Stephanie Sadre-Orafai is an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Cincinnati. She received her PhD in Anthropology from New York University. Her research focuses on transformations in contemporary US racial thinking and visual culture by ethnographically examining emerging forms of expertise, cultural and institutional practices of type production, and the intersection of race, language, and visual practices in aesthetic industries. Her publications include “Models, Measurement, and the Problem of Mediation in the New York Fashion Industry,” in Visual Anthropology Review (2016); “Recasting Fashion Image Production: An Ethnographic & Practice-Based Approach to Investigating Bodies as Media,” in Fashion Studies: Research Methods, Sites & Practices (Bloomsbury, 2016); “The Figure of the Model and Reality Television,” in Fashioning Models: Image, Text, and Industry (Berg, 2012); and “Fashion’s Other Images: Casting Photographs and the Production of a Professional Vision,” in Images in Time (Wunderkammer, 2011).
Tell us about your academic background and how you became interested in your research area.
I became interested in anthropology when I was a junior in high school after being matched with an archaeologist in a mentorship program. I worked in his lab, but also sat in on his biological anthropology lectures. That experience changed my life. There I learned that seemingly natural categories of human difference were contingent, contextual, and socially constructed, which became a recurrent theme in my research: understanding how these categories were naturalized and put into relations with moral and aesthetic hierarchies. While I have been in anthropology departments my entire career—as an undergraduate, graduate student, and now, faculty member—I have always worked at the intersection of it and other disciplines and on topics not commonly pursued in anthropology. My research has allowed me to explore a range of worlds, including fashion, design, policing, and corrections. I am interested in how experts in these fields cultivate what are usually unthinking routines of typification into foundational features of their professions. Methodologically, I analyze media artifacts and the practices of their production, employing ethnographic and micro-analytic techniques to understand their material, visual, and discursive dimensions. Across these sites I explore how experts create new articulations of mediation and visibility that shape how broader US publics see and imagine difference and inequality.
What attracted you to the Bard Graduate Center fellowship?
Despite focusing on aesthetic industries and practices for the past fifteen years, I had never designed a project that took material culture as its primary point of departure. While I was accustomed to considering how experts handle, talk about, and use objects (particularly visual and biographical documents), I always began with the process, not the object. My goal had been to record and analyze those practices that do not leave traces, or whose traces may be more difficult to follow in the material record itself. The Bard Graduate Center fellowship presented an interesting challenge to rethink my own work and research process through the lens of objects, to see what other kinds of stories they could tell.
What will be the focus and result of your research here?
I am working on a book project titled Type by Design. Drawing on ethnographic and material culture analysis, this project connects the histories and contemporary cultural practices of two New York commercial aesthetic industries—the high fashion modeling industry and the commercial font business—through a shared material culture form: promotional type ephemera. It brings the overlapping concerns of animate (fashion models) and inanimate (typefaces) type production into dialogue, examining how visual references and narratives are used to entextualize types over time and across contexts. It explores the mutually vivifying and dehumanizing dimensions of type production and what their professional practices can reveal about underlying changes in cultural ideas of “difference” and how they are visually encoded for the New York market. The goal of this project is to critically examine what is at stake in becoming more object-like as a “type” for people, and conversely, what it means to have both a face and body for inanimate forms.
What are you goals after the fellowship?
My fellowship comes at the end of my post-tenure sabbatical, so upon returning to Cincinnati, I will complete my book manuscript and submit it for review. When I go back to teaching, I plan on incorporating more material culture approaches in my classes, as well as in my future work. An unexpected development of my research that I hope to leverage is building up a digital archive of fashion modeling ephemera I have collected and finding an institutional home for it, either in New York or back in Cincinnati. I want to make these materials accessible to other researchers and extend critical discussion of them. This could also lead to an exhibition and/or short film.
