Workshop by Kathleen Stewart

Ordinary Affects

March 18, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Kelly Writer's House

Emerging descriptions of the self (and the world of its objects) point to something fluid but intense, relational but material and embodied, spectral but experienced. This workshop explores the kinds of ethnographic writing experiments that begin from these nascent senses of the self in the world to articulate a particular ethnographic perspective and a kind of autoethnography that lives not in the land of navel gazing, but in a world of matter, affects, impacts, and the particularity of events. The workshop will include writing exercises and readings.

Workshop participants should bring a short writing sample for reading aloud, and/or something from their ethnographic research they would like to write stories about.

Reading
Cultural Poesis: The Generativity of Emergent Things

Biosketch

Kathleen Stewart teaches anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin and is the director of the Americo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies. Her first book, A Space
on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an "Other" America (Princeton, 1996) was recognized by the Chicago Folklore Prize and the Victor Turner Prize for best ethnography. Her current project, Ordinary Impacts: The Affective Life of U.S. Public Culture (in press, Duke University Press), is a story of an everyday life buoyed and pierced by surging affects, volatile imaginaries, dense materializations, and the direct excitation of the senses. It traces these intensities as they course through complex, internally-riven modes of agency, technologies, sensibilities, flows of power and money, daydreams, institutions, dramas, bodily states, modes of attention, and ways of experiencing time and space.

 
Registration Information

To register, send an e-mail to Veronica Aplenc vaplenc@sas.upenn.edu with your name, departmental affiliation, status in graduate program (e.g. in coursework; ABD and before research; in fieldwork; writing up), project title, and brief project description (short paragraph). If you wish to sign up for more than one workshop, please rank the workshops in order of your preference, so that we may accommodate as many registrants as possible with their first choices.

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