I have been involved with my field site, the Bloomington Community Orchard, for years, but this is the first summer where attendance at work & learn days, when their volunteers gather to do site maintenance, has been my top priority. This week, when temperatures hovered around 90 degrees Fahrenheit with oppressive humidity, I struggled to claw my way back out of the house & over to the Orchard. Within minutes, my body was tired. I was flailing & fading. My back ached, & the fabric of my shirt clung to it, heavy with sweat & humidity.
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During classes this week, I had my students read Hayden & Buck's "Doing community supported agriculture: Tactile space, affect and effects of membership". It was their introduction to non-representational theory. We used the opportunity to discuss how all five senses build the landscape & enhance our relationship to place. As Haden & Buck write, following Deleuze & Guattari, "...affect is transversal force that is always being created, becoming. Affect emerges from spatially constrained mutable webs of associations and actions." Merriam-Webster defines affect as "the conscious subjective aspect of an emotion considered apart from bodily changes" and "a set of observable manifestations of a subjectively experienced emotion." It was these two things I kept in mind while watching bodies move through the orchard, sipping cider & bending into downward-facing dog.
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I am entering my 27th year. This is meant to be a big one--big ambitions for my personal & professional year. I'm attempting to organize my first AAG paper session. I'm editing my first articles that I hope to have published. Research agendas are set. A calendar of deadlines--grants, papers, projects, abstracts--hangs on my home office wall. I'm attempting to thin my obligations & create time for my life outside of work. As a toast to that ambition, I'm trying to reclaim my blogging. It's a small step back to the type of writing I've most enjoyed doing, creative nonfiction. While I won't clutter this blog with personal tid-bits, I would like to begin posting collections of the Internet & life that seem to be most refreshing. Here's such a post, or "A List As I Turn 27".
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