Today I attended:
Class: Theorising Gender; Theme: Poststructuralism, Deconstruction and Feminism | Karen Throsby
Encounters between feminism and poststructuralism have been intense and fruitful, but hotly contested. Many feminist scholars have argued that poststructuralist and deconstructionist approaches offer feminist theorising productive tools for the exploration of key issues in relation to power and knowledge, and that such approaches enable a questioning of some problematic assumptions of feminist scholarship. Other scholars, however, have denounced poststructuralism as incompatible with feminist theorising, affirming that it dangerously undermines the bases not only for feminist production of knowledge claims, but also for feminist social and political transformation. In this session, we will consider these debates and the profound effects they have had on the development of feminist theory.
Dissertation meeting one-on-one
Evening Seminar: CERS Public Lecture: The Afterlife of Black Sociology
Professor Barnor Hesse, Northwestern University, USA
Date: Monday 2nd November, 2015, 17:00 – 18:30
Location: Room 12.25, Social Sciences Building
Abstract
This lecture provides a critical historical and analytical commentary on ‘racism’ as a concept rather than a self-evidential empirical phenomenon. It invites reconsideration of the 20th century genealogy of the racism concept prior to and in relation to its appropriation by American sociology. Central to this argument is that the western emergent formulation of the ‘racism concept’ was primarily concerned with attributing the epithet racism to Nazism’s mobilizations and representations of race that degraded and violated white populations in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s.
The appropriation of the ‘racism concept’ by a Black sociology in the late 1960s – early 1970 meant its supplementation and modification by analyses of colonialism and white supremacy that the initializing western foundation of the ‘racism concept’ exempted and foreclosed. This is described as the alterity of the racism concept. Finally, the lecture discusses these conceptual and political implications in terms of the analytical frontiers that established antagonisms between white and Black sociologies during the 1970s
Above are abstracts, or descriptions of what I attended today. These descriptions were given by the institution, persons of knowledge not by me.
Very briefly things that struck with me today were:
- Poststructuralism
- Postmodernism
- The idea that ‘Feminism’, the ‘Female’ or ‘Woman’ is a juridicial categorisation
- That to challenge the notions that you ‘could define or be defined as what one is not’, you have to unpick what the normative definition is. OR you could just reject that entirely
- “The Governance of Race” or “Race Governance”
- I must start formulating questions for my dissertation topic(s)
- I must decide my dissertation topic.
- The area of my idea must be constituted or re-constituted in questions or framings that could help me address what I WANT to DO. NOT what I SHOULD DO.
- Life is complicated and hard
- I tend to write poetry to just vomit out my thoughts, feelings and to show some form or daily writing.
- THAT I SHOULD use this blog and my uptake of #NaBloPoMo to actually use writing in order to communicate wider ideas and my existence
Mariam Kauser 