Kathleen Stewart Visit

Lecture: Thursday, Feb. 9th at 3:30pm (Reception, 5pm). British Studies Room, Norlin Library, M549
Workshop: Friday, Feb. 10th, 10am–2pm. Lunch provided. Conference Room 245. UMC.

About Kathleen Stewart: Katie Stewart (Anthropology, Professor, UT-Austin) 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 worlding.

Thursday Evening Lecture: Writing Affect ~ Composing Precarity

In this talk, Stewart will discuss how 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) 

Friday Workshop:  

Writing matters if objects of analysis are to be understood as emergent forms with qualities, intensities, and trajectories that can be described or evoked. Writing is not epiphenomenal to thought but its medium. As it sidles up to worlds, disparate and incommensurate things throw themselves together. (Precarity’s Forms, Cultural Anthropology, 27, 2012)

The Friday workshop will be devoted to the practice of writing ourselves into our worlds as emergent and disparate ensembles.  The workshop leader, Kathleen Stewart, will introducing the speculative concept of ‘worlding’ that appears win philosophy, criticism, digital studies, and cultural study. We will consider our writing as an inscription that configures the spaces of form and event in daily living.  The price of admission to this workshop is a 500 word same of the author’s choosing.  We will not circulate the samples before hand and will instead read each piece aloud, actively listening, and then interspersing talk among the group.  The process of sharing, hearing, questioning, and proposing—for oneself and for the sake of others—is intended to help everyone, regardless of their station in life, to start to think through a project or concept by working with words.

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All events are open and free to the public. Advance Registration Required for Workshop Only. To register for writing workshop or to ask questions, email john.ackerman@colorado.edu. 

This Event is Sponsored by:   Program for Writing and Rhetoric, A&S

                                                   The WRITE Lab 

                                                   Department of Communication, CMCI

                                                   Department of Anthropology, A&S

                                                   Department of Women & Gender Studies, A&S