This semester, I needed quiet. I needed to let go of all nonessential tasks. I spent the first 20 weeks of my pregnancy rather sick, struggling to stay afloat in my course load. It was a struggle, & my department has handled the news with more compassion, support, & excitement than I ever could have anticipated. Academia isn't historically a female-friendly (let alone parent-friendly) environment. And that's among faculty. Add in the still present dynamic in many department of infantilizing graduate students, & the idea of a "student" having a child seems preposterous. We are often seen, through the student label, as children ourselves."
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I'm heading to the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers for the first time this year. We're heading to Chicago for five days in April, and the very Rory Gilmore side of me is looking forward to the giant catalog of sessions for planning out my days. In addition to being my first AAGs, it's also the first time I've organized a conference session.
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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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