Hmm.
A new publication, in Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies.
Intimacies of Rock
Ethnographic Considerations of Posthuman Performativity in Canada’s Rocky Mountains
Here’s the Abstract:
This essay engages feminist science studies and theories of performativity to inject with dynamism familiar figurations of static being. Through the modalities of ethnographic writing, memory, and embodied experience, I enact a lively engagement with Canada’s Rocky Mountains. By shifting the way we understand this unique, constitutive feature of the Canadian West, I suggest an approach to ethics that expands categories of agency, disaggregating it from realms of human exceptionalism. Through the analytic of performativity, I attend to the dynamic and agentive capacity/ies of glacial bodies, mountains, and lichen—nonhuman bodies considered passive and inert by prevailing epistemologies—to make/materialize meaning. I animate the argument that what we call nature is not a passive, immutable surface on which culture is inscribed, but rather is the production of active, agential practices, each containing divergent wills to power immanent with the capacity to make cuts of their own. The aim of this writing is to think through how mountains, and other such complex living systems, might pose a necessary series of questions to prevailing epistemologies and systems of epistemological capture.
I’m particularly interested in the part about the dynamic and agentive capacities of glacial bodies, mountains, and lichen, and the description of them as nonhuman bodies considered passive and inert by prevailing epistemologies. I’m deeply curious about the non-prevailing (the marginalized, the minority, the Other) epistemologies that consider rocks and mountains active agents. I’m very curious about what kind of will to power a mountain can have. I also wonder how feminism comes into it.
Comments
16 responses to “The posthuman performativity of the Canadian Rockies”
You’re certain this isn’t a joke?
I sincerely hope it is a joke.
Well I’m not certain of anything, but it’s dressed up as an academic paper.
“I’m very curious about what kind of will to power a mountain can have.”
Avalanches! Unstoppable!
“I also wonder how feminism comes into it.”
Um… It’s also going to crush them like bugs?
(There better not have been any taxpayer-funded grants behind this, unless it’s an elaborate joke. Which it just has to be.)
“I also wonder how feminism comes into it.”
My guess: “prevailing epistemologies” view nature as “passive and inert” because it has been gendered as female. Culture is gendered as male, thus it is seen as an active force that phallocratically “inscribes” itself upon passive nature, a process that serves as a metaphor for the degrading ritual of PIV intercourse.
Not with writing like that. Academese is great for bullshitting, not so good for lively engaged animated argument.
http://pseudoacademic.com/
Julius Caesar knew all about this; why else would he talk about Gallia Cisalpina and Gallia Transalpina?
Especially with mountains!
And that’s just the abstract!
Now, if it was about the Grand Tetons…
I searched for “femin” to capture feminist, feminism, and all the other permutations. I got four hits. One is in the abtract, another in the keywords, another in the bibliography, and the fourth in the author biography.
Or, more plainly, it isn’t in the paper at all.
She does bang on rather a lot about lichen, though. So that’s nice.
My background is in medicine and physical science so I have to make great efforts to restrain myself from starting to rant about social science when I read this kind of thing. As in, “THIS IS NOT SCIENCE!!11!!!!1!”
Then I have to have a sit down and a nice drink and remind myself that not all social science is like this.
It could be a joke but I’ve seen almost as daft papers that have been real. Often the problem is that we don’t understand the jargon and concepts implicit in the study – after all, jargon doesn’t mean what it literally means.
This one still makes me want to bang my head against a wall though.
Random output from Monash U’s PoMoGenerator program? Lovely.
If it’s a joke, it’s one they are prepared to charge $30 for. That would lay them open to charges of fraud.
This paper would have been instantly rejected by ethnography journals as well as geography journals; but unfortunately such examples of peseudoscience junk academic research is still accepted by postmodern outlets and it is dominant (made popular by newage writings of Bruno Latour and Karen Barad under the guise of scholarship) where rhetoric is played as evidence of research.