Photo Credit: learner.org At the end of my three years serving as a member of the Watershed Collective, I’m poised to shed the graduate chrysalis and move into the next phase of my academic career. So it’s no surprise that I’m drawn to theoretical and cultural representations of transition, upheaval, and change--fascinated by processes of becoming. With this orientation in mind, I appreciate the opportunity to reflect, not only on the phenomenal collection of posts shared by

Last Friday evening, February 9th, João Moreira Salles visited the Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center to screen his new documentary film essay No Intenso Agora (In the Intense Now). Following the screening of the film—which was presented as a part of the Ross’s Norman A. Geske Cinema Showcase as well as the Humanities on the Edge lecture series—Salles appeared for a Q&A with the audience. No Intenso Agora combines archival footage, both professional and found amateur footage,

Photo Credit: dreamstime.com As I read and reread the collection of posts our Watershed team has contributed this semester (15 truly stellar pieces of writing in all), I was struck by their shared commitment to expanding theory’s reach beyond the computer screen and into the world. These texts are saturated with calls to action, reorienting readers toward the pursuit of praxis. Although I teach writing and consider myself mathematically challenged, there is one equation I con

“Humanity can progress of its own accord” were the last words of Professor Ronald Judy’s lecture, “Restless Flying from Haiti to Tunisia: What is ‘After Revolution’ Anyway?” I begin this review with the conclusion of Dr. Judy’s lecture solely for this reason: after-revolution is just the beginning point of imagining the full capacity of our humanity. At the heart of this year’s Humanities on the Edge series is the concept of “Post Revolutionary Futures." The second lecture of

The Humanities on the Edge lectures for this academic year take on the question of “Post-Revolutionary Futures.” If Timothy Brown’s recent lecture on the events of 1968 and the Russian Revolution laid the historical groundwork for asking the question, “Is revolution still possible?,” next week’s lecture by Ronald Judy promises to approach this question in terms of the very conditions of imagining revolution and what may follow it. On Thursday, October 19th, at 5:30pm in the S

“Watershed” is a loaded term, though it has two general definitions. The first of these, which comes from the natural sciences, is articulated by the United States Geological Survey as “an area of land that drains all the streams and rainfall to a common outlet such as the outflow of a reservoir, mouth of a bay, or any point along a stream channel. […] Watersheds are important because the streamflow and the water quality of a river are affected by things, human-induced or not

In a recent interview with BURNAWAY, Kirsten Pai Buick explains what she means by the problem of art history’s black subject, stating that she means problem in “two ways.” First that “problem” designates the artist as someone who is not a white male -- that to be a non-white non-male artist is to be expected to “reproduce your identity very simply in your art.” This is to say that the white male is a blank-canvas (so to speak) that is allowed to execute the “mind, hand and ge

Exposed isn’t a manifesto. It also isn’t a metaphor. Stacy Alaimo’s most recent book, Exposed: Environmental Politics & Pleasures in Posthuman Times, argues from the first sentence that “the Anthropocene is no time to set things straight” (1). This pun, as readers of the book quickly deduce, relates to the use of the word straight. On one hand, straight, meaning right or correct, refers to the impossibility of stopping or adjusting course now that the Anthropocene, the sixth

On an evening between the old travel ban and the new one, more than forty days and forty nights after having bid farewell to the first African American, bi-racial president, Alexandre Da Costa continued the conversation on “Post-Racial Futures?” (emphasis on the question mark) with his lecture “Towards a Hemispheric Critique of the Post-Racial.” Public praise for the post-racial, Da Costa explained, is a rhetorical and conceptual smoke screen. It hinges on a strategy of obfus

About two or three years ago, I joined a couple of my friends from high school to have dinner with our old American history teacher. This is a man we respected as an exemplar of good character, an intelligent man who had provoked us those years ago to think critically in new ways about the issues that have shaped our country and the debates that formed our American structures and institutions. The conversation that night, however, felt strangely alien to me despite how predic