down at it. The photo is reminiscent of a mother-baby post-childbirth photo. The second banner says, "Adoption is the most special happiness in the world" with an image above of a woman holding a baby and smiling. 

    Design Statement: 

    Finally, I am interested in examining the ways that adoption has been used to reinforce the hegemonic heterosexual two-parent family structure in South Korea. Since the 1980s and still today, upwards of eighty percent of all of the children sent for adoption in the 1980s were the children of unwed mothers. This percentage increased in the 1990s, so that today the children of unwed mothers constitute over ninety percent of adopted Korean children. The most recent statistics show that in 2012, ninety-two percent of the children sent for overseas adoption were the children of unwed mothers (Ministry “2012 Statistical”). This is unsurprising given the fact that, typically, when women become pregnant outside of marriage in Korea and choose to give birth, families heavily pressure the mothers to give the child up for adoption. In other words, although adoption is often seen as a symbol of multiculturalism and non-traditional, pluralistic family structures in the West, it has paradoxically stifled the acceptance of diverse family formations in South Korea, particularly single mother-headed families. 

    Source: Ministry of Health and Welfare. “1958–2008 Statistical Report on Unwed Mothers and
    Adoption.” http://stat.mw.go.kr/, 2010. Accessed 12 May 2017.
    ———. “2012 Statistical Report on Domestic and International Adoption.” Ministry of
    Health and Welfare. http://www.mohw.go.kr/react/index.jsp/, 2012. Accessed 12
    May 2017.

  • transparent visualizations and toxic fashions
    View essay

    transparent visualizations and toxic fashions

    As an anthropologist interested in sustainable fashion, my research is broadly focused on the study of objects and materiality through the intersection of design, economics, and law. For this project, I focus on the ways in which the toxicity of the contemporary fashion industry is called out, or queried, through practices of visualization. As an industry that relies on transnational production processes, visualization is a key strategy used by advocates to document the social and environmental impacts of (fast) fashion. However, it is also an increasingly important tool by which self-declared “conscious” companies distinguish their work. To this end, I am drawn to the paradoxical role of visualization as a key means by which the challenges (and progress) in establishing a more sustainable fashion industry are made transparent. In this essay I include images from advertisements and branding campaigns of fashion companies that comment on the sustainability of their work in juxtaposition with the imagery found in journalism. In addition, I include original photographs of garments that challenge how we think about the permeation of toxicity in fashion. Through these images my goal is to query why visualization is privileged as the medium by which sustainability is made transparent.

    Melissa Begey: Cite As

    Cite as:

    Begey, Melissa. 2019. Transparent Visualizations and Toxic Fashions. In Visualizing Toxic Subjects Digital Exhibit, curated by James Adams and Kim Fortun. The Center for Ethnography. 

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