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http://intellectualvirtues.blogspot.com Practice, Praxis, and Genealogies among Worldings: Feeling out just how embedded we are in complex systems.... WMST 621, Spring 2014 UMD Thursdays, 4 to 6:30 pm at WDS 2101R Professor: Katie King Office: 2101C Woods Hall, University of Maryland, College Park Katies office hours: Weds 10-12 pm. Make appointment. Some TThs 10-11 am by special arrangement. Office phone: 301.405.7294 (voice mail) Katie's home tel. 301.589.2195, call only 10 am-7 pm Email: katking@umd.edu /use this for regular communication, best response WHEN YOU SUBMIT ATTACHMENTS BY EMAIL DO IT ONLY TO: katiekin@gmail.com (notice kin NOT king) KKs website with NEWS, SOCIAL HOURS, MESSAGES: http://katiekin.weebly.com/ Class Website at: http://intellectualvirtues.blogspot.com course description WORLDING (v) - "a historical process of taking care, and setting limits, entering into, and making the world-horizon come near and become local and informed, situated, instantiated as an uneven/incomplete material process of world-becoming." [Wilson. 2007. The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization. North Atlantic: 212.] "Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That's how the light gets in." [Leonard Cohen, Anthem, on The Future/Ten New Songs. 1992. http://www.leonardcohen.com/us/music/futureten-new-songs/anthem] Rethinking what we mean by both dichotomies of theory and activism as well as by genealogies. How do we work with all these as bits in emergent processes, rather than god's eye view analysts? Can we and what would it entail? Collecting thinking, working it all out in bits here: I have designed our version of this course for a particular set of folks among many knowledge worlds with many histories happening at different lag times. What we have wondered about as social movements tie things together in this course, but also become something quite new and different from what we have usually expected. Direct theory is a way to name some of the complexities of just how it is that theory and activisms enfold: even when we think of ourselves as belonging somehow to one or the other in a kind of us/them distinction (from either end). Many belongings and exclusions are tapped into and felt out, with consequences macro, micro, quantum? We can talk about the double bind nature of such complexity, even of its abuses, as well as of its creativities. And in strange and interesting ways, in multiple we, different histories crisscross spacetimes such that what we have thought of as genealogies are also always properly unstable and fluctuating: the contexts are somehow INSIDE. Social exclusion and controlling images have new faces and we gather together not just with humans, but with animals, things, vibrant materialities, to live among them and alter with them. In dialectical materialism we call the point of potentiality "contradiction." Contradictions bring themselves and more into being, a very condition of existence. Perfections as well as mutually exclusive us/thems are thus in marxist theory pernicious illusions. As Leonard Cohen says: Forget your perfect offering! Our course and our planet need us to find many cracks now and let in much new light: lightning even as one author will put it.... We will explore materialities in terms ethical, ontologically coming-into-being, and epistemologically shaped as agencies in knowings and learnings that are not simply or only human. And we are humans, animals, things, and more, our agency captured in bodies, in collectives, across distributed infrastructures, among media and objects, and together with processes we participate in non-consciously. From the languages of complex systems we take as method and companion some of what the term stigmergy enlivens. You may know it as the sort of indirect coordinations some insects depend upon and that flash mobs

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arise from. Its being-ness enfolds singularity and multiplicity, and it works too as an affect, not just a mechanism, as not a gods-eye-view analytic, but as one way to describe how we feel it all happening WITH This course is required for WMST PhD & graduate certificate students. It is taught once a year in a faculty rotation among specializations. This version is a transdisciplinary course that takes up your feminist knowledges as you have them now, across interests and disciplines and political experiences. It is a seminar, but an unusual one in which you will experiment with new scholarly practices, perhaps prepare for your exams, and figure out how to learn in contact zones, at the edge of what we, individually and collectively, know. What you DON'T know will be a resource to the class, as well as what you do! required books, ordered at campus books and on reserve: You are required to read these, not to buy them, or even to own them. All are on reserve at McKeldin (our only use of ELMS/Canvas) and many are available at other libraries. Share them, rent them, borrow them, xerox them, scan them. Fair use means producing copies for your own private research use. Of course you can help others in obtaining originals for such fair use copying. I will create links on the course website to places to buy or download these. Be sure to locate them long before you need to read them. ISBN numbers are included to make ordering them easier if you wish to buy them. You might notice that two are free for download on the web, and others are