Synopsis The author experiences multiple encounters with AI discourse and struggles to make sense of the tension in their body that results. The author makes no argument and finds no answers; the author invites you, Reader, into the mess, where it sits there, looking at us. — Scene 1: At the recent Rhetoric of…
Tag: Science and Technology
Limestone Caves, Concrete Buildings, and the Locating Technology for Edible Nests
The Name of a Bird Just before turning another year older in the summer of 2024, I learned that I had been wrong. What I grew up considering a type of “swallow” is a drastically different kind of bird. Allow me to explain by going back in time. In April 1936, an ornithologist named Canuto…
Sciences of the Future: A Petition
A few days ago—or maybe it was weeks, time after all has been out of joint lately—my colleague, Tim Morton, tweeted something interesting. It seems to have sincebeen deleted, so I’ll have to paraphrase it from a memory whose reliability has already been called into question. But Morton said something like this: the humanities are…
Colonial Lit(t)eraria: Topographies of Purity and Pollution on the Bank of the Ganga
Is there a link between the histories of the sanitation of the Hooghly and the formation of a discourse of sanitary womanhood in colonial Calcutta? The river in question, Hooghly or Ganga, was the epitome of pollution for the British while being synonymous with purity for the colonized Hindu. The historian Pratik Chakrabarti makes an…
Rethinking Pink: U.S. Breast Cancer Activism in the 20th Century
Sarah Roth // Gracia Buffleben, a queer woman living with metastatic cancer, ascends the stage to receive an award at the Women and Cancer Walk. It is 1996 in San Francisco, and hundreds of women, families, and supporters sprawl in a park in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge. Tables are set up around…