Basically, what it sounds like. The author reached out to me over email back in December and we had a conversational back-and-forth and this is the result. Give it a read and let me know what you think.
Category Archives: Academics
Saviour Syndrome: thoughts-in-process
I’ve noticed a trend, lately, in a lot of the circles I move in or at least brush against, and it’s something I’m starting to label, since I’m coming across it so often. Help me think through this?
I’m calling it “saviour syndrome” because I’m coming across a lot of religious language and mythos from sources I would expect to be fully secular, or atheist, or at least agnostic or pagan or heavily critical of the Christian narrative. It’s frankly pretty puzzling at first, but given more thought and what I know about the origins of settler society on Turtle Island, it comes clear after a bit of thought. At least, to me. I want to know if I’m off-base or what I haven’t thought about, since this is grounded in my own experience as a cis, white, 3rd-gen Dutch settler woman who grew up in the Christian Reformed Church ethnoreligious community. So there’s a lot I might not be seeing. But this is what I have seen.
Continue reading Saviour Syndrome: thoughts-in-process
Podcast – Academics on Air
This spring, I was part of producing a podcast about a UAlberta campus radio show from 40 years ago. Check it out at https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/academics-on-air/
Talk: “From Cyberpunk to Solarpunk: The Evolution of the Future”
Hey all, just a quick note to let you know that my talk “From Cyberpunk to Solarpunk: The Evolution of the Future” for PhilosophyCon 77: Aborted Carbon is live on YouTube. The subtitles are still processing, but I hope that won’t take too long. I really enjoyed researching and creating this video, although I’m still not great at video editing – in this regard I have, as Jenna Marbles has said, a “too much” gene.
Presenting my six-year old:
Video on research
This is an older video, taken Feb 2017 (ish) where I talk a bit about my thesis project as it was at that point. It’s not evolved too too much past that, a year later, though I have written almost two chapters so far while past!me hadn’t written any.
Enjoy my glasses-less squinting and trying to look like I’m not struggling to focus on the interviewer. Forgive the um-ing and ah-ing; I hadn’t practiced this at all.
Musings
Typing posts up is exhausting and takes my mental energy away from where it needs to be (e.g. my thesis, maybe), so I’m not going to be making any more gigantic posts about theory – or, well, I won’t be pushing myself to do so, at least until my dissertation is over and done with. Life is too short to hold oneself to academic standards for writing that is non-peer-reviewed – and, let’s face it – that isn’t generally even considered by a hiring committee for a traditional academic job, or tenure review board.
On Cyborgs, part 2
Cyborg theory, in its ability to work across oppositional binaries like technology/human, culture/nature, constructed/given, helps philosophers (and thinkers in general) in forging a way forward beyond what Donna Haraway called the “informatics of domination” back in 1985: self/other, masculine/feminine, white/black, subject/object, real/virtual, heterosexual/homosexual, etc and the implicit hierarchy of the first term over the second.* Going beyond binaries, refusing to devalue integral aspects of our being, realizing that parts of our selves that we thought were inherent are actually constructs / the result of cultural forces, and then working to move forward with that knowledge. Pretty nifty, right?**
On Cyborgs, part 1
So, cyborgs. If you grew up in the 90s like me, you probably get an image of the Terminator, or the Teen Titans character, or Neo. That’s where I started, but not exactly where the theory of cyborgs started, and that’s the theory I wanna talk about in this post.
Warning: I’m pretty steeped in feminist writing praxis of framing arguments with personal experience so it may or may not get personal up in hurr.
Post-
Back in July, I was chatting over the phone with my parents, telling them about the research trip I was taking, the book I was reading, and generally the sort of life-update type things that you do when you live with two entirely separate provinces between their home and the one that you live in. I’m currently reading The Posthuman Glossary by Rosi Braidotti & Maria Hlavajova; on hearing this my parents wanted to know what I meant by posthuman. I entirely failed to explain it to them.