Kathleen Coe Roberts, from the Center for the Humanities, sends word of an interesting Russell House lecture tomorrow night. Semi-relatedly, did you know that Russell House was named a National Historic Monument in 2001? Now you know.
Professor Kathleen Stewart will explore the ways we might think about what constitutes a life, a subject of her book in progress on worlding in the U.S. She argues that worlding is an incitement to form now taking place in situations of ordinary living saturated with promise and threat. An intimate, compositional process of inhabiting publicly circulating forces of all kinds, worlding now proliferates around practices, bodies, fantasies, scenes of absorption, styles, forms of attachment, or strategies for self-transformation. The commonplace labor of becoming sentient to a world?€?s work, bodies, and rhythms scores worlding refrains across disparate events, registers, sensibilities, atmospheres, and states of acclimation, endurance, pleasure or alarm. As worlds accrue, spread contagiously, sediment, unfold, go flat, get stuck, or dissipate, they call attention to what it is like to be-in-the-world. Using recent efforts to rebuild the role of description and the form and function of the concept in theorizing, Stewart approaches worldings as objects that are oblique, enigmatic, plastic and intense. They have trajectories, gradients, valences, moods, sensations, tempos and lifespans. Theorizing with and about them can teach a politics of affective life.