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Brief Biography
Kathleen Stewart is Professor in the Department of Anthropology. Her research interests include cultural generativity, affect, ordinary life, public culture, political imaginaries, ethnographic writing, narrative, ethnopoetics, post-structuralism, U.S. popular culture, Appalachia and Las Vegas.

Abstract
Atmospheric Attunements
Something throws itself together. Or sags, shifts tone, or fails. Invisible airs quicken around nascent forms, rinding up like the skin of an orange. Circulating forces waver and pulse, visceralizing the sheer sense of something happening. The ordinary hums with the background noise of all that takes place in moments, scenes, objects, resonances, rhythms. The atmospheric attunes to the sentience of things passing in and out of existence, to the expressivity of what Giorgio Agamben calls 'whatever being'. This sensing out that attends is itself a labor of worlding, an effort to inhabit a flighty ground.

This writing asks what it takes to live out the worlding of forces rinding up and dissipating. But it also wonders about the significance of accretion itself. The way that an atmosphere accretes for senses in sync with it (or sort it) and the worlding that accrues partially or fully, quickly or slowly, for a time, with habit or shock, in practices or daydreams.  A worlding - an attunement - that can be sloughed off, realized, imagined, brought to bear or just born.

Workshop News

Masterclass with Prof. Grant Farred (Cornell University)
Thursday, 23rd July, 10:30 - 12:30, TfC Bagel, UTS Building 3, Room 4.02

Calling all postgraduates whose research touches the general fields of postcolonial theory; race; formation of intellectuals; sport's theory; cultural studies and literary studies. Grant Farred who is a Director of Graduate Studies at Cornell University is hoping to meet with interested students to discuss their projects in these broad areas.

Brief Biography:
Professor Grant Farred is from Cornell University and before that from the Literature Program at Duke University, where he taught courses in literature and cultural studies.  Farred earned his PhD. from Princeton University in 1997, and an MA from Columbia University in 1990 after a BA Honours from University of the Western Cape, in Cape Town, South Africa in 1988. He also taught at Williams College and Michigan University. He has served as General Editor of the prestigious journal of critical cultural studies, South Atlantic Quarterly (SAQ) since 2002. He has published in a range of areas, including postcolonial theory, race, formation of intellectuals, sport's theory, and cultural studies and literary studies.  His books include Midfielder's Moment: Coloured Literature and Culture in Contemporary South Africa (Westview Press, 1999), What's My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), Phantom Calls: Race and the Globalization of the NBA (2006), and his most recent Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football, (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, published 2008). He is completing a fourth book manuscript entitled, Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest (forthcoming in from University of Minnesota Press, dedicated to thinking of the philosophy of athletic movement.) Farred also edited a volume entitled Rethinking CLR James (London: Blackwell Publishers, 1996) a collection of essays on the Caribbean intellectual written by major scholars in the field of history, literary criticism and cultural studies. He edited a special issue of SAQ (2004) entitled After the Thrill Is Gone: A Decade of Post-Apartheid South Africa, a serious appraisal of South African democracy, its failure and its successes, in the post-apartheid era.  Farred joined the Africana Center in fall 2007.

Please RSVP as spaces are limited.
For further details, contact Lindi Todd

TfC Bagel Reading Group organised by Thom Van Dooren:

Thursday, 18 June, 2pm, TfC Bagel (Bldg. 3, Level 4, Room 4.02)
Anna Tsing: Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection

A chapter from Anna Tsing's book and will be the topic of discussion for this session.

Please contact Thom Van Dooren for further information, reading material and to RSVP for the meeting.

The Listening Project Workshops:
Convenors: Tanja Dreher, Justine Lloyd, Penny O'Donnell
A series of workshops looking at the politics, technologies and practices of listening. The project develops a new area of study through an innovative model of networking, bringing together researchers across a range of disciplines as well as media and cultural producers.

Contact the project officer, Cate, for more information.

[Sponsored by the ARC Cultural Research Network and TfC]

Conference News

Call for Abstracts

'Terpsichorean Architecture: Writing About Music'. A One Day symposium organised by Tony Mitchell.

Friday, 25th September, venue tba

'Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's a really stupid thing to want to do', is a statement usually attributed to Elvis Costello in Musician magazine No. 60 (October 1983), p. 52, which has long been quoted as evidence of the impossibility of writing adequately about the processes of producing and listening to music. Leaving aside the fact that Costello has denied he ever said it, and it has been mistakenly attributed to a number of other musicians over the years including Laurie Anderson, David Byrne and Frank Zappa (who actually said 'rock journalism is people who can't write, preparing stories based on interviews with people who can't talk, in order to amuse people who can't read'), this symposium and journal issue set out to prove the contrary.

Papers will draw on evidence of the volume of important writing that exists about all forms of music, in academic, journalistic and creative fields, and discuss different ways in which music has been 'translated' into language. The English jazz writer Paul Savage, for example, describing the music of John Coltrane, refers to 'a musical monument like that feat of terpsichorean architecture Giant Steps'. And in a 2004 issue of the Architectural Review (vol.216 August) entitled 'Terpsichore and the Architects', Simon Goldhill notes that in ancient Greek theatre, 'the chorus danced the architecture of the theatrical space into being' and 'the dancer was a storyteller whose body told a story, like a sculpture coming alive or a mobile embodiment of tradition'. Choreographer Siobhan Davies speaks of the dancer building 'an inner architecture with volume, texture and rhythm, which allows you to slice up space … Classical ballet and classical architecture share proportion, grandeur, and the idea of being at the centre of the universe … Light and acoustics are very important in dance and architecture: we have to consider how we introduce light to form and how we hear ourselves live in that form'.

This symposium  calls for papers which discuss a wide range of different modes and forms of music and music writing in all fields, from a perspective of dance and architecture (including 'natural' architectural forms). Themed papers need not address writing about music directly, but may illustrate modes of writing about music in different ways. Authors presenting papers in the symposium will be invited to submit articles for a special issue of the refereed ejournal Transforming Cultures.

Send paper proposals (200 words)  in word attachment to: Tony Mitchell

Research News

Transforming Cultures members have successfully been awarded funding through the ARC Discovery and Linkage grants process to commence in 2008.

1. Intercolonial networks of the Indian Ocean: Devleena Ghosh, Heather Goodall, Stephen Muecke, Michael Pearson [ARC Discovery Grant, 2008 - 2010].

2. Information and Cultural Exchange: a study of best practices in community building, participation and cultural citizenship through creative practices: Ilaria Vanni, Tanja Deher, Devleena Ghosh, Chris Ho, Tony Mitchell [ARC Linkage Grant, 2008 - 2010].