Alexis Shotwell

Author: alexis

  • “Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere.”

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    I am tasked with writing a review of the book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Not feeling able to actually do that, I have written this instead. This is because of course, it is impossible for me to write a review of anything Donna Haraway writes; it would be like a jellyfish…

  • Grappling with the trouble & in the wake

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    In March, we took the ferry from Bellingham, Washington, to Haines, Alaska. Getting to Haines was the last link in a chain of intense, nourishing, lovely time with friends – a wonderful and a sad thing about this driving trip that we’ve been on from Ottawa looping around the continent is seeing the distribution of…

  • A politics of imperfection, a politics of responsibility.

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    The kind folks over at the University of Minnesota Press blog posted this short piece, and I’m reproducing it here, too. Lately it seems like every day brings a new bad thing for anyone not invested in white supremacy and capitalism. As the tweet went: “First they came for the Latinos, Muslims, women, gays, poor…

  • #Viral

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    Last week, I participated in a conversation as part of the “undisciplinary” #(HASHTAG) series organized by the mighty team of Emilie Cameron, Danielle Dinovelli-Lang, Stacy Douglas, and Ummni Khan. These have been some of my favorite events at Carleton since they started a couple of years ago, since they always bring together an interesting set…

  • Teaching the material: Trigger warnings, what it is, and the ontology-epistemology thing

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    I’ve just had some wonderful time out in BC, doing interviews for the AIDS activist oral history project I’m working on and starting to look into the history of AIDS criminalization legislation out there (did you know that BC passed legislation in 1990 to send HIV positive people to former leper colonies?). I felt really…

  • Femme identification & Stranger Things

    Femme identification & Stranger Things

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    spoilers for most of season 1. I read, and appreciated a lot of Shannon Keating’s points about femininity and Hollywood horror conventions over at Buzzfeed. Its central point is a critique of the trope in pop culture requiring unfeminine girls to be made over, feminized, and rendered desirable in order to be worthy of regard.…

  • Against purity!

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    I just submitted the final edits on the book I’ve been working on, Against Purity: Living in Compromised Times. The last parts of working on a piece of writing are always a bit of a let-down, consisting as they usually do of checking references and correcting typos, and the stage I’m at makes me nervous…

  • The problem with loving whiteness

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    This was later published as part of a section in Philosophy Today on the book The problem with loving whiteness SPEP, October 2015, response to S. Sullivan’s Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism Shannon Sullivan’s work on racialization and habits, and on relationality and transaction, was important to my philosophical formation. It…