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.
Tag Archives: theory
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.
Niceties
(Found this in my drafts folder in January 2018; it is unfinished, but I’ve lost the thread of my thought, so I am back-posting it now)
On Canada Day, post-Brexit and pre-US Presidential Vote, I was feeling the Canadian smugness, not going to lie. Something about having spent almost a year now with a government that seems a lot saner and less deliberately apocalyptic than the last has put part of my brain at a dangerous ease, and I slipped more readily into the national myth than I have for years. Isn’t it a nice feeling, to be Canadian? Isn’t it nice that we’re just so nice?
We’ve been telling ourselves that for decades, now. Even last year this time, when anxiety over the Harper Government was at its height, a lot of the criticism could be boiled down to a concern that we had become, as a country, not very nice. We love this myth. The world loves this myth.
Planet Cancer: Some Speculation on Anthropocentrism & Ecological After-Images of Humanity
I came across an article the other night on concrete (The Problem with Reinforced Concrete) that, after reading halfway through, I retweeted to remind myself to read fully the next morning.* And I have, and it’s a fascinating glimpse into one aspect of the how of urban decay aesthetic so beloved by cyberpunks, and an equally fascinating rebuke of the conceit of many twentieth-century far-future science fiction novels where all that is left of humanity is their concrete.