A selection of readings from the new issue of WSQ in preparation for "Slam Precarious Work" on the current state of precarious labor, imperatives to love your job, the social and racial hierarchies of domestic labor, and how women workers organizing in NYC's Chinatown have connected the conditions of their paid work with their unpaid care work.
Danielle Rouse discusses the event QueensEnglish@QueensMuseum, which consisted of a series of performances, readings, and discussion that considered how standardized uses of English have been used to oppress while those oppressed have creatively transformed the language.
Archivist Rachel Mattson raises questions about how digitization and online distribution change the stakes of preserving videotape archives of queer histories. Exploring two distinct instances, raised among the VHS Archives working group, Mattson considers the nuances of how context, medium, and identity transform the ethics of using this archival material.
GC PhD student Louis Olander reflects on the event “The Future of Public Education: Searching for The Public Good Amid Gentrification, Privatization, and Inequality,” including a performance of Laundry City, a play written and performed by high school students about dynamics of segregation, displacement, and integration in New York City today.
A selection of readings related to the event "Puerto Rico/New York/Morocco: Poet’s Journey," including two interviews with Victor Hernández Cruz.
Digital Publics Fellow Kasey Zapatka outlines his project "Housing Literacy" and provides an overview of NYC rent regulation and tenants' rights, along with the history and current context of rent regulation in New York City.
Digital Publics Fellow Diane Yoong describes the process of beginning their project searching for and recovering the histories of queer Asian (American)s, who have generally been excluded from histories and normative representations of queer people. They also discuss a number of other archival initiatives and interventions taking place in and around the Center for the Humanities.
Cory Tamler discusses her experience reading an archival copy of Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto, annotated by Solanas herself. In this post, Tamler reads how the act of annotation might be a textual performance of becoming for Solanas—who negotiates the text’s unique publishing history and its consequences for her legacy in both the literal and figurative margins.
Iris Cushing reflects on her experience as part of the Collaborative Research Seminar on Archives and Special Collections, reading The Floating Bear, a bi-monthly, mimeographed newsletter started in 1961 by Diane di Prima and LeRoi Jones. Cushing attends to the material, social, and conceptual conditions under which the newsletter circulated—its "field" and "range—considering the Bear's network of influences, the labor required to produce it, and the artistic freedom afforded by it.
GC PhD student Maya Harakawa reflects on her fellowship co-running the online magazine Triple Canopy's Publication Intensive, a two-week summer program devoted to considering forms of publication that bring together networked forms of production and circulation with the rich legacies of print culture and artistic practices rooted in print.
Jean Carlos Soto reports on the Consciousness & Revolution II conference and three panels dealing with legacies of movement-based education from the nationalist right-wing's influence over India's theological schools in the 1980s to the Portuguese grassroots social movement Plataforma Gueto, the Blank Panthers' Oakland Community School and the "We Will Remember" Survival Group.
A selection of readings for "Intimate Measures: Amy Herzog and Nitin Ahuja" on the refraction of the self through the microbiome, the labor of intimacy in ASMR videos, the work of commodities, and intimate self-management.
"[...] perhaps caring labor does not require literally caring, which would only interfere with efficiency. "
--Amy Herzog, "Star vehicle: labor and corporeal traffic in Under the Skin"
Five Lehman College English Honors program students reflect on discussions from the Activism in Academia conference on topics including the use of literature to foster empathy; diversifying curricula; student experiences of race, religion, and representation in the classroom; and activist pedagogies.
Curator Kaegan Sparks shares suggested readings for the exhibition Soft Skills on questions of reproductive and affective labor, care, ASMR, and gendered and racialized forms of work.
GC PhD students Kaitlin Mondello and Elizabeth Weybright reflect on a series of presentations and performances from “The Vibrating World: Soundscapes and Undersongs” conference, which ranged from considerations of sound and affect to theories on the intersection of disability and modernist music to aural performances of a threatened environment.
GC M.A. student Mette Christiansen reflects on a selection of presentations from the "Public and Publics" conference, which considered various conceptions of the public through a range of lenses including governance and the law, counterpublics and social movements, physical and designed space (and related question of access and exclusion), and art in public.
GC PhD student Christina Katopodis reflects on a selection of presentations from The Vibrating World conference including a silent performance of a scene from the opera Aida, a panel on the politics of sound, a performative lecture on making music with nonhuman lifeforms, and an audiovisual performance that drew on the dual histories of synthesizers and radio.
A selection of readings related to "Behind the Camera, Covering the Image" on uses of occlusion, opacity, and relations between watcher and watched.
A selection of readings related to "Interventions in the Interview, Fugitive Subjects" on documentary as an apparatus of capture and how subjects might resist this capture.
Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore (ted) Kerr discuss the diverse legacy of AIDS activist video; how this legacy has been used in mainstream representations by white gay men to represent white gay men’s stories; and how the many underrepresented histories of AIDS—particularly the work and experiences of women and people of color—might be accessed, highlighted, and carried on.
Jaime Shearn Coan reflects on two events he co-organized with Janet Werther, Interventions in the Narrativizing the AIDS Crisis and A Matter of Urgency and Agency: HIV/AIDS in conjunction with the Danspace Project Platform 2016: Lost and Found.
Co-director Bess Rowen shares notes on the rehearsal process of Marco Millions, an adaptation of a Eugene O'Neill play, in which six CUNY undergraduate and graduate students and faculty each translated parts of the play into other languages, experiences, and vernaculars.
Student reflections on an event commemorating the 50th anniversary of Souffles-Anfas the influential Moroccan journal of poetry, culture, and politics.
A selection of readings related to Reason After Its Eclipse: A Conversation with Martin Jay, including two interviews with Jay.