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Safety Orange
How fluorescent orange symbolizes the uneven distribution of safety and risk in the neoliberal United States
Safety Orange first emerged in the 1950s as a bureaucratic color standard in technical manuals and federal regulations in the United States. Today it is most visible in the contexts of terror, pandemic, and environmental alarm systems; traffic control; work safety; and mass incarceration. In recent decades, the color has become ubiquitous in American public life—a marker of the extreme poles of state oversight and abandonment, of capitalist excess and dereliction. Its unprecedented saturation encodes the tracking of those bodies, neighborhoods, and infrastructures judged as worthy of care—and those deemed dangerous and expendable. Here, Anna Watkins Fisher uses Safety Orange as an interpretive key for theorizing the uneven distribution of safety and care in twenty-first-century U.S. public life and for pondering what the color tells us about neoliberalism’s intensifying impact often hiding in plain sight in ordinary and commonplace phenomena.
Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
Safety Orange first emerged in the 1950s as a bureaucratic color standard in technical manuals and federal regulations in the United States. Today it is most visible in the contexts of terror, pandemic, and environmental alarm systems; traffic control; work safety; and mass incarceration. In recent decades, the color has become ubiquitous in American public life—a marker of the extreme poles of state oversight and abandonment, of capitalist excess and dereliction. Its unprecedented saturation encodes the tracking of those bodies, neighborhoods, and infrastructures judged as worthy of care—and those deemed dangerous and expendable. Here, Anna Watkins Fisher uses Safety Orange as an interpretive key for theorizing the uneven distribution of safety and care in twenty-first-century U.S. public life and for pondering what the color tells us about neoliberalism’s intensifying impact often hiding in plain sight in ordinary and commonplace phenomena.
Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
- GenresNonfiction
98 pages, Paperback
Published December 7, 2021
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23 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 26, 2024
Don’t sell me a book about safety orange and then turn it into a metaphor for global disaster and climate change. Safety/blaze orange is far too cool to disparage. This woman cites The History of Traffic Cones as a source and she doesn’t realize that that’s far more interesting than discussing the uselessness of Bush’s orange alerts. I’m here for the orange. Give me orange! Don’t give me tortured metaphors about other shades of orange. I want the one specific shade of orange. The life-saving orange! This is lame. I need to stop buying Forerunners series books just because they’re cute and they look interesting. They’re not. Except for Kill the Overseer! That one was great. Everything else in the series is an overly obscure warning about Trumpism. We know!
May 15, 2024
9/10
Always appreciate works such as these that deal with inaction in the Anthropocene, and tasty apophenia. Perhaps in and of itself, academics' tendency to correlate unremarkable entities with neoliberal agendas is Safety Orange at work yet again - harmless semiotics made hypervisible, at the same time reappropriating said Safety Orange to disrupt the status quo, turning ubiquitous, day-to-day objects into metaphors one can live by.
However, for such a surgical disquisition, the call-to-action was rather dull? The lack of a proposal for "Seeing Red" makes one wonder if it's the author's own roundabout tongue-in-cheek callback to her own argument, getting the reader all riled up with zero guidance as to what follows.
In any case, I liked it. Read it.
Always appreciate works such as these that deal with inaction in the Anthropocene, and tasty apophenia. Perhaps in and of itself, academics' tendency to correlate unremarkable entities with neoliberal agendas is Safety Orange at work yet again - harmless semiotics made hypervisible, at the same time reappropriating said Safety Orange to disrupt the status quo, turning ubiquitous, day-to-day objects into metaphors one can live by.
However, for such a surgical disquisition, the call-to-action was rather dull? The lack of a proposal for "Seeing Red" makes one wonder if it's the author's own roundabout tongue-in-cheek callback to her own argument, getting the reader all riled up with zero guidance as to what follows.
In any case, I liked it. Read it.
August 30, 2022
One of those academic essays that takes a seemingly-mundane topic and spins it out into a state-of-the-world polemic, here using the warning color as a key to understanding a society in which a perpetual state of crisis is the new status quo.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews