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.
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.
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 […]
Sitting in the back of the Wisconsin Room in the UW-Milwaukee Student Union, it is October 25th, 2018 and I am doing my very best to fade into the background at tonight’s Distinguished Lecture by Roxane Gay. As the leaders of a campus multicultural sorority introduce both the moderator Dr. Amber Tucker (MKE LGBT+ Community […]
Taking a seat amid the twinkling blue lights that lined either side of the aisles in Curtin 175, I arrived at the October 5th lecture by Dr. N. Katherine Hayles expecting an encounter with material semiotics and notions of digital bodies. What I experienced was even more: a riveting discussion of symbiosis, cognitive assemblages and questions of the world to come as compared […]
Having arrived at its 50th anniversary a markedly different entity than when it was first founded, it is particularly fitting that the theme uniting the Center for 21st Century’s work for the past year was In the Eschaton. Grappling with issues of shifting ideals, transition, endings and resurrections, six scholars took to the podium in […]