In the seminar Making the Invisible Visible with Paola Bertucci, we examined the relationship between the visualization of scientific objects through illustration and photography with the system of values of scientific communities and their societies. We searched for the humans within the machines, and recontextualised the seemingly objective representations of our world into their sociopolitical milieu. Over the course of the seminar, persistent themes emerged: Every image has a visual argument. Objectivity is a constructed concept that changes over time. Science is not immune to creating idealized archetypes and marketing them as the truth. And, the visualized invisible reflects the choices and values of the creator and of the viewer.
In our digital age inundated by photo-visual content, visual literacy is a crucial skill for students to master in order to not only understand the immediate message of an image, but locate that image in a series of historical circumstances that shape and are shaped by values. A core component to building resilient viewers that do not passively consume is to have them embark on a meta-cognitive practice of examining the media’s construction of their belief system.
The skill set will be practiced through this interdisciplinary unit for a Psychology class that uncovers the historical construction of the societal value system that leads to eating disorders. Although eating disorders do originate as an individual response to their environment and genetics, this unit will focus on the socialization behind why body image becomes the addiction of choice.
One of the biggest misconceptions around body dysmorphia and eating disorders is that the afflicted are concerned with the superficial, when in fact the sickness represents an internal battle between warped messages of perfection, inner worth and a need for control in a chaotic world. Body dysmorphia is a symptom of a society obsessed with measurement, comparison, and competition. Its distortions reveal the limitations of pursuing a standardized singular goal in the name of a virtue such as “success” or fulfillment. The grind to self-optimize through fitness tracking and hustle culture runs parallel to early 1900s culture of factory optimization, eugenics and the valorisation of productivity and output. The “perfect body” and “the perfect worker” similarly require hyper-vigilance in pursuit of idealized metrics while risking dehumanisation and self-denial.
It is no surprise that in the past decade or so, with the advent of the modern era of smartphones and social media in the late 2000s, and increased mental health advocacy, documented rates of body dysmorphia and eating disorders have increased. For example, in a 2023 behavioral health report published by Trilliant Health and Dr. Jain entitled, “Trends Shaping the Health Economy,” rates of eating disorder diagnoses in the United States increased 107.4% between 2018-2002 alone, and there is an immense body of research linking social media to adverse mental health effects. Students may have a general familiarity or intuitive understanding of such statistics, and this unit serves to take them on a historical tour of where the values encoded in our modern day visualizations of idealised human health originate. While there are many origin stories and contributors to our nation’s disordered relationship with food and fitness, this unit focuses on the role of ideals of mechanical efficiency, the invention of the calorie and its implications for labor, and the inherent distortions that occur when making life visible through photography.
While this unit is for Psychology class, it is an interdisciplinary approach, taking cues from sociology, history, art, and economics by examining the values behind work. The unit follows the trajectory of 1) primary source analysis comparing early industrial illustrations of “the perfect machine” to The Human Motor: Or the Scientific Foundations of Labour and Industry (1920) book by French engineer and physiologist Jules Amar, 2) investigating the invention and shift of the calorie as a term for a unit of mechanical energy to nutrition accrued with societal values, after which students artistically redesign Atwater’s calorimeter with visuals of these values, 3) primary source analysis of magazines concerned with teaching readers about “personal efficiency” and finding modern day counterparts via social media, 4) evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of early 20th century factory optimization strategies through analysis of Taylorism, Gantt Charts, and Siemens work tools with modern day comparison to AI optimization and Amazon surveillance culture, 5) decoding the eugenic precedents in modern metrics of health and beauty such as BMI, 6) examining mechanical objectivity and inherent distortions in digital photography vs film photography 7) a Fishbowl discussion answering follow up prompts to the core question: “What are the advantages and limitations of the ways we are evaluated; how could it be redesigned? Is there more to life than productivity?”, 8) a final project where students re-narrate a playlist of current day self-optimization social media videos reflective of the historical context and their new understandings, create new stereoscopes with which to look at the world re-distorted away from the distortions, portrait of themself made of words and not images, or making a fun house that plays on these themes of distortion and efficiency.
The scope and sequence of this unit lines up in the larger grouping of units in Psychology discussing mental illness. It serves as a historical underpinning to conversations about eating disorders and incorporates analysis of ideological messaging and claim-construction. It prompts students to have a meta-cognitive awareness of the values they actively and passively subscribe to and question to what extent those values serve them. The skill sets and critical thinking strategies it teaches include visual literacy, examining historical context and causal relationships, making claims, and reimagining worlds.
Some essential course questions of this unit curriculum include: What gets lost in the process of visualization? How did visualizing our “inner life force” through the schema of caloric input-output tables radically reshape our world sociologically? How has our visualization of health been distorted through the media to promote un-health? How does digital technology place new parameters on how to see the world, and how do we avoid being limited by them? How can we preserve an organic sense of care and love after we’ve quantified and categorized our world?
