“Racial Vision: Failed Projects of Human Difference” is a cultural historical investigation into the pre-histories of racialized facial recognition technologies. The qualitative and computational investigation of racial recognition begins with an analysis of 18th century French doctors studying “racial metamorphoses” and ends with 21st century Chinese computer vision engineers trying to remedy racial bias in machine learning datasets.

How does racial classification emerge in contexts where it previously did not exist? And how does racialization happen within Whiteness and within Asianness?

"Horror Vacui: Racial Misalignment, Symbolic Repair, and Imperial Legitimation in German National Socialist Portrait Photography." American Journal of Sociology 129 (2): 313-383. Link here. If you do not have institutional access, please feel free to email me for a preprint at Anna.skarpelis ((at)) qc.cuny.edu

Paper 2, R&R with American Sociological Review.

Things that look the same are often rather different. Hidden variation is extremely consequential for our understanding of social mechanisms and processes. Three of my papers look at things that appear the same on the surface, but disguise fundamentally different interests, technologies, and processes.

“Race’s Many Metamorphoses: Racial Vision from Skin Tone Studies to Artificial Intelligence” (2022, under review)

18th century doctors obsessed over the question of what “caused” Black skin. 21st century computer vision engineers are trying to generate synthetic Black faces in order to balance racially biased machine learning datasets. Both projects are outgrowths of substantively different political economies: slavery-based capitalism, and modern democracy. That both locate race in measurable bodily characteristics could lead us to describe contemporary developments in artificial intelligence as continuous with a physiognomic past, especially on account of shared essentializing and biological notions of race. Such a position has many merits. The article however proposes a supplementary view that shifts the interpretive lens from continuities of racial essentialism, to those of what I call racial metamorphosis — the changing of race of a single person within their lifetime. Drawing on one example from the history of medicine, and another from contemporary computer vision engineering, the manuscript addresses questions of continuity and change within scientific practice and situates them within larger, complex histories of race and racism.

“Race in Parentheses: Historical Legacies in the Production of Racial Absence” (under review since 2018)

What do we talk about when we don’t talk about race? Rather than straightforward cases of erasure or non-recognition, I argue that these are instances of political projects that uncouple the racist past from a non-racial present that reveal an active, purposive, performative strategy to absent race itself. In other words: The absenting of race is a racializing project that denies its very existence. It is an act of omission by commission that functions as a modernizing maneuver, where racial divestment becomes the precondition for “moving on” from historical wrongs and difficult historical pasts. Deploying comparative-historical data on Germany, France and Japan, the article theorizes how states of racial absenting emerge via four partially overlapping cultural processes: temporal bracketing, conceptual divestment, linguistic evasion, and spatial excision. I build comparative sociological theory that more granularly describes and explains processes and forms of erasure, omission, and absence that generalize to broader questions of comparison, hidden variation, and how to analyze negative or unmarked space.

“What is it like to be a Nazi? Racial Vision and Scientific Selves in German Portrait Photographic Practice” (2020, Link to Preprint)

How did National Socialist photographers generate “race” in images? Through an analysis of photographic instruction manuals, reflections of the image makers on their craft and the photographs themselves, I theorize three processes by which National Socialist-period photographers created race in images: contemplation, freezing, and sculpting. Photography, far from being a transcriptional art, brimmed with agency and was in constant disagreement about the nature of perception, and the best way of capturing phenomena occurring in the world through novel technologies. While local circumstances of photographic production under National Socialist rule at first glance appear excessively specific and perhaps exceptional, they raise more universal questions about perception, vision and interpretation that remain at issue today (Browne 2010; Morning 2011; Morning 2014; Nelson 2008).

My interest in computational sociology is twofold: First, in establishing meaning in images and videos. Second, in devising methods to better capture perception across the board of sociological methods (ethnography, experiments, vision, etc.). I learned about Computer Vision at Harvard and MIT, and about art historical ways of seeing at Eikones.

“The Moral Pixel” (2022, Working Paper) looks at how computer vision analyzes images and asks a fundamental question about meaning : what would happen if we go beyond the figure/ground dichotomy that is so foundational to formal image analysis? The paper then outlines different moral components of image analysis and their consequences for sociological work using automated image or video analysis.

“Erasing Hitler” (2022, Working Paper) is a hermeneutic paper on images that explores the consequences of artists Jake and Dinos Chapman defacing Adolf Hitler’s watercolor paintings by painting rainbows and hearts over them. Building on this anecdote, the paper theorizes questions of authenticity and of epistemic backstops in testimonial and archival practices, both for physical and digital materials.

“Consider the Scallop (Scallop Gallop)” (2020) asks fundamental questions about the nature of perception. My first virtual reality exhibition, it was shown at the MIT Museum Studio between December 2020 - April 2021, as part of a group exhibition called “Total Internal Reflection.”

“Untitled” (2020, ongoing), collaborative project with Fiona Rose Greenland. We track the development of “untitled” works of art in art price and visual content over the 20th century.

My main interests in qualitative work center on questions of classification, epistemology, and translation.

“Life on File: Archival Epistemology and Theory” (2020) provides a framework for sociological analysis in and through archives. The article is part of a special issue “Archival Work as Qualitative Sociology” in the Journal Qualitative Sociology. It has also been translated into Portuguese.

“Race in Translation” (2021-) is an ongoing project with Elizabeth Onasch on how social scientists who work on race & ethnicity navigate the fraught linguistic terrain of translation.

“Hounded by Nuance, or: Freeing the B*tch from the Iron Cage” (2020, Working Paper). Analyses of classification and boundary work rely so heavily on careful attention to concepts and their deployment, and yet little attention is paid in the social sciences as to how translation, with its linguistic particularities and the diachronic temporality of concepts, impacts meaning. How does translation matter for social theory and sociology more broadly? And second, how can we theorize what happens in translation?

I enjoy reviewing books, doing public policy work and writing handbook chapters. I have written on minimum wage regulation, the politics of demographic change, and the rise of fascism.

Please see the publications section on my CV for links to the full texts of these publications.