available as ebooks, some on the Kindle. Note that you do not need the Kindle itself to read these as Kindle books. I have been reading Kindle books using Kindle for the Mac and also Kindle on my iPhone and iPod Touch. You may wish to use an appropriate app for devices you already have, if you are not a Kindle user. We will probably be reading around in some of these books, not necessarily reading each in its entirety. But we may try having different folks reading different parts as we go along, so that as a class we get a sense of the whole book. This is to make you less worried about the amount of reading involved, and also to alert you to our needing access to the whole of each book nonetheless. If for any reason you are having trouble keeping up with the amounts of reading involved, please come talk to Katie as soon as you realize this. (I have trouble reading as much as I used to due to eye problems nowadays. I am very sympathetic. We want to help each other.) Sandoval. 2000. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minnesota. 9780816627370 Keating. 2013. Transformation Now! Toward a Post-Oppositional Politics of Change. Illinois. 9780252079399 Reed. 2005. The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle. Minnesota. 9780816637713 Flanagan. 2009. Critical Play: Radical Game Design. MIT. 9780262518659 Alkon. 2011. Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability. MIT. 9780262516327 Cohen. 2012. Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1. OHP. [Free online.] 9781607852377 Dolphijn. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Michigan. OHP. [Free online.] 9781607852810 Hanhardt. 2013. Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence. Duke. 9780822354703 Tambe. 2009. Codes of Misconduct: Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay. Minnesota. 9780816651382 (Another possible: Das. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. California. 9780520247451) Barad. recent articles. (Reference: 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke. 9780822339175) King. talksites. (Reference: 2012. Networked Reenactments: Stories Transdisciplinary Knowledges Tell. Duke. 9780822350729) Whittier. 1995. Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women's Movement. Temple. 9781566392822 Hewitt. (Reference: 2010. No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism. Rutgers. 9780813547251) Berger. (Reference: 2009. The Intersectional Approach: Transforming the Academy through Race, Class, and Gender. UNC. 9780807859810)

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A variety of short articles, some emailed, some online, to be shared for reading in companionship with these books. Some I will offer, some you will gather to share or to report on as you notice their usefulness. There is an infinite network of associations to make of course, so we will discuss how to participate in such networks, gradually enriching them over time, and how to reasonably share them with others. For example, one such online is: Klein. 2004. Disciplinary origins and differences, from the 2004 FENNER CONFERENCE ON THE ENVIRONMENT, Understanding the populationenvironment debate: Bridging disciplinary divides; The Shine Dome, Canberra, Australia, 24-25 May. Available online at: http://www.science.org.au/events/fenner/fenner2004/klein.htm class procedures This will be a media and technology intensive course, although what that means to various folks may be properly quite different! You are encouraged to bring your own laptop, iPad, smart phone, whatever, if possible, to connect with social media, to share individual savvy about internet resources, and to use data visualizations and virtual environments for cognition and collaboration. Katie is a proponent of what she calls worn tools: warmed up, not worn out! (see her discussion of this: http://socmedlearn.blogspot.com/) and a fan of the genres of participation that emerged from the Digital Youth project: http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/: hanging out, messing around, and geeking out. All these shi ft who counts as expert in what, when, how. Well talk more about it all and you can share your own thoughts, experiences, and insights. Katie typically uses Blogger as a website authoring tool. Our class website is generated on and hosted by Blogger, and there are consequences of it all worth discussing. Katie uses the website as a platform for presentation media (rather than, say, Powerpoint). Your assignments will include creating handouts, posters, and other presentation media, both high and low tech, crafty and touchy in their own interesting ways. Thus so-called constructionist learning and collaboration will also be important, and will be opened up to analysis for interconnections among knowledge worlds. We will consider and practice perhaps our own versions of critical making, and of what the MIT Media Lab calls lifelong kindergarten. The first half of each class will be devoted to discussions initiated by twenty minute presentations by student teams, exploring assumptions the materials require us to reexamine. The second half of each class will engage with Katies website, discussions on just how we (which we?) might gather together to minimize damage and maximize flourishing. Sometimes we will also practice prototyping crafty posters or websites, each to think with our senses and body knowledges in physical formats and artsy fe elings. Prototyping activities introduce you to multimodal learning, what some call flipping