viz.

(Photo Credit:  Pete Souza, White House Photographer, via TPM)

The Obama administration is currently debating whether or not to release photos of Osama bin Laden's body, though it is looking more and more likely that they will.  I can understand the arguments from both sides of this issue, though I suspect that anyone inclined to a see a conspiracy in all of this will not be deterred by such evidence any more than hardline birthers were deterred by the release of the long form birth certificate. 

As the year closes, we're reflecting on the ways our posts have connected visual rhetoric, digital literacy, and pedagogy. We've presented lesson plans that use programs like Animoto, iMovie, Sound Slides Plus, Xtranormal, etc.  There are longer posts that detail how these programs were used available on the blog, but in the first part of this post, Elizabeth will focus on those that present ideas for using iMovie in the classroom. In the second part of the post, Ashley will explore one of the broad themes our posts this year have addressed and talk about the ways in which we are theorizing the connections between embodiment and pedagogy.

(Image Credit:  Substantia Jones, Adiposivity.com)

Substantia Jones is an award-winning, Manhattan-based photographer whose work has been featured in The New York Times and showcased at galleries and shows throughout the Northeast.  Her website, The Adipositivity Project, is dedicated to documenting and celebrating bodies that are typically invisible--except as negative examples--in modern media.  In her own words, Substantia promotes size-acceptance "not by listing the merits of big people, or detailing examples of excellence (these things are easily seen all around us), but rather, through a visual display of fat physicality. The sort that's normally unseen."

I was thrilled to have the opportunity to exchange emails with Substantia and develop a post that would showcase some of her favorite photographs. Her answers to my questions are in bold. Many of the photographs below are NSFW. 

(Image Credit:  Kate Harding, Shapely Prose)

The special guest contribution I had planned for this week is not quite ready (but should be soon!), so here's a quick preview of some of the themes we'll be exploring on bodies and visibility. 

As I said in my post on childhood obesity campaigns, increasing access to healthy food and exercise is a public health and social justice goal that is worth aggressively pursuing.  However, too often efforts at doing so tend to target bodies that do not conform to ideals of healthy appearance rather than encouraging healthy behaviors or promoting access to the means of engaging in those behaviors.  The affect is the stigmatization of non-conforming bodies, which is, of course, counter to the goals of promoting diversity and treating all human beings as persons entitled to respect and bodily autonomy.  It also tends to encourage hypocrisy, as it is possible to have a body that "looks" healthy but really isn't.  As my post on Schultz and Ornstein's The Athlete showed, we often have a very narrow conception of what a high-functioning body looks like.

The slide show above has been hosted on the Shapely Prose blog for a few years now, but it is still one of my favorite visuals representations of body diversity and the skewed notions we have of what normality and abnormality look like.  Enjoy. 

Streaming Video by Ustream.TV

(Video Credit: Raptor Resource Project, UStream)

Over the past few months, the Raptor Resource Project has been hosting this live "nest cam" feed of a pair of eagles in Decorah, IA.  As of last week, the pair became the proud parents of three babies, and the drama of their incubating and hatching eggs has become a bit of an internet sensation.  The project is part of a conservation effort directed toward monitoring and understanding the nesting habits of avian raptors (eagles, falcons, owls, etc.), maintaining nesting sites, and educating the public.

(Photo Credit:  Billboard, Georgia  Childrens Health Alliance, via Body Impolitic)

No one could argue that efforts to promote healthy eating and exercise among school children, such as Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" campaign, aren't well-intentioned.  But as Paul Campos argues in this recent Daily Beast article, too often anti-obesity campaigns focused on children stigmatize the very individuals they are supposedly trying to help.  The image above, a billboard produced by the Georgia Childrens Health Alliance, is a case in point.  These scowling children with warning labels slapped across their stomachs seem to have crossed the line from being victims of genetics, environment, lack of opportunities for healthy exertion, and inavailability of affordable healthy meal choices to, I guess, being perpetrators.  Something has clearly gone wrong here.  Seriously, how would you like to be one of the kids in these pictures with your body held up as a symbol of a national crisis?  

This is just a quick plug for the upcoming Sequels Symposium, called "Hemispheric Crises: Race, Culture, and Representation," being held this Thursday and Friday at the University of Texas.  Organizer Connie Steel promises it will be a rousing display of rhetoric in practice.  For details, visit the E3W Facebook page or the main website.

The former Main Labor Department mural, Judy Taylor, via The Portland Press Herald

As of Monday, a 36-foot mural in the Maine Department of Labor was removed by order of Governor LePage because of its perceived "anti-business" bias.  The mural, created by artist Judy Taylor, depicted scenes from Maine's labor history and was criticized by local business leaders for being overtly "pro-union" and therefore inappropriate for a taxpayer-funded building.  Debate over the mural, of course, appears to be an extension of the intense debates about the status of the labor movement nationwide, but particularly in states like Wisconsin and Illinois, where public-sector unions have experienced considerable political setbacks following the conservative "wave" election of 2010. 

(Image Credit:  Time Magazine)

Following on the heels of Megan, Cate, and Elizabeth, I've been monitoring media coverage of the disaster in Japan and coming across some interesting points for debate.  I found this Time cover shortly after reading an anonymous letter to Talking Points Memo by a Japanese scholar critiquing Western media coverage of the Fukushima nuclear power plant: 

(Image Credit:  The Atlantic)

I adore interactive maps, especially ones that come in sexy colors and with a wealth of demographic data.  The Atlantic has a new one up by Dante Chinni and James Gimpel, authors of Our Patchwork Nation, that juxtaposes demographic data for individual counties and the rise or fall in average incomes.  Chinni and Gimpel use these relationships to identify twelve "county types," each of which have some relationship to a demographic data point and a rise or fall in income.  Seven of the county types have seen a decrease in effective income (adjusted for inflation) between 1980 and 2010.