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Spring 2016 Semester Review: Or, How to Write a Watershed

Aubrey Streit Krug

Apr 26, 2016

Spring 2016 Semester Review: Or, How to Write a Watershed

While the Watershed collective takes a summer hiatus from writing new blog posts, we hope you’ll enjoy browsing through the sometimes flowing, sometimes halting lines of thought we spun out this spring semester. You can page backward through the archive chronologically. You can search by topical tags in the column at the right. Or you can keep scrolling for a slightly self-reflexive guide to reading—and writing—Watershed posts. Look around you. (Say it to yourself like this.)

Watershed Recommends

the Watershed collective

Jan 19, 2016

Watershed Recommends

Whether you have revisions, resolutions, or revolutions in mind at the beginning of 2016, the Watershed collective offers some reading suggestions. Theory texts we read last year and recommend: Postcomposition by Sidney I. Dobrin (2011). This provocative text argues that the field of composition needs to undertake a fundamental shift away from its current interests in pedagogy, college writing, and administrative work, and instead move toward writing itself as the predominant

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s "Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism&qu

Aubrey Streit Krug

Oct 27, 2015

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s "Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism&qu

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s 2013 essay begins with a brief but incisive genealogy of posthumanist theory, a genealogy in which scholars like Aimé Césaire and Sylvia Wynter prefigure Michel Foucault. Jackson explains that it is Foucault’s “observation that ‘man’ is a historically contingent formation” which is most often understood as urging the humanities to critically reflect on the category of “man” at the center of humanism and to move toward posthumanism. However, Césaire,

Some Knotted Thoughts on Theory

Aubrey Streit Krug

Sep 29, 2015

Some Knotted Thoughts on Theory

1. When I was an undergraduate student in an American literature survey class, I wrote an essay on Susan Glaspbell’s one-act play Trifles (1916). The play’s main characters--several men, including a sherriff and an attorney, and two women, a neighbor and the sherriff's wife--are investigating the home of a woman whose husband has been found dead. What interested me, and what I tried to analyze, was the word play the two women engage in as they interpret the domestic scene;

Humanities on the Edge Lecture Review: Cristina Rodríguez

Aubrey Streit Krug

Apr 21, 2015

Humanities on the Edge Lecture Review: Cristina Rodríguez

The 21st Humanities on the Edge speaker, Cristina Rodríguez, concluded this academic year’s focus on “States of Exception” with a talk on “Immigration Reform and the Political Value of Manufactured Crisis.” Rodríguez is Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where she is the school’s first tenured Latina law professor. Her April 16 presentation was co-sponsored by UNL’s Institute of Ethnic Studies as part of their annual Spring Celebration. Rodríguez’s ov

Recognizing and Responding to Plant Stories

Feb 4, 2015

Recognizing and Responding to Plant Stories

Scientific research into the myriad abilities of plants to recognize and respond to their environments calls into question the “common-sense” assumptions (for some cultures) that plants are passive, sedentary, and uncommunicative. At the same time, there are important differences between plants and other kinds of creatures, like animals. Revising people’s understanding of plants without inaccurately representing plants vis-à-vis animals can thus be a tricky task for science a

Review of Michael Marder’s “For a Phytocentrism to Come”

Dec 2, 2014

Review of Michael Marder’s “For a Phytocentrism to Come”

Can Western critical theory decenter anthropos, the human? The formulation of the “Anthropocene” as a geological era suggests that human impact upon the planet cannot be ignored. Yet the Anthropocene simultaneously and ironically calls attention to the anthropocentrism of some human cultures that have contributed to global environmental crises and injustices. This tension between the need to recognize and the need to depart from theories that center the human (or more properl

Weedy Environmental Justice

Nov 4, 2014

Weedy Environmental Justice

Many people mark the beginning of contemporary environmentalism with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. Carson depicts the effects of toxic chemicals, mainly pesticides, on birds, humans, and other animals. Her writing imaginatively and materially links human and non-human bodies—including humans and plants. Chapter 6 of Silent Spring begins with Carson’s recognition that “[t]he earth’s vegetation is part of a web of life in which there are intimate and

Humanities on the Edge Lecture Review: Ursula Heise

Oct 7, 2014

Humanities on the Edge Lecture Review: Ursula Heise

On Oct. 2, 2014, Ursula Heise [http://www.uheise.net/] spoke on “Biocities: Urban Futures and the Reinvention of Nature” to an attentive audience at UNL’s Sheldon Museum of Art. Heise, a professor of English and a faculty member of UCLA’s Institute of the Environment of the Sustainability, was the 17th invited guest of the Humanities on the Edge speaker series. Her lecture previewed ideas from her manuscript-in-progress, Where the Wild Things Used to Be: Narrative, Database,

Humanities on the Edge Article Review: Ursula Heise

Sep 30, 2014

Humanities on the Edge Article Review: Ursula Heise

The plants at the center of Ruth Ozeki’s 2003 novel All Over Creation are agricultural crops, in particular, the Russet Burbank potato. Ursula Heise notices how Ozeki repeatedly uses the potato as a metaphor for humans, and suggests this narrative equation demonstrates the dangers of conflating social and biological diversity. Heise’s larger point is that environmental literature and ecocriticism need a more nuanced engagement with theories of transnationalism and globalizati

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