It’s a Thursday evening, and I’m so, so ready to call it a week, or almost. I plan to work from home tomorrow. I imagine how, after leaving my kid at preschool, I will enjoy the brisk snowy walk along the frozen inlet, to the rising sun and the music in my headphones, and make […]
Tag: flamenco
On the tyranny of Zoom, knowledge policy, flamenco shoes, and touching somebody’s shoulder
What is wrong with a Zoom meeting? Nothing. It’s perfect. A little bubble (or big, size doesn’t matter, marginal costs are zero, the more, the merrier), where you can convene and commune with each other in perfect harmony. Communication for all. Democracy enacted. Everyone can participate. Participatory turn. Erasing barriers, gaps, distances, divisions, frontiers and […]
On dancing with the shawl, faux pas, and being chiselled through research training
El mantón, the flamenco shawl, refuses to do my bidding. It refuses to levitate in the air in front of me, in order to then fall softly on my chest – like it levitates in front of my teacher and then falls on hers, right under her collar bones and covering her entire wide-open arms. […]
On feminist philosophy, Freud, populism and flamenco shawls
My Alice-in-Wonderland moment of (allegorically) entering a smoke-filled room full of (mostly male) critical theorists, which I described earlier, has brought me here, to this point (or should I already start saying ‘standpoint’?) of musing on, puzzling over and, as one of the professors at our department loves saying, ‘muddling’ with feminist epistemology. A reminder: […]
On vueltas, roots, and the (field)work of love
In Latcho Drom, a music film by Tony Gatlif, there is a footage which invariably enthrals me: a Rajasthani girl performing pirouettes. Her back is bent at ninety degrees to the rest of her body, almost parallel to the ground, and she uses her arm as the centre of the propelling motion with which she […]
On deconstruction, acute social theory overdose, and Guernica
In the first couple of weeks of my PhD, I made the mistake of reading The Structure of Sociological Theory by Jonathan H. Turner. It’s an old book and somewhat out-of-date (at least the edition I had), but I just happened to run into it in India and brought it home. Not that it wasn’t […]
On taking the space, or The choreographies of unfolding
It still feels like early days of my ‘research training’, but I have had ample opportunity to observe the problem of taking the space, both in myself and others. Women tend to be worse at this than men, but of course there are exceptions in both cases. I have been keenly and purposefully observing women […]
On gender, critical theory and flamenco guitar
Hm, wouldn’t it be nice to start this blog with something lighthearted? Sure! – thought I enthusiastically, and jumped head first into the heavy-lifting topic: gender. A couple of days after I ‘immortalised’ in my individual study plan (ISP, a.k.a. the Holy Bible of a PhD student) the idea that I will use critical theory […]
Fathom 