Category: Uncategorized
-
Shary Boyle, Outside the Palace of Me – Virtual Spotlight Tour: Whiteness
(this was an access copy for a conversation about this work, Thursday, May 12, 1 – 2pm EST) On the stage of this show, but also in our lives, we enact different roles; our expressive intent does not control the interpretive uptake we might receive. Thus talking about something like whiteness invites us to dwell…
-
Ethical orientations toward repair in climate change
Hamburg, 21 April 2022 (this was the access copy for the live version of this talk) Jesuit priest, pacifist, and anti-nuclear activist Danial Berrigan once gave a famously short convocation speech at a New York high school. He came on stage and said only: “Know where you stand and stand there.” I’m interested in both…
-
Claiming bad kin (the published version)
A couple of people have asked for the actual final copy of this piece – it came out in this great broadsheet published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, available in a pdf in an issue called “Bearing.” I’m revising it for the book I’m working on, but of course that takes…
-
Solidarity Against Straightness – access copy
University of Hamburg, Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter Philosophisches Seminar November 22, 2021 My core argument in this piece is: We should be in solidarity against straightness. I want to be on the side of straight people, against straightness as norm, institution, and system. While my own political orientation remains toward queerness of many sorts, I’ve come to…
-
Choose your fighter
Writing advice! I have given so much of it. As part of a general feeling of not knowing what the fuck I’m doing, I’ve been revisiting giving advice at all. In particular, I’ve been wondering if it’s ever good to give writing advice. This is because it is literally my job to teach people to…
-
Not letting a quote hang in space
We often hear, or tell our students, not to just let quotes hang out in space. Sometimes we say that they should not end a paragraph with a quote, or that it’s important to explain why the quote is there, in the chapter or paper or whatever. This exercise is to warm up how to…
-
Containment vs Care
Against the Grain consistently offers incredible programming about social movements, history, books, ideas, and contemporary issues. They’ve been doing episodes on the politics of pandemics, including a number where they talked with experts who study pandemics and, latterly, people who more do analysis (like me). I was really happy to speak with Sasha Lilley last…
-
Good Old Freewriting
I think Peter Elbow’s great book Writing Without Teachers was the first place I encountered a rationale for freewriting. Freewriting’s a really useful technology for academic writers in particular. The how of freewriting is very simple: You set a timer, usually for quite a short time (5-7 minutes) and write without stopping, editing, reading what…
-
On not writing about what we love
I read a piece somewhere. I can’t find it now but I think about it often enough that maybe some of what I think about it wasn’t actually there. Anyhow, I remember that it made an argument for Peter Schjeldahl as a significant critic in part because of a pedagogical mode in his critical writing.…
-
Grounding in why we write – internal and external motivations
In my thesis writing class this term we discussed Joe Kadi’s brilliant piece “Stupidity ‘Deconstructed’,” which looks at the experience of working-class people in the university. I teach this piece alongside Eli Clare’s book Exile and Pride pretty much as often as I can, because I find them both incredibly nuanced, beautifully done, and useful…