Frontiers in Social Science features new research in the flagship journals of the Social Science Research Council’s founding disciplinary associations. Every month we publish a new selection of articles from the most recent issues of these journals, marking the rapid advance of the frontiers of social and behavioral science.
An examination of art from social movements in post-dictatorship São Paulo in the 1970s-1990s reveals how historians can analyze visual archives for new kinds of historical insight.
This article examines the video essay in this issue, “Visualizing Resilience from the Periphery: Social Movements, Visual Archives, and the Megacity,” and the video essay as a form of historical argumentation. First, the article traces how the video essay reconstructs a visual lexicon that fostered resilience among social movements from the urban peripheries of South America’s most populous city, São Paulo, during Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship (1964–85) and the democratic transition that followed. Popular artists illustrated movement paraphernalia with hand-drawn images of diverse subjects, including urban landscapes, public life, neighborhood organizing, and open protest. The video essay assembles these dispersed illustrations as well as soundscapes and clips from films into distinct phases of a metanarrative connecting the rise of the megacity to collective social action. It subsequently disassembles those focal points to underscore the open-ended and iterative nature of visual argumentation. The article then underscores how the video essay as a form of peer-reviewable argumentation allows historians to creatively engage with a large corpus of visual imagery. It concludes by discussing issues inherent to the form, such as the difference between written and visual argumentation, citation practices, integration of text, translation of foreign languages, and the preservation of digital scholarship, among others.
This article analyzes human labor within green infrastructure in Los Angeles, assessing emergent dynamics of environmental justice.
In Los Angeles, water managers and environmentalist NGOs champion green infrastructure retrofits, installations intended to maximize the water-absorbing capacity of the urban landscape. In such arrangements, the work of water management is necessarily spread among a more-than-human community, including (but certainly not limited to) humans, plants, soils, and gravels. This article analyzes the human labor within these collaborations, tracking when and how this work gets enrolled in networks of water management and circuits of value. I develop the term ecosystem duties to characterize these exertions and as a useful analytic for assessing emergent dynamics of environmental justice.