This summer, i was lucky enough to participate in the inaugural modern and contemporary studies initiative summer institute at penn state. Necessarily germinal, the paper i presented gestures the first dissertation chapter i’m working on, tentatively titled ‘the subject after postmodernism: Barad, Levinas, and Intra-Active Ethics’. A pdf of the presentation can be found below.

[excerpt]: In a way, I’m interested in what feels like an unresolvable tension between present and future. Rather than exchange one for the other, I’m trying to work through ethical practices and models of intra-activity to reconfigure the possibility of a different future from our situatedness in the present—to expand the horizon of possibilities from what feels like stasis. Towards this end, we might think beyond our immediate relation to other humans and nonhumans by attending to our imbrication with and within a larger and longer ecology which we both (co)inhabit and (co)produce—deep time, to an extent. I’m asking us to think about complicity alongside—rather than beyond—the kind of face to fact ethical encounters with which we might be familiar by seeking the impersonal lurking in all matter(s) human or otherwise. It’s not about abandoning current ethical projects, but recognizing and multiply the vantage from which we attend to those projects.

‘the subject after postmodernism: Barad, Levinas, and Intra-Active Ethics‘