Safety Orange by Anna Watkins Fisher

Safety Orange by Anna Watkins Fisher

How fluorescent orange symbolizes the uneven distribution of safety and risk in the neoliberal United States    Safety Orange first emerged in the 1950s as a bureaucratic color standard in technical manuals and federal regulations in the United States. Today it is most visible in the contexts of terror, pandemic, and environmental alarm systems; traffic control; work safety; and mass incarceration. In recent decades, the color has become ubiquitous in American public life-a marker of the extreme poles of state oversight and abandonment, of capitalist excess and dereliction. Its unprecedented saturation encodes the tracking of those bodies, neighborhoods, and infrastructures judged as worthy of care-and those deemed dangerous and expendable.  Here, Anna Watkins Fisher uses Safety Orange as an interpretive key for theorizing the uneven distribution of safety and care in twenty-first-century U.S. public life and for pondering what the color tells us about neoliberalism’s intensifying impact often hiding in plain sight in ordinary and commonplace phenomena.  Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

"In an age when so many books of aesthetic and critical theory feel not only dense but several degrees removed from things that matter in daily life, Safety Orange stands apartIt’s a convincing kind of argument that makes you see things differently, be they artworks, the United States, or urban detritus on your daily walk."-Art in America

Anna Watkins Fisher is associate professor of American culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is author of The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance and coeditor of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. 

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781517913397
ISBN 10	151791339X
Title	Safety Orange
Author	Anna Watkins Fisher
Series	Forerunners: Ideas First
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University of Minnesota Press
Year published	2021-12-07
Number of pages	98
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.