Visualizing Toxic Subjects is a collaborative project in which participants are collecting, captioning, sharing and commenting on ethnographic visualizations, working to update ways of using a variety of visual materials in the conduct and expression of ethnography.  

Participants are building digital photo essays, an Instagram profile, and a gallery exhibit of images that convey toxicity in its many forms and guises -- environmental toxics, to be sure, but also political toxicity, toxic media or culture, and so on.

“Toxicity” is a powerful organizing rubric for this project for a number of reasons. Toxics are often illegible through dominant frameworks; they are “subaltern,” outside recognition in hegemonic terms. Toxics are also most often intersectional, resulting from and exacerbated by multiple, synergistic systems and stressors. And toxics endure and accumulate, operating exponentially and intergenerationally. Visualizing toxic subjects thus requires subversive intent, critical design, and creative use and reading of visual materials.

Participants have been encouraged to think and work with scientific visualizations, cartoons, photojournalism, advertisements, maps made by activist organizations, or many other visual materials, articulating how they push back against (sometimes manufactured) illegibility, drawing in and on ethnographic sensibilities. The challenge is to work within (and sometime against) the image density that characterizes the worlds we study and often hope to change.   

The project is hosted on the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, digital infrastructure especially designed to support research on topics beyond the reach of established terms and methods.