{"title":"Untitled (Speech Poem #2)","authors":"Marrok Sedgwick","doi":"10.5070/r72145861","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/r72145861","url":null,"abstract":"Author(s): Sedgwick, Marrok | Abstract: Closed captions often do not fully convey the meaning, emotion, or even the full dialogue of spoken English to a d/Deaf audience. They are often incomplete, whether due to audist assumptions about the ability of d/Deaf to understand content (such as with captions that present allegedly less lofty language than that spoken by the actors on-screen), or the technological failure whereby caption decoders in televisions and in the devices cinemas use drop a line of dialogue. Other times, the failure of closed captions relates to the more subtle inability of formal written captioning protocols to capture tone of voice, or to really represent what emotional information is portrayed by a soundtrack. What does it mean to have “upbeat music” or to name the instrument itself? My work subverts this obfuscation of meaning, turning the tables to privilege disabled communities over non-disabled communities.","PeriodicalId":343897,"journal":{"name":"Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130059343","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"BLAST RADIUS: No. 4 in a Series of Data Humanization Performances","authors":"Adriene Jenik","doi":"10.5070/r72145855","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/r72145855","url":null,"abstract":"Author(s): Jenik, Adriene | Abstract: At around 7:30pm on April 13, 2017 the US government dropped the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb near the Moman Dara Village in the Asadkhel area in the Achin district of Nagarhar province in eastern Afghanistan. Nicknamed the \"Mother of All Bombs\" the weapon is the largest non-nuclear weapon in the US arsenal, with a blast radius, meaning the area in which serious effects on people and structures can be felt, of a mile. While the MOAB was the largest weapon released, it was but one of 4,361 air weapons that targeted Afghanistan during 2017, according to US Air Forces Central Command declassified airpower summaries. At 7:30am on April 13, 2018, the anniversary of this event, I walked a path equivalent to the blast radius of MOAB on land in Arizona. This walk memorialized the civilians killed, the villages terrorized, the populations forced to migrate, and the lands scarred as a result of the endless wars being carried out in the name of protecting US citizens.","PeriodicalId":343897,"journal":{"name":"Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal","volume":"100 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127377271","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Languages of Violence","authors":"Ansel Arnold","doi":"10.5070/r72145849","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/r72145849","url":null,"abstract":"Author(s): Arnold, Ansel | Abstract: Languages of Violence is a gaming/sound performance mediated by the streaming service Twitch. The visual elements represent the active key registrations and inputs being made during a video game, while the sound is of the game as it’s played and mixed through analog pedals and feedback loops. The context of the game and the event that it produces are obscured by this interpretation. What’s left is an impressionistic gesture that mediates a fact of violence. At the outset of this work, I was exploring what I saw left open by realistic digital violence, in that it can be directed beyond its actual origins. Gunfire is made indistinguishable from a real life event, but its context as a video game rescues it or makes it acceptable.","PeriodicalId":343897,"journal":{"name":"Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128336073","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Letter from the Editor","authors":"Kate Korroch","doi":"10.5070/r72145848","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/r72145848","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":343897,"journal":{"name":"Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129887691","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Heat is On","authors":"A. Raengo","doi":"10.5070/r72145854","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/r72145854","url":null,"abstract":"Author(s): Raengo, Alessandra | Abstract: At one point in Kahlil Joseph’s two-screen installation BLKNWS (2018 – ongoing), African American poet June Jordan recites her “Song of the Law Abiding Citizen.” Strategicallyunderstated and delivered with deadpan irony, the poem begins by quickly accumulating momentum.","PeriodicalId":343897,"journal":{"name":"Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal","volume":"13 11","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120919655","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lag and Impact in Visual Studies","authors":"Sara Blaylock","doi":"10.5070/r72145853","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/r72145853","url":null,"abstract":"Author(s): Blaylock, Sara | Abstract: A few weeks ago, I found myself sitting on my porch with a friend and my partner, trying to explain just what visual studies is. My friend, a historian, and my partner, who teaches in an English department, both listened patiently as I muddled through my usual preambles:It’s like art history, but with a more politicized vision… Some people approach visual studies as a means to think about perception and technologies that have literally changed vision… Others use it as a means to explain how what is made (or allowed to be) visible is a tool of consolidating and maintaining hegemonic power… Some people see it as a development of art history; others define it as a radical rupture.