ok, ok, I am back....

I have to thank Annie Winfield for the exigency to post. I have been a bad blogger and totally away from the blog world for, gulp, about a month now. I realize this is very poor blogging etiquette. Why have I not blogged, hmmmm.... I am actually not sure. But I have not even read other people's blogs, also poor etiquette. I have been delightfully busy with two job searches and random committee work; WS is transitioning from a program to a department, which has meant a lot of jumping through hoops to make sure we have the proper records of things like, who our chair is/should be and a lot of rewriting/checking by-laws. I never expected that so much of my time in faculty meetings would be debating the subtle language of by-laws. But at least WS has a good rhetorician to help them along the way-- ha! I have emerged myself in research too trying to meet a self-imposed deadline---which is looming!

Here is what I have been thinking about along those lines: I am working on my chapter on the rhetoric of policy-making and during lunch with D yesterday, where she reminded me of my fondness for the research of the pair J.K Gibson-Graham (who incidentally have a new book out called A Postcapitialist Politics that has a chapter on emotions and capitalism), I realized that a lot of my book is about kairos. I should know this by now especially since my Cs paper for 2007 is in fact about kairos and contemporary welfare policy-- well really about kairos and the circulation of images. Reading Robert Asen's book Visions of Poverty I am reminded that, for example, "Seeing is more than the perception of objects with the eyes" (5) and that (and Asen quotes Elaine Scarry here) "the way we act toward 'others' is shaped by how we imagine them" (6) so that "[i]magining entails individual and collective effort" which is "intrinsic to social orders" (6). One of the things I point out in my book is that in late-twentieth century welfare policy there is a strange return to images-- an not actual images but more well, implied or even enthymematic images as Asen ultimately suggests, of what it means to be deserving/undeserving of welfare aid-- that at once reflect similar anxieties displayed in early twentieth-century hygiene and welfare movements most of which were supported by eugenicist research. Yet, as Hassian Marouf suggests, eugenicist discourses, like any discourse really, shifts and changes over time so that there maybe traces of an earlier time but that the time period were they reiterate creates new meaning. I think this is why D's suggestion that I look again at Gibson-Graham (as was suggested to her) is important. As Gibson-Graham make clear economic structures (or capitalism as they suggest) is not monolithic but rather it also shifts and changes-- as well as our "attachments" to it or the things that shore-up, support its structures. And these "images" that implicitly appear in welfare policy (and explicitly in World Bank policies/programs as my other chapters explore) are connected to extreme economic shifts at the end of the 20th century and in many ways are about the anxieties of these economic shifts for the middle class in particular. I know that there are various buzzes out there about structures of feeling and capitalism and to be honest I am somewhat reluctant to go there because I only think this is a small part of my project but hmmm.... Perhaps a task I must take on, ugh? Or maybe I need to just hunker down and write, right? Ok now I need my exigence to move from paper to screen..... ? Or do I read on...?