Small Pieces of Academia

I’ve recently stumbled on a twitter account called New Real Peer Review. The twitter account is largely (but not entirely) dedicated to posting abstracts of journal articles and links to the papers. Here’s one such abstract:

This article explores the formation of a tranimal, hippopotamus alter-ego. Confronting transgender with transpecies, the author claims that his hippopotamus “identity” allowed him to (verbally) escape, all at once, several sets of categorization that govern human bodies (“gender,” “sexuality,” age). He starts with an account of how his metaphorical hippo-self is collectively produced and performed, distinguishing the subjective, the intersubjective and the social. The article then investigates the politics of equating transgender and transpecies, critically examining the question of the inclusion of “xenogenders” in the trans political movement. Finally, the author returns to the magical power of metaphors, arguing that metaphors do materialize insofar as the flesh does not remain unchanged by them. Analogizing his hippo-self to a “cut” as theorized by Eva Hayward – a regeneration of the boundaries of the self – he offers a final crossing to the world of fiction by showing how the His Dark Materialstrilogy outlines an aesthetics of porosity, which suggests that the self is, as much as a novel, a work of fiction.

The author has gotten an appointment as a visiting scholar at the U of Arizona. Here is the announcement from the Gender and Women’s Studies department:

GWS and the UA Institute for LGBT Studies welcome visiting scholar! Florentin Félix Morin is a French student who just started his PhD this year at Université Paris 8. He works at the intersection of Trans Studies and Animal Studies, focusing on tranimal body modifications, practices and subjectivities. He is beyond excited to be in Tucson for the Spring semester, benefit from all the department’s and the Institute’s activities, conduct fieldwork in the US, and meet everyone! (He uses the name ‘Felix’ in English.)

Welcome, Felix.  The U of A GWS department faculty also includes Professor Whitney Stark. Here’s the abstract of “Reconfiguring Quantum Identities,” a paper she recently wrote:

In this semimanifesto, I approach how understandings of quantum physics and cyborgian bodies can (or always already do) ally with feminist anti-oppression practices long in use. The idea of the body (whether biological, social, or of work) is not stagnant, and new materialist feminisms help to recognize how multiple phenomena work together to behave in what can become legible at any given moment as a body. By utilizing the materiality of conceptions about connectivity often thought to be merely theoretical, by taking a critical look at the noncentralized and multiple movements of quantum physics, and by dehierarchizing the necessity of linear bodies through time, it becomes possible to reconfigure structures of value, longevity, and subjectivity in ways explicitly aligned with anti-oppression practices and identity politics. Combining intersectionality and quantum physics can provide for differing perspectives on organizing practices long used by marginalized people, for enabling apparatuses that allow for new possibilities of safer spaces, and for practices of accountability.

I’ve always had a lay interest in physics, but Stark’s paper covers ground that is new to me.

Here’s some more college news.

To wrap up this post, I think it behooves society to a pay a bit more attention to what is happening on college campuses these days. After all, we (the public) are usually funding a big part of it, and colleges can be the tip of the cultural-change spear.  I am pretty sure most people don’t want to end up where some of academia is trying to lead us.