Wells Hall
619 Red Cedar Rd, Okemos, MI 48864
USA
HIVES will be meeting for the first official time on September 12, 2019 in room C607 of Wells Hall (619 Red Cedar Road, East Lansing, MI 48824). This meeting will be primarily to introduce HIVES guiding questions, discuss the trajectory of the workshop for the year, and nourish our bodyminds with pizza and discussion. We would like to begin the buzz of conversation with a discussion of texts and videos, available here, that present some nodes for future engagement. Finally, we will be revealing our fall keynote speaker at the meeting!
This and all future HIVES meetings are open to the public, including but certainly not limited to: students, non-students, artists, curious parties, larvae, comic-lovers, poets, and all others. Please feel welcome to circulate the poster above which has been formatted to be accessible to screen readers. Please fill out this google form if you plan to attend in order to share your preferences and needs for refreshments and access.
HIVES is an ongoing scholarly, artistic, and communal organization dedicated to developing an understanding of the ways in which matter and beings function in interdependent networks. This research workshop seeks to create a generative space for conversations at the intersections of disability studies and animal studies in popular culture. In his book Brilliant Imperfection, Eli Clare emphasizes how “White Western culture goes to extraordinary lengths to deny the vital relationships between water and stone, plant and animal, human and nonhuman, as well as the utter reliance of human upon human” (Clare 136). Clare offers the disability studies notion of interdependence as a way to undo fantastical narratives of independence and the individual. HIVES is an engagement with hiveminds, relationality, and interdependence across and within animal/human divides. This research workshop draws on popular culture in the form of novels, films, and video games and theory from disability studies to critical race theory to queer studies to animal studies in order to think through disrupting white western denials of interdependence. We are guided by the questions: what are the potentials and pitfalls of the overlap between disability and animal studies? what forms of inter-reliance arise from lived disabled existence and/or representations of disabled characters in popular culture? what does (and does not) separate animals and humans? what frictions exist in turning to animal studies to find alternate conceptions of relational being?