Katharina Fackler – författare

Throughout the 1960s—from the War on Poverty to the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign—Americans fiercely debated what the persistence of poverty meant for the United States. Picturing the Poor examines an array of rarely seen social documentary photographs to show that debates over poverty were also debates over the right ways of seeing, feeling, and knowing.When the public “rediscovered” poverty in the late 1950s and 1960s, photography played a crucial role in shaping how the problem was imagined. This book traces how social actors, including the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, the magazine Look, and grassroots activists, used images to influence public perception. Katharina Fackler argues that social documentary photography was revitalized, remodeled, and contested in the process. As Cold War geopolitics and the Civil Rights Movement reshaped ideas of democracy, photographs raised urgent questions: Who could portray poverty? Whose suffering would be visible? And to whose sensibilities should such images appeal?By analyzing photographs within their social and sensory contexts, Picturing the Poor reveals how images mediated the politics of poverty, navigating racialized, gendered, and classed habits of feeling while making ambivalent interventions in debates over social justice. This book will fascinate scholars, students, and general readers interested in the 1960s, visual culture, and the intertwined histories of poverty, politics, and social change.

This book explores formations of oceanic kinship in transnational American literature and culture from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. The chapters in this edited volume examine how kinship as a critical idiom and conceptual lens can help us rethink forms of human and nonhuman belonging in oceanic contexts. The book’s notion of kinship encompasses practices of mutual care which emerge from an understanding of interdependence, collectivity, and affiliation.Taken together, the essays critically engage with a variety of themes and concepts in oceanic studies: postcolonial ecologies, maritime labor histories, slavery and indentured servitude, extractive capitalism, settler colonialism, race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, the posthuman, the Anthropocene, and decolonial epistemologies. They therefore contribute new perspectives from kinship studies to current conversations in the blue humanities and adjacent fields such as diaspora studies, Black studies, Indigenous studies, ecocriticism, and queer theory. Together, they probe possibilities for an oceanic ethics of care for the twenty-first century. This book will be relevant to students and scholars of oceanic studies, literary studies, cultural studies, and those interested in the intersections of kinship, the environmental humanities, and postcolonial theory.The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Atlantic Studies.