COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE: feelings, orgies, longings

===NOTE CHANGES: we meet for entire class time 12 March; Joseph talk is 1 April 

<<<SECTION II: what’s new? Neo-liberalism? New materialisms?

Anker. 2014. Orgies of Feeling. Duke. 978-0822356974. ASIN: B00NCU8PWA.

Gessen & Huff-Hannon, eds. 2014. Gay Propaganda. OR Books. 978-1939293350. ASIN: B00J7XJBWO.

Kirksey, ed. 2014. The Multispecies Salon. Duke. 978-0822356257. ASIN: B00PIKKE1C.

Povinelli. 2011. Economies of Abandonment. 978-0822350842. ASIN: B0068JZCAK.

Rodríguez. 2014. Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings. NYU. 978-0814764923. ASIN: B00L8BUIES.

FOR MIRANDA: Community: Burgett & Mendler, eds. 2014 (2nd ed). Keywords for American Cultural Studies. NYU. 978-0814708019. ASIN: B00PSKHO1.

Thursday 26 February – Anker, Gessen

Thursday 5 March – Gessen, Rodríguez

Thursday 12 March – Povinelli, Kirksey <we must miss LGBT talk after all, so plan instead:
> Friday, March 13, 2015 Colloquium with Tavia Nyong’o; 12:30pm-2pm at Taliaferro Hall 2110  

Thursday 19 March – SPRING BREAK

Thursday 26 March – Povinelli, Kirksey, Anker, Gessen, Rodríguez <ANKER AT CLASS>
[Wednesday 1 April: Miranda Joseph at LGBT Series: check out Burgett & Mendler: Community] 

Thursday 2 April – paper sessions

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Thursday 12 March – Communities of Practice: feelings, orgies, longings: when oppositional and why? 

• READ: You should have done all the Anker, Gessen, Rodríguez, Povinelli, Kirksey readings for both the last two weeks as well as this week as negotiated with our Director of Readings.
• LINKS AND WEBSITE: You should have read the work on the new TAB: communities of practice and started to play around with how to use these ideas in our discussion and analyses. What will these conceptual tools help us do? 

• RECOMMENDED: Burgett & Mendler, eds. 2014 (2nd ed). Keywords for American Cultural Studies. TERM: Cvetkovich, "Affect" (13-16). Also Acknowledgements (vii-viii), Introduction (1-7) and Note on Classroom Use (9-11).
• ADD THIS WEEK: TERM: Rodríguez, "Latino, Latina, Latin@" (146-149).
• ALSO RECOMMENDED: on the Wikipedia: "LGBT Rights in Russia," here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Russia 

• ALSO: use the web to figure out the term "pinkwashing." What work does it do for which communities of practice? COMPARE IT WITH the term "homonationalism." How do these terms work together? How have you seen them used and by whom for what purposes? Where do you find each on the web? What can you infer from all this?

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DOUBLE PRESENTATIONS! BRING IN ABSTRACT FOR PAPER SESSIONS! 

• Each TEAM will have exactly one hour to accomplish both presentation and to facilitate discussion.
• We will take a brisk 10 min break between.

• That means we will have only about twenty minutes before the end of class to catch up on loose ends and maybe to continue connections among all the readings and our thoughts. Be sure you know what you need at this time! 

For this class you should ALSO bring in an abstract for the paper you are contemplating producing for our class paper session, and in our discussions following each presentation make a point of connecting with these ideas and possibilities! We will share these with class buddies, and you will meet outside class with a buddy to discuss these at some point before, during, or just after break. THINK COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE! Note the TAB on this for details.

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NOTICE! :) What's coming up! Begin to make plans, play around on the web, figure out where you will be going with all this! 

The paper sessions and the website give us a friendly introduction and practice for professional venues, skills, and even contestations today. 

For paper sessions: 1) learning to create abstracts and using as basis for scholarly interaction; 2) you will also create a professional bio before the event, such as those you will be asked to provide in various circumstances, sometimes for conference panels or journal contributions; 3) set up for sessions, handouts, in interactive poster-session style: new practices today as conference formats are sites of experimentation.

With website: 1) you will read everyone's papers after the sessions; 2) we will offer "peer-review" to two other classmates, learning how this is done professionally and feeling out how to offer and receive suggestions; 3) a simple website for the class will function as an online academic journal for the papers produced by our class and put up after class peer-review; 4) you will each curate some form of web-based professional presence, and will link that up to your paper on the class journal website.

Here is a nice example from one of Cathy Davidson's courses at Duke. Enjoy it! Ours can be even more simple: http://dukesurprise.com  Or this: http://www.hastac.org/collections/field-notes-21st-century-literacies  Check TAB assignment fun for links to possible platforms. Learn one skill at a time, be friendly about it all, everyone learns (don't have the most skilled already person do the work for everyone). Pick something to learn and take it easy! 

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EXTRAS! 

I had added the stuff below to an earlier post, and liked the Ainsworth article myself, not as without flaws or not to be criticized, but as some introduction to interesting issues. (I never assume that something I read or suggest is flawless!) And so it is! On Facebook today more response to this essay, including a link to comments by Anne Fausto-Sterling: “Giving credit and showing chains of knowledge are part of doing science journalism in an ethical and professional manner. It does a disservice to science to pretend that all the ideas come from scientists in the current moment. The ideas in this article come from intersex activists (many of whom some of the scientists you do cite knew and worked with) as well as historians of science and biologists such as myself. Feminist theory also contributed to the growth of these ideas. Biology is not an island divorced from the rest of academia or society. It is not great journalism to pretend otherwise.” (See: http://oiiuk.org/975/musing-on-binary-essentialism/  )

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[OPTIONAL READING NOW, BUT WE MAY WISH TO REFER TO LATER: Claire Ainsworth (2015). Sex redefined: The idea of two sexes is simplistic. Biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that. Nature 518 (19 February 2015): 288-291. doi:10.1038/518288a.  http://www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews  ]

Saw this on Facebook and like this science writer summary of findings since the nineties. Interesting elements perhaps in the narration, visualization, communication of intra-body action too. Could be understood to be the kind of knowledges that new materialisms might wish to work out and with and inspect and analyze.... What sorts of politics are appropriate for such analysis? What tactics are "friendly" to including new sciences while also being carefully aware of their ideological agencies?

The new sciences of epigenetics are involved here, "turning genes on and off" as the popular press tends to put it, a new set of mechanisms for what was, until relatively recently, understood as a scientific fallacy, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, sometimes denominated Lamarckism.  A Soviet version of that  was debunked as Lysenkoism. You may wish to nose around on the web and begin to become familiar with these terms and issues.

Menopausal killer whales are family leaders: http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2015/03/menopausal-killer-whales-are-family-leaders  

Getting Personal: Anne Fausto-Sterling on gene expression and individuality: http://bostonreview.net/wonders/anne-fausto-sterling-getting-personal-gene-expression

The emergence of individuality in genetically identical mice: http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-emergence-of-individuality-in-genetically-identical-mice

Mental health is a complex, interactive dance of nature and nurture: http://www.psypost.org/2015/03/mental-health-is-a-complex-interactive-dance-of-nature-and-nurture-32348

The environment and schizophrenia: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v468/n7321/full/nature09563.html