the class or how to include making as a kind of learning. We will be making both posters and websites. If you are new to making the kind of posters that enhance critical thinking and cognitive skills, or want some ideas about how to craft them well, see the wonderful slideshow by Leeann Hunter here: http://multimodal.wsu.edu/blog/?p=97 If you have never made a website, you might start off with a Blogger version. Blogger is what I use for the class website. I use Weebly for my professional website. Both of these are very simple. Or you might like to build a site on Word Press. If you have already begun crafting websites, pick your favorite platform for something new, or enhance what you already have going with projects from our course. A fun site with easy tools for all kinds of web prototyping activities you will find here: http://easyedutools.weebly.com In the middle of the semester we will conduct in one class period two poster session style paper discussions in which you will share your current work with each other after having written a ten page paper. That means that some people will be presenting their work in various parts of the room, all at the same time, while other class members wander around the room, interacting with them as they discuss their projects, using handouts to focus interactions. After we spend time doing this, we will move into collective discussion and engagement all together. We gather to create connections between your work and the work of others, and orchestrate a collective conversation. This is NOT about suggestions for writing itself, but a substantive engagement with the IDEAS of your classmates as put forth in their papers. If non-native speakers or others need adjustments here please work with Katie to make them carefully. The papers will then be collected as an online book that we will refer to for the rest of the semester. On the final day of the course we will conduct in one class period two poster sessions, conference style, where you can work individually or with a partner or team to create a scholarly research poster, individually, or as a member of a team of up to 4 members. Posters should synthesize the work you have done in the class, bringing together in some interactive way yours and others presentations and research, readings, and papers. They may play with data analytics in some fashion, they may have creative elements (although they need to do this for a professional context), they will be predominately visual rather than textual. They should include both the RESULTS of your synthetic analyses, and also a way of showing HOW YOU GOT THERE! In the sciences you would show the experimental set up, the results and your methods. How should these

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elements be transformed for your sort of poster? You should have a fantasy scholarly venue in mind for the poster you, perhaps in a team, come up with. Posters have long been a staple of conferences in the sciences, sometimes in the social sciences, and increasingly today, in the humanities, especially in the digital humanities. Humanities style posters are still in development, and digital humanities posters are often unusually creative, with an eye to data analytics and visualizations. We will discuss these in the class. NO POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS WILL BE ACCEPTED FOR THIS ASSIGNMENT. However Powerpoint is actually often used as a kind of graphics manager to create the single slides that become a poster. There are lots of ideas for all this online, and we will also discuss this as well. We will need a director of posters, who will troll the web for resources, work with poster makers generating ideas, and on the last day of class, coordinate two poster sessions. summary of assignments (see what to do, make it fun online too) each assignment includes any presentation element itself, as well as any written or spoken products, and also includes participation with the work of others. NOTE THAT OTHERS ARE DEPENDING ON YOU TO BE TIMELY! several 20 min presentations: done with a team, on assumptions the materials require us to reexamine, with useful handouts generated for whole class, as well as active engagement with presentations others do for you. a very brief (10-12 pg.) research paper and handout, with attention to non-traditional media and technology sources, with one-on-one discussion with various class members during poster-style sessions, both concerning ones own paper & handout and those of others. You will work with course materials and your own projects, synthesizing these and re-presenting the results. These will be collected for a public online class book. a research poster, with attention to non-traditional media and technology sources, can be individual or team presented, with one-on-one discussion with various class members during poster sessions, both concerning ones own poster and those of others. You will work with course materials and your own projects, synthesizing these and re-presenting the results in poster formats. Dont bother to print out or create expensive versions of these. Crafty posters are appreciated, and electronic versions can be simply printed out and displayed on your own laptop during poster sessions. Posters are becoming more prominent at digital humanities conferences and elsewhere, and it is useful to know how to make them, and also how to alter what counts as a poster as they become important in non-science specific research activities.

