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A Fruitful Experience without the Fruitful Synthesis

Ramblings of an Undergraduate Student: An Unfinishable Project

Hello! My name is Ryan Richardson. This is a website I created to catalogue all the thoughts I wrote down over the course of my Provost Fellowship which was granted to me by Loyola University Chicago's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (LUROP). I am deeply honored to have been given the privilege to invest myself in a lifechanging engagement. This project has truly challenged the way I engage with academia, the world, and myself. My research proposal was initially interested in delving into Sara Ahmed's discussions on Affect Theory. As I began engaging in works deemed relevant to a field that seeks to make relevancy irrelevant- Foucault, Ahmed, Butler, Halberstam- I began to realize that I found many more words to say on Subject Construction. This is to say that reading Jack Halberstam's Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire alongside Jasbir K. Puar's The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacitary, Disability, and Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others took me on a journey into the "wild." With these three as my central guides, I began to examine orientations as a world making maneuver, pinkwashing propaganda, and the United States ultimate quest to f*ck the wild (and all of us over). I compiled all my findings and thoughts into a PowerPoint presentation that is linked below with the full script for all who are interested in that. From there, my project hit a wall. I did not read for about a month; I felt exhausted having compiled and presented so much information in about 3 months. And when I did begin to read again, I picked up books that I did not think would necessarily be necessary for my project. So, I had to contest with the idea that I was wasting my time on the one hand. On the other hand, I had to remember that everything has value. And the books I read taught me so much. The books I read, which I've (hopefully) written in my linked semi-annotated bibliography and my goodreads.com account (if you want to keep up with me there!), seemed to value the idea of community. This idea that we are all interconnected in this world, and that we must not only work together but love one another. That to survive in this world, this heterosexual patriarchal capitalistic imperialistic ableist world, and to move beyond the states of survival, we have to love. And I truly began to love myself, and love myself for not always working myself to craft a concise, academically driven and acceptable, and highly intellectual (in word and thought), product. I chose to adhere to Moya Bailey's words in "The Ethics of Pace" in The South Atlantic Quarterly's publication of Crip Temporalities: "the people and the processes by which they are engaged are essential parts of the scholarship. An ethics of pace means that the ends do not justify the means but, rather, that the means are the ends" (294-5). As such, this webpage is my means, and I do hope you join me in this project because my means don't plan to reach their end...

Ryan Richardson

Apr 2, 20221 min read

Some Questions (Finally)

Research Questions for Commune: A Counterculture of Care

How are citizens produced?
1. Who are citizens?
2. Who are non-citizens?
How do the conditions of (neoliberal or multinational) capitalism and the surveillance (police) state wound up in the production of individualism and apathy?
How is the individual produced and what is the individual's relation to the community?
1. What can “I” do if anything at all?
What can the collapsing of linear time and sexual demarcations do to produce a counterculture of care?
1. How can demarcations of sexuality be reclaimed so as to not reproduce the conditions of its exclusions (homonormativity)?
What is Care? [The definition and the praxis]
1. What is Community?
2. How do “we” create a ‘community of care?’

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Some Questions (Finally)

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