Paper short abstract:

This paper applies the skilled visions approach to collective strategies of self-representation, focusing on the apprenticeship of stereotypes as a naturalization of social classification, experimenting with non-linear platforms for multimedia editing and providing a broad review of visual resources and arguments currently spanning the web.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will discuss the idea of applying the skilled visions approach to collective strategies of self-representation, by combining visual archive research with ethnographic sources in a project about looking.

The goal is to develop a critical analysis of belonging, focusing on the visual apprenticeship of stereotypes as a naturalization of social classification.

The thesis is that there is a complex and tacit competence at play in the mutual exercise of recognition, and that such "skilled vision" feeds on comparison by context and on cultural training rather than on a replicable repertoire of classificatory schemes. In other words, the business of "sorting faces" depends on where we draw the implicit boundaries of the groups we are identifying. Our own capacity for recognizing and ascribing membership of a certain group is a skill that is largely contextual, socially inculcated and publicly performed.

The paper aims at connecting my previous work on Skilled Visions with a work-in-progress agenda, experimenting with on-line non linear platforms for multimedia editing and providing a broad review of visual resources and arguments currently spanning the web and the critique of visual culture.

The ethnographic flesh of the project is an observation of Boston, home to one of the most renowned and diverse communities of researchers in the world, but also the "youngest" US city and the result of intertwined histories of migration. Challenged suburbs and gentrified "ethnic" quarters such as the Italian North End compose an urban caleydoscope of visual formations.