Writing Affect ~ Composing Precarity
with Kathleen Stewart (UT-Austin)
Thurs, Feb 9
3:30-5:00 pm
Norlin British & Irish Studies Room
Ethnography's mantra of grounded writing, or writing from the ground, potentially enables attention to the shakenness of difference encountered or imagined... What kind of "ground" is it, then, that sends people bouncing, takes place as a threshold, hits the senses as a set of provocations, or presents as a problematic sensed in circuits of reaction already set in motion? (The Point of Precision, Representations, 135, 2016)
Kathleen Stewart writes and teaches on affect, the ordinary, the senses, and modes of ethnographic engagement based on curiosity and attachment. Her first book, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an 'Other' America (Princeton University Press, 1996) portrays a dense and textured layering of sense and form laid down in social use. Ordinary Affects (Duke University Press, 2007) maps the force, or affects, of encounters, desires, bodily states, dream worlds, and modes of attention and distraction in the composition and suffering of present moments lived as immanent events. Her current project, Worlding, tries to approach ways of collective living through or sensing out. An attunement that is also a worldling.