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pursuit of perishable things | brooke bryan

• monday

• 03.May
• MP call for papers

• What are you eating, and what’s eating you? The MP Journal is seeking academic papers, book reviews and other well-written inquiries on the subject of women and consumption, with particular focus on women and food.

• tuesday

• 25.Feb
• Our want of stuff is fundamental. But complicated.

• What happens when we internalize the ownership of property? Not just property, like land, but other kinds of property. Stuff.

  How does living in an age of quick and easy “stuff” change us and how we move through the world?

• wednesday

• 26.May
• Domesticity and Progress: The Vacuum Cleaner Theory and other Thoughts

• When we had no technology for “vacuuming,” the entire family might have been involved in the beating of the rugs. Then, along comes the invention of the vacuum cleaner.

• thursday

• 29.Apr
• Domestic Practices: the research question

• My grandfather was not pleased when my dad brought him the top-of-the-line convection microwave oven that would come to be a pivotal force in his kitchen for the next 15 years. Whatever he sensed is what I hope to explore.

• friday

• 19.May
• Stories & Community

• On the necessity of recording community narratives: “all communities tell stories about themselves, about the distinctive nature of their formation and achievements. These stories can have a powerful role in constituting our identities, and so in defining and sustaining our common life. But they are also subject to endless manipulation, for it will always be in the interests of the powerful — rulers and opinion-formers alike — that certain stories should be remembered, and in certain ways, and that other stories should be forgotten.”

• saturday

• 29.May
• On the Woes of Curriculum Design

• Trying to build a mightily interdisciplinary degree in memory and narrative that is a seamless blend of theory and method at the interstice of ethnography and oral history is proving damn difficult. In fact, I can’t even say it. Maybe I should say to hell with these disciplinary considerations, forever relegate myself to the title of ‘phenomenologist with an audio recorder,’ and just read Heidegger for the next 18 months.