Tag Archives: feminism

The (Laboring) Elephant in the Room

admin 24/03/2013

One of the major themes of Duke’s 7th annual Feminist Theory Workshop this weekend was  the condition of precarity. The initial conversation and configurations of the discussion of precarity revolved around the ethics of a privileged relation of the academic/scholar/researcher to an object of study that exists in precarity. However, it seemed to me, and many others, that the discussion of the ethics of such a position did not sufficiently acknowledge those of us at the… The (Laboring) Elephant in the Room

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Towards an Otherwhere

admin 23/03/2013

Last night, at Duke’s Feminist Theory Workshop, Elizabeth Povinelli presented some of her recent work around geontologies. Both in the talk and in the q&a afterwards, there were often turns to her concept of “living otherwise”—that is, living in non-normative ways.  The phrase calls up for me early twentieth century writer Vita Sackville-West’s long poem The Land (1927) in which she describes the usefulness or even necessity for “reaching out towards an otherwhere.” Here’s the line with… Towards an Otherwhere

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“Learning from Nature”

admin 17/01/2013

I attended a recent MLA roundtable on Sustainability and Pedagogy that had me thinking (again) about the relationship between the environmental/ecocritical content some of us teach and the ways in which we teach that content. As eco-conscious teachers, it’s often difficult to help students find a place between the paralysis caused by feelings of helplessness about environmental degradation and the glorification of “Nature” as something pure and, therefore, worthy of preservation. My larger research project… “Learning from Nature”

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