Critical insights from C21's Tennessen Scholars
Josh Rivers discusses how the systems created to purportedly support “security”: the state, the military, the police, borders, and so on exist not to ensure safety but to enact surveillance. In doing so, they produce insecure subjects.
Tennessen Scholar Joni Hayward reflects on some of the more striking connections between our recent Insecurity conference and the insecurity and precarity that underscore life as a graduate student.
Josh Rivers points out how understanding -cenes as a coalescing of contingencies into a present historical condition (rather than simply temporal epochs) helps inform Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing’s notion of the Plantationocene. Specifically, understanding the Plantationocene as a present systemic condition allows us to think more productively about Haraway’s “attachment sites”—the small, often transactional moments where larger systems of production connect with individual lives and vice versa.
Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing used their discussion of the newly termed Plantationocene to enhance and contextualize our contemporary notion of the Anthropocene. Specifically, the Plantationocene refers to the shift in conditions caused by the invention of the plantation, an apparatus that caused the “re-doing of worlds” by re-ordering environmental and economic systems on a global scale.
During this April 5 roundtable discussion, Jenna Freedman (Barnard College Library, New York), Milo Miller (UW-Milwaukee and the Queer Zine Archive Project) and Lane Hall (English, UW-Milwaukee) discussed some of the best practices for collecting, digitizing and sharing zines.
Visual culture theorist, activist and a professor of media, culture, and communication Nicholas Mirzoeff recently visited UWM to discuss “Whiteness and the Crisis.” His talk addressed how white supremacy and whiteness as an ideology have been able to reproduce and revive themselves, despite the long period in which multiculturalism or diversity and antiracism have been widely and actively discussed in our society.
Mirzoeff’s lecture focused on historical statues and the racist ideologies often embedded within them. Drawing on the Marxian and anti-colonial theories of Stuart Hall and Frantz Fanon, Mirzoeff expanded on Fanon’s idea of “the world of statues,” explaining that if we view whiteness as a statue—in the sense that they are idealized, composite forms of whiteness—we can interrogate the hierarchies that continue to operate within them.
On Friday, March 8, staff, faculty, and a smattering of graduate students gathered in Curtin 175 for a half-day symposium titled “Power and Gendered Labor in the Academy.” The symposium worked to expand discussions about sexual assault and violence—ones that so often begin with the statement #MeToo. While rape culture and patriarchy are surely to blame for the preponderance of sexual assault, the panelists and keynote speaker encouraged audience members to shift our analytical gaze to consider also the intersection of gender, power, and labor—here, they suggested, is a new space for reflection and eventual change within the academy.
Back on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s campus after nearly two months away, I am once more tucked into my favorite nook in Curtin 175 while I eagerly await Jane Gallop’s talk on her recently released monograph, Sexuality, Disability, and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus (2019, Duke University Press). This work promises to connect several intersecting […]
We are living in the Anthropocene era, when humans are the leading power influencing the earth’s future. Environmental systems and ecological processes are clearly in action; however, it is hard to understand their expressions apart from human activities. On his lecture on November 1st at UWM, entitled as “Embattled Earth: Commodities, Conflict and Climate Change […]
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