Critical Visions and the Unsteady In‐Between

Abstract

The students huddled around the large digital duplicator, their phones out, ready to capture on video evidence of the first print run. There were three weeks left in the semester, and we were working on a tight but staggered production schedule, based in part on the pages we could finalize and which inks and papers we had on hand. Over the previous three months, the students had conceptualized the scope, style, and tone of their publication, producing twelve substantial, individual writing and creative projects and eight collaborative, interstitial ones. The sum of this work would eventually become a 160-page, perfect bound book with an initial run of 750 copies. These were all printed and bound "in-house" by sixteen students and faculty over a three-week period. They were then distributed to friends, colleagues, and local community members as well as visual researchers, writers, and artists around the world. The CVSN Field Guide to Color was the third installment of CVSN, a now biennial student-produced publication from the Critical Visions Certificate Program at the University of Cincinnati (UC).Since 2011, the Critical Visions program has brought together students from multiple fields to teach them how to combine critical theory and social analysis with art, media, and design practices. Insistent that students "write and make from day one," the program emphasizes the inextricable relationship between form and content. As a central maxim on the certificate capstone syllabus states: "Neither the written, nor the visual components should be afterthoughts; each informs the other." The program trains students to find associative, nonlinear ways of approaching social issues so they can ask better questions and provoke nuanced discussions through considered, form-based aesthetic choices. Framed around challenging "dominant forms of seeing," the program aims to keep students off balance: to condition them to work in the unsteady in-between of disciplines.A key way the program fosters this kind of slippery engagement is through the immersive, collaborative labors required to produce CVSN. During the fifteen-week capstone studio/seminar cotaught by faculty from the School of Art and Department of Anthropology, students conceive, write, and design a stand-alone publication on a single theme. External design and editorial/production mentors weigh in at key points in the semester on macro issues (e.g., order and rhythm of the major and minor projects, cohesion and coverage of the theme, technical and aesthetic details concerning the design and genre), while an international editorial board made up of artists, activists, and academics review individual student projects at the midterm, offering feedback on writing, argumentation, and execution of visual expression.In this way, the program is in conversation with other collaborative projects that join art and social science, such as Ethnographic Terminalia, the Center for Imaginative Ethnography, and the Research Centre for Shared Incompetence (see also Schneider and Wright ...

Reframe, Redesign, Realign

“…Thinking through this recursive imaging helped us articulate what we wanted the redesign to do. Finally, building off the insights of publishing CVSN (Sadre‐Orafai et al 2018), we focused on the print to introduce productive limitations and reinsert the tactile dimensions of the journal.…”