Full title for this post = Scholarly enterprise: quilting, loping, slutting it up casting my line
I just attended a graduate workshop/mini-conference at the GC entitled “Failure,” an annual event hosted by the Social and Political Theory Student Association. I was there for about 11 hours and when I left, the stimulating conversations were very much still going on. What an event! Young and burgeoning scholars from the fields of political science, English, sociology, feminist studies, critical race theory, education, etc., etc. The room was lively from the get-go and while I was intimidated at various points, the joy of the exchange, the interlacing of minds was beyond thrilling.
So much to say, but I will share what I presented on today and then some of the ideas I have bookmarked to look into (the plethora and thrum of which I could never fully encapsulate in a blog post).
My talk: “‘Low-status’ adult immigrant learners in non-profit education: Framing failure as a first step in pedagogy and academia.” The basic summary is this: The non-profit education of adult immigrants invisible-izes and dehumanizes these learners while serving neoliberal and societal interests in the United States. This form of education must be challenged for its reliance on the discursive construction of adult immigrants in the American narrative, the paternalistic ways in which non-profit education takes place in terms of pedagogy and programming, and the related myopia in the American academy of a monoculturalist, America-centric ideological tradition that reifies a theoretical regime premised on historically-constructed cultural categories (especially race, but also language, class, and other terms) as well as the paternalistic prescription of pedagogy as a unidirectional process.
Areas of interest for the future (in no particular order):
- Ahmed, “The Promise of Happiness”
- Bourdieu’s concepts of “field” and “habitus”
- Ranciere, “The Hatred of Democracy”
- Butler’s discussion of livability (and her discussion of the delegation of sovreignty)
- The semantic confusion of the ethical and the economic in framing terrorism and violence
- Halberstam
- Securitization theory
- J. Munoz
- Fricker, “Epistemic Injustice”
- Ambiguity as a challenge to binarisms in academic thinking
- Linda Alcott
- Bradotti, “Nomadic Subjects”
- Jose Medina
- “Anthropocine”
- Tessman, “Moral Failure”
- Postmodernist feminist literature on “everyday resistance”
- Total Revolution
What a delightfully exhausting day!
