Watershed

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The Space Betwixt and Between:
Watershed Moments from Spring 2018

The Space Betwixt and Between: Watershed Moments from Spring 2018

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

Seeing '68: HotE Review, "No Intenso Agora" ("In the Intense Now")

Seeing '68: HotE Review, "No Intenso Agora" ("In the Intense Now")

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,

The Power of Praxis: Reflections on a Watershed Semester

The Power of Praxis: Reflections on a Watershed Semester

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

Poetic Flight: HotE Review, Ronald Judy

Poetic Flight: HotE Review, Ronald Judy

“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

Restless Imagination: HotE Preview, Ronald Judy

Restless Imagination: HotE Preview, Ronald Judy

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: Retrospective on a Semester

Watershed: Retrospective on a Semester

“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

Humanities on the Edge Preview: Kirsten Pai Buick

Humanities on the Edge Preview: Kirsten Pai Buick

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

Book Review: 'Exposed' by Stacy Alaimo

Book Review: 'Exposed' by Stacy Alaimo

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

Our So-Called Progress: Humanities on the Edge Review, Alexandre Da Costa

Our So-Called Progress: Humanities on the Edge Review, Alexandre Da Costa

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

The Post-Racial Ideology: HotE Preview, Alexandre Da Costa

The Post-Racial Ideology: HotE Preview, Alexandre Da Costa

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

The Exuberant Silence of an Overabundant Life

The Exuberant Silence of an Overabundant Life

Review of All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage by Peter Szendy, Translated by Roland Végső "They might listen if I make no sound." (Agnes Obel, “Mary,” Citizen of Glass) The listener crouches behind the text, and though he listens alone, it would not be quite right to say that there is not a sense of timidity in the subtle voyeurism of the act. Reading theory seems so often like this - a listening, perhaps too closely, and whatever we are able to say after all has been overh

Humanities on the Edge Preview: Sue J. Kim

Humanities on the Edge Preview: Sue J. Kim

In the introduction to her 2009 book, Critiquing Postmodernism in Contemporary Discourse of Race, Sue J. Kim writes that she “critique[s] the epistemology and politics of what [she] refers to as “otherness postmodernism’” (Kim 1). This “otherness postmodernism” that Kim critiques is that group of critical tendencies based upon the creation and privileging of a dichotomy of sameness and difference, in particular as it applies to race and gender. Drawing upon Slavoj Zizek, Kim

Humanities on the Edge Lecture Review: Milton S. F. Curry

Humanities on the Edge Lecture Review: Milton S. F. Curry

Amid a year (that is, another year) tempest-tossed by a seemingly endless cycle of black Americans reported dead at the hands of the state, we begin our seventh year of Humanities on the Edge lectures, this time oriented around the question of post-racial futures. The exigency of the theme is therefore obvious. Introducing Milton S. F. Curry, Associate Dean at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning as well as our first speaker of the y

Humanities on the Edge Preview: Milton S. F. Curry

Humanities on the Edge Preview: Milton S. F. Curry

In the introductory speech to the 2011 Curating Race Curating Space Symposium at the University of Michigan Museum of Modern Art, Milton S.F. Curry states that the intellectual project of architecture “requires more than inclusion and diversity as appeasement strategies, it requires direct engagement with persons, bodies, and subjectivities that are the objects of our discourse” (1). This is to say that the task of architecture is both to take up the conceptualization and rec

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

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.)

I Really Don't Know Clouds At All: HotE Lecture Review, John Durham Peters

I Really Don't Know Clouds At All: HotE Lecture Review, John Durham Peters

Last Thursday evening, John Durham Peters visited campus to deliver the final Humanities on the Edge lecture of the semester. Entitled “Do Clouds Have Meaning? On the Relation Between Media and Nature,” the lecture raised fundamental questions about what aspects of reality we choose to imbue with meaning, what ways we find to interpret our environment, and what this relation may tell us about ourselves. Peters began his presentation with the comment that his drive here from I

Humanities on the Edge Preview: John Durham Peters

Humanities on the Edge Preview: John Durham Peters

Photo Credit: Bill Manning In preparation for the upcoming Humanities on the Edge Lecture by John Durham Peters, the A. Craig Professor in the Department of Communication and Professor of International Studies at the University of Iowa, this post will review a previous lecture entitled, “‘What is Knowledge For’ and What Does Communications Have to do With It?” The lecture was given at the 100th Annual Convention of the National Communication Association in Chicago in 2014. Fr

Humanities on the Edge Lecture Review: Saya Woolfalk

Humanities on the Edge Lecture Review: Saya Woolfalk

Fig. 1. Empathics dancing in the "Star Compulsion" formation Saya Woolfalk’s installations, performances, and multimedia work imagine the future in the terms of Afrofuturism, extending a tradition that includes “the music of Sun Ra and George Clinton and science-fiction novels by Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler” (Johnson). Jonathan Walz, Curator of American Art at the Sheldon Museum, said that her art encourages a dynamics of empathy, which is “needed now more than ever.”

The Business of Asking Questions: Saya Woolfalk’s Bodies of Work

The Business of Asking Questions: Saya Woolfalk’s Bodies of Work

Artist Saya Woolfalk’s works in paint, soft sculpture, installation, and video playfully and powerfully re-imagine the possibilities of being human. Using color, sculptural costumes, performance, and storytelling, the New York artist simultaneously envisions a future utopia and critiques the shortcomings of contemporary society. Woolfalk will discuss three recent, inter-related bodies of work—No Place, The Empathics, and ChimaTEK—in a Humanities on the Edge lecture at the She

Humanities on the Edge Preview: “Saya Woolfalk: World Builder”

Humanities on the Edge Preview: “Saya Woolfalk: World Builder”

Saya Woolfalk, ChimaTEK Beta Launch, 2014, installation view, (Photo credit: ArtMag 85) On March 3, the Humanities on the Edge lecture series will welcome visual artist Saya Woolfalk to speak about her work. Woolfalk will be the series’ 23rd speaker—and its first visual artist. Woolfalk’s art provides a unique perspective on HotE’s theme for this year, “Posthuman Futures.” In her artist statement, Woolfalk writes: “My work considers the idea that symbolic and ideological syst

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