
What are the top five questions/obsessions/visionary hopes/productive doubts/topics that currently
occupy your contemplations about research? [Approximately 1 page]
How can we loosen/shatter trustworthiness and