With Nikko Stevens and Liz Lessner
Inspired by the literature and practices of posthumanism, feminist technoscience, and agential, relational, and sensorial objects, this project offers an initial inquiry into the deliberate and collaborative production of joy. Like knowledge, joy is communal, contextual, evolving, relational. Scholars like Rosi Braidotti and Katherine Hayles problematize the primacy of hierarchical, anthropocentric perspectives on relational networks. Inspired by these feminist/posthumanist approaches, we are moved to ask how joy can be a “valid” product of human-object entanglements. This experimental approach takes frameworks from STS and posthumanism and remixes them to place joy as a first-order product (opening the door for other affective experiences to also be valid productions of human-material entanglements, not to mention future sites of and partners to knowledge production).
This work offers an interruption – of the ideas of scholarship as knowledge production, of the unidirectional format of many sessions – inviting attendees to join us in creating an entangled, embodied, collective experience of joy. Joy as institutional concern now resides mainly in the entertainment sector and the research on joy is most often used in service of capitalism and enterprise (Wall Street sentiment analysis, Facebook quiz/online games as thinly veiled surveillance apparatus, etc.) We ask what knowledges may come when we center joy as necessary to the human inquiry the academy seeks to foster. As boundary objects, works like this might allow us to reflect on the multivalent experience of joy and begin to structure a theory of joy as integral to scholarship. We invite you to contribute to this initial inquiry through an accessible, participatory, feminist, and ultimately human(e) co-production of joy.
Confrence Demo
The Joy Collector, Association for Computers in the Humanities, Pittsburg, PA, 2019
Exhibition
Corporeal Imaginations, curator Jacqueline Wernimont, Jones Media, Dartmouth, Hanover, NH, 2019
