QUEER UTOPIAS, a webinar

SAVE THE DATE!

QUEER UTOPIAS

an online symposium

Friday, April 9, 2021

“Queer Utopias” is a one-day celebration of the forms, modes, and styles of happy queer placemaking. In a historical present dominated by contestations over the future of political life, claims and counterclaims to hidden knowledge, and the inflammatory effects of paranoia, this symposium highlights those hopeful experiments of the past and present whose legacies of pleasure, ease, care, and joy might inspire future experimentation and maybe, by doing so, remake the world.

10 am Pacific

Panel: “Horizons of Queer Utopias”

Jayna Brown, Pratt Institute

Jill Richards, Yale University

Alexis Lothian, University of Maryland

Noon Pacific

Film Screening: ONCE A FURY

https://onceafury.com/

1:30 pm Pacific

Post-Screening Discussion with the Director

Jacqueline Rhodes, Michigan State University

2:30 pm Pacific

Roundtable: “Utopias Cruised: Thinking With — and Beyond — Muñoz”

Jules Gill-Peterson, University of Pittsburgh

Timothy Oleksiak, U. of Massachusetts, Boston

Seth E. Davis, Curry College

Sherryl Vint, U. of California, Riverside

Hosted by Rebekah Sheldon, Indiana University,

and Jonathan Alexander, U. of California, Irvine.

Sponsored by UCI School of Humanities;

UCI Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies; IU Department of English.

You are invited to a Zoom webinar.

When: Apr 9, 2021 10:00 AM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

Topic: Queer Utopias

Register in advance for this webinar:

https://uci.zoom.us/.../register/WN_PQqlX0s3RKWwrhl-mQWN2w

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STROKE BOOK READING!

Gave my first reading from STROKE BOOK (coming in October from Fordham UP) as part of the UCI Medical Humanities Center’s Works-in-Progress Series: STROKE BOOK: The Queer Story of a Blindspot, by Jonathan Alexander — February 17, 2021 from 4-5 Pacific. Info here.

UCI Medical Humanities Event: Jonathan Alexander reading from STROKE BOOK

Please join us on Wednesday, February 17th, from 4:00-5:00 p.m. PST for our second Work-in-Progress presentation by Jonathan Alexander, Chancellor's Professor of English!

Work-in-Progress Series: The Work-in-Progress series provides faculty and students from around campus the opportunity to showcase their research projects that engage with the intersection of medicine, arts, and the humanities. This year, the center is featuring presentations by previous grant recipients to highlight the current state of their projects, to demonstrate the range of work that the center supports, and to create places of enriching overlap.

STROKE BOOK: The Queer Story of a Blindspot

"STROKE BOOK emerged out of a health crisis in the summer of 2019, and a need to think and feel that crisis through my sexuality, my changing sense of dis/ability, and my experience of time. At a basic level, the book, largely drafted in the immediate aftermath of the crisis (a minor stroke), chronicles a very mortal encounter with time, with my recognition that we are never not beholden to time, even as we often refuse opportunities to confront the feelings and realities of our beholdenness. But it is also a recognition that queer time has its own rhythms, fluctuations, and perversities. I experienced — and continue to experience — my health crisis in very particular ways, ways that I cannot disentangle from my experiences in this culture as a queer person. This book is a refusal to engage in disentanglement." - Jonathan Alexander

Jonathan Alexander is a three-time recipient of the Ellen Nold Award for Best Articles in the field of Computers and Composition Studies. His books have been nominated for various awards, including the Lambda Literary Award. In 2011, he was awarded the Charles Moran Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Field of Computers and Writing Studies. From 2010-2013, Alexander was named a UCI Chancellor's Fellow in recognition of his scholarly achievements. In 2016, he was named a Chancellor's Professor.

Click here to register for this event!

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SECOND WIND

Going live on FB today at 2 pm Pacific! TODAY!

You are cordially invited to cruise by a “front door” mini-concert by SECOND WIND (Susan C. Jarratt, flute / Jonathan Alexander, piano).

The musicians will be performing, near the door for your outdoor enjoyment, a short musical set of something baroque, something blue, something romantic.

Please wear a mask and distance as needed.

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Second Wind

music for flute and piano

The Wayfinding Project

LOVE working on THE WAYFINDING PROJECT with my UC colleagues. Check it out: https://thewayfindingproject.com.

The Wayfinding Project is led by a core of three University of California researchers: Carl Whithaus (UC, Davis), Karen Lunsford (UC, Santa Barbara), and Jonathan Alexander (UC, Irvine), who, over the past three years, have been engaged in a collaborative and multi-campus research project that examines the “writing lives” of UC students that are 3-10 years post graduation. The group has been particularly interested in the kinds of professional, personal, and civic kinds of writing that our alumni regularly engage in, as well as what kinds of knowledges about writing these alumni are developing after graduating. As they have analyzed their pilot data, the researchers have considered how the concept of “wayfinding” might help us understand how our graduates continue to develop as writers after graduation, building on and augmenting the skills strategies, and habits of mind learned on our campuses. The Wayfinding Project builds on findings from existing large-scale research projects within writing studies, such as Michigan State University’s “Writing, Information, and Digital Experience” (WIDE) study and the multi-campus work documented in The Meaningful Writing Project. Unlike these efforts, the Wayfinding Project is designed to attend to alumni’s experiences after they have left our campuses and are making transitions from collegiate to career and personal lives beyond their time as undergraduates. Currently, WP researchers have surveyed nearly 275 students from UC campuses and conducted in-depth focus group interviews with 22 participants — all of whom reflect the diverse population of a minority-majority state, and who also represent the various socioeconomic classes that attend UC.