…I listed examples of potential objects of study. I began with the obvious: art, posters, film, advertisements, maps. I then listed more totalizing, which is to say less concrete, examples: systems of representation, discourse, the use of space, the commons. I inventoried the range of theoretical tools at my disposal: Marxism, feminism, critical race studies, indigeneity, postcolonialism, and queer theory… My historian friend nodded generously. “Yes,” she said, “people in my discipline work on these issues, as well.” My partner, more than a bit familiar with this intrigue of mine, acknowledged that his classroom and writing practice also welcome a variety of methodologies and source materials. So, what then, I proceeded to ask, is it that makes visual studies a discipline when its approach—that is to say, its methodology of interdisciplinarity—is being practiced (and seemingly welcomed) across the humanities?","PeriodicalId":343897,"journal":{"name":"Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal","volume":"102 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123997810","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lupine Sensibilities: Dynamically Embodied Intersubjectivity between Humans and Refugee Wolves","authors":"A. Hoffman","doi":"10.5070/r72145860","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/r72145860","url":null,"abstract":"Author(s): Hoffman, Austin D. | Abstract: There is a growing body of literature in the field of environmental education that draws from the phenomenological tradition in theorizing about human-animal interactions. I am inspired by the eco-phenomenology of Phillip G. Payne and aim here to further an educational pedagogy of intercorporeal relations and to conceptualize M:W as “an active experiential and existential site of and for inquiry in and with various natures and environments.” From the animal welfarist perspective, some work has also been done about how these interactions occur in the contexts of zoos and wildlife sanctuaries, and how they can be mutually enriching for non/humans; Lindsey Mehrkam, Nicolle Verdi, and Clive Wynne have specifically studied captive wolves and wolf-dogs in this regard. Holding all these schools of thought in mind, this essay lies at the four-way intersection of human-animal studies (HAS), anthropological methodology, environmental education, and phenomenology. More specifically, I endeavor to bring the anthropological framework of dynamic embodiment—which draws heavily from phenomenology but has been largely humancentric—firmly into conversation with these other intellectual genealogies.","PeriodicalId":343897,"journal":{"name":"Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130918997","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"(Un)veiling Sappho: Renée Vivien and Natalie Clifford Barney’s Radical Translation Projects","authors":"R. Dilts","doi":"10.5070/r72145856","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/r72145856","url":null,"abstract":"Author(s): Dilts, Rebekkah | Abstract: In 1894 a strange book titled Les chansons des Bilitis (The Songs of Bilitis) was published by the popular French writer Pierre Louys. A collection of erotic poetry, it began with an introduction that claimed the poems were found on the walls of a tomb in Cyprus and were written by an ancient Greek woman named Bilitis, a courtesan and contemporary of the ancient Greek poet Sappho. In fact, Louys fabricated Bilitis and the majority of the poems in the collection. He cites some of Sappho’s real verses, but credits them to his invented Bilitis. To lend authenticity to the forgery, he listed some of the poems as “untranslated” in the book’s index, and included a bibliography with earlier translations of collections of Bilitis’s poetry, which were, of course, also false. Yet upon publication, the fraud eluded even the most expert of scholars. Perhaps most surprisingly, even when the literary hoax was eventually exposed, it did little to diminish the book’s popularity. Louys’s endeavor both challenges the ethics of “faithful” translation and raises the question: why didn’t readers care that Bilitis wasn’t a real poet?","PeriodicalId":343897,"journal":{"name":"Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121795148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Interpreting the Legal Archive of Visual Transformations: Textual Articulations of Visibility in Evidentiary Procedures and Documentary Formats of Colonial Law","authors":"A. Akhtar","doi":"10.5070/r72145859","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/r72145859","url":null,"abstract":"Author(s): Akhtar, Asif Ali | Abstract: This article is concerned with tracing an onto-epistemological break through the archeology of colonial penal law, whereby a historical restructuring of the “visible” and the “articulable” produces modern ways of “seeing” and “knowing.” This epistemic break will be investigated through eighteenth and nineteenth century “Regulation” of Islamic sharīʿa penal law by British administrators of the East India Company in colonial Bengal. The juridico-discursive body, which came to be known as Anglo-Muhammadan law, will be analyzed through court records compiled by Company jurists and their Regulations modifying sharīʿa jurisprudence. Islamic penal law is based on hermeneutical practices of juridical reasoning formed through particular ways of seeing, knowing, and verifying the truth through eye-witness and testimony. In this article I will show that when the British commandeered this system of justice towards their own ends, the regulatory changes they instituted inadvertently brought about visual transformations of the ways in which legal life-worlds of the colony come to be recorded, articulated, and expressed. Under the British administration of colonial Bengal, this dual-process of appropriation and subversion of the law took shape through translation and transliteration of fiqh treatises, to legal amendments and sweeping legislations in substantive law. This process not only provided colonial power access to the bodies of colonial subjects, but also conditioned the relations between criminality, visuality, and juridical veridiction through penal legislation. As this article will show, the East India Company’s regulation of Islamic penal law began incorporating modern forms of evidentiary proofs, indexicality, and documentary formats that restructured the lifeworld of colonial law in 19th century Bengal.","PeriodicalId":343897,"journal":{"name":"Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128339063","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}