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Disembodied bodies

 A map like this, which posits "risk" by predetermined structural parameters, can be very powerful for conjuring an applied approach to mitigating toxic exposure. However, as you state in your text, images are geared and constructed for specific audiences, and when looking at this map I am left to wonder who is motivated to action? Color-coded displays on maps that denote differences tend to make the viewer immediately look for their home, their risk. I am struck also by the lack of presence of the exposed here. It could serve to reify the disembodiment of the marginal in data.

Chae Yoo: Visualizing Lead Risk

This image communicates the 'potential' of lead poisoning. I appreciated this image as an ethnographic object because, as the author points out, it represents the gap between reality and public discourse on lead poisoning. This object delivers the importance of imagining what is yet unknown.

Alice Chen: Visualizing Lead Risk

This image is usefu as an ethnographic text in so far that the author does well in explicating the socially contingent impact of exposure to lead to particular communities. In addition, while the map is primairly focused on macro-level data, the author does a strong job of describing how the forms of knowledge contained in the map are bound to the way poisoning is obscured from the general public. By doing so, the author is implicitly revealing how this (state/local) failure to visualize toxicity is prolonging poisoning.