Needless to say, it has been a strange semester for the Watershed Collective. We’ve gone from a time that made sense, with ready responses and excitement to dive into thoughts and theory throughout this semester. To deny the way that the COVID19 crisis has shaped the Watershed Collective is to deny the very way it changes our world each and every day. We took unscheduled posting breaks in response to UN...

Throughout Watershed’s history, the Collective has offered recommendations. What is a better time to dig into some critical theory than during the COVID-19 pandemic and all classes moving online? Whether you’re looking for a theoretical lens for your seminar paper, texts to add to your reading lists, or a conversation starter, Watershed has you covered. 

Photo: Princeton University Press  

Theory texts we...

I've been putting together a puzzle.

A couple of weeks ago, I felt inexplicably drawn to a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle that had been sitting in my closet for I don’t know how long. Turning for a moment from the unrelenting news coverage of COVID-19, the collapse of our routines, and a head-space of hurried, half-completed thoughts, I opened the box.

To acquiesce to being puzzled, to accept and even invite p...

Promotional Material for Sex Education Season 2. 

This post contains spoilers for both seasons of Netflix’s Sex Education.

Nearly every episode of Netflix’s series Sex Education begins with a sex scene, but none of them are particularly sexy. The first episode begins with a shot of a shaking lamp as the camera pans over an older couple. As the camera moves up to the second floor, the shaking is revea...

2020 marks the 10th year of the Humanities on the Edge series, with this year featuring a variety of female scholars across multiple disciplines. The latest in these talks was Dr. Sayek Valencia, a transfeminist philosopher, essayist, and performing artists. Valencia is currently a Professor and Researcher at the Department of Cultural Studies at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana, Baja Californ...

Transfeminist philosopher, essayist, and performance artist, Sayak Valencia, will be presenting her lecture, “From Gore Capitalism to Snuff Politics: The Body as Mass Media,” on Thursday, March 5, from 5:30-7:30 at the Sheldon Museum of Art’s Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium. Valencia is a Professor and Researcher at the Department of Cultural Studies at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana, Baja Califo...

It’s strange how you can take note of something once, and then all of a sudden, that obscure thing keeps popping up over and again. When recently teaching James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, published in 1912, I was intrigued by a passage describing the narrator’s employment in Jacksonville, Florida: because of his education, he became un lector, a reader in a cigar factory. Next...

Thursday Feb. 13 5:30-7 pm, Sheldon Museum of Art, Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium

Free and open to the public

The spring 2020’s first Humanities on the Edge lecture brings Brown University Professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media Ariella Azoulay to the Sheldon to deliver a talk, "Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism” based her 2019 book of the same name.

Azoulay’s photography and s...

This post contains spoilers of the final episode of the TV show Broad City

            Broad City's series finale serves as a metaphor for a queer version of feminism. If anyone is curious about how an identity-focused theory like feminism can resist a single-focus on women at the expense of other identities, look no further than the final scene in Broad City.

            Bro...

It is no doubt that the study of the past has been enriched by social history. Historical studies focusing on social elements within history reveal human experiences that provide readers with the “main cultural components of life” transcending analyses of the past that were initially examined through the political formation of the nation-state which left out the masses.