The Cerritos College Visual and Cultural Studies Program is a first-of-its-kind interdisciplinary AA degree unique in the California Community College system. Building upon such traditional programs as Art History, Film Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Gender Studies, students are free to mix and match across a broad range of areas of specialization. The six papers and one short narrative assembled in this sixth volume of the self-published journal, VIEWS, present just a sampling of the many papers and independent research projects pursued by students enrolled in courses within the program this year.

The past and the present are rarely as far apart as they may seem and the essays collected here make this quite clear, either by examining the historical context of contemporary practices or by looking at the past through a contemporary lens. For example, Eunice Selvas explores the impact the urban redesign of Paris had on the bourgeois lifestyles captured by the Impressionist painters. Clarissa Soto traces the evolution of silhouette portraiture from a tool of scientific racism to the challenging imagery of Kara Walker. Julie Gallo ties Kristeva’s conception of the abject to depictions of women by male artists in order to unpack the ways women artists have used blood as a medium to provoke patriarchal norms. Jeremy Nunez views various ecologically-based contemporary artworks through the philosophical lens of object-oriented ontology and posthumanism. Cerrik Chin links the development of early automatons to Enlightenment-era questions about free will and the nature of human consciousness. Srivatsan Balaji examines the resurgence of androgyny in contemporary fashion design. And Kephon Wandix speculates about what he, or anyone really, might learn from a life long lived.

Individually, these papers represent milestone achievements for these young scholars; together, however, they represent the very best of Cerritos College’s Visual and Cultural Studies program.