More discussion of these in class and on website as we proceed, but do note that presentations dont start until TBA. YOU ONLY GET 20 MINS TO PRESENT! this means you and your partner/s must plan carefully and create amazingly useful handouts to share! After you present, you will facilitate discussion for about 45 mins. Be sure to have everything, all tech, all set up before class time begins! What do presentations cover? First of all, think of these as gifts of some of your time and EXTRA RESEARCH to the class. THEY ARE NOT ABOUT THE TEXT ITSELF (we discuss that together in class) but should bring to the class something we don't all have (yet) in common -- some research that will enliven the contexts and "outsides" of the text put it into worldly processes beyond it. [See online: on presentations too) course schedule Be sure to scope out whole books, but we will concentrate intensively on specific parts each class time, connecting across readings. If you wish to use presentation media for your presentations, for the roundtables, or for the poster sessions, you must bring your own laptop or borrow one from the department, ARHU, or friends. My laptop will not be available for this use or to host flashdrives. I use blogger myself and other web based delivery systems, and suggest becoming familiar with these. Notice that the course has three sections to it: the first to get us up and running with presentations and working with the directors of assignments, the second two lead up to, first, our papers and online book, then our poster sessions. Be sure to keep your eyes on those prizes and start work on them collectively right away. Collective work needs very long lead times, so create and connect with teams as soon as you can.

<<<SECTION I: just doing it: gathering among companions, at home and in the streets Sandoval. 2000. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minnesota. 9780816627370 Keating. 2013. Transformation Now! Toward a Post-Oppositional Politics of Change. Illinois. 9780252079399 Reed. 2005. The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle. Minnesota. 9780816637713 Flanagan. 2009. Critical Play: Radical Game Design. MIT. 9780262518659

Thursday 30 January Arts, Play, Double Binds, Differential Consciousness/es of Protest: why direct theory matters and how it materializes HAVE YOU READ THROUGH WEBSITE, CHECKED ALL THE LINKS YET? WE BEGIN CLASS BY examining the books we will gather together with, considering our intensive and extensive belongings, enabling various of such us to learn as agential things, beings, animals, processes, distributed cognitions, ecologies of affect and more. INTRODUCTIONS of all the us we can figure out how to name and share! NOTE: BOOKS TAB: LINK: Dumit on How I Read: something to ponder for our course! And this will help too: How to Read a Book in Two Hours or Less from Inside Higher Ed's GradHacker. PRESENTATION TAB: LINKS: How to Read Handout & Edwards on How to Give an Academic Talk. HANDOUTS: Reagon83 Coalition Politics: home & streets: http://web.colby.edu/ed332/files/2010/08/Coalition-Politics.pdf ; Sandoval02 AfterBridge; Reed05 Scenarios for Revolution; KingHandout99 feminist generations; KingHandout13 Queer Method; KingHandout13 SLSA Gregory Bateson (who is he and why might we care?) famously said, in the pronoun we, I of course included the starfish and the redwood forest, the segmenting egg, and the Senate of the United States. Us means not only Batesons living patterns, from the starfishs invertebrate radial symmetry to redwood cloning timelines to recursive epigenesis, mechanism and structure in a segmenting egg to those human affiliations of power and state and love that we could wish for in the Senate of the United States. Us gathers sympoietically too all these boundary objects storing details and affects as well as quantum entanglements of electron and memory and even hybrids and objects as human, nonhuman, inhuman and compost. Introductions to each other as resources, to the class, readings and procedures, and to gathering strategies. Our first prototyping session: collectively make, pairs or grps or all: timeline for events described and publication/s; put in context: timeline major historical events during that time; put in context: yourself and your family during that time; put in context: one or more for you iconic feminist/or political figures google image these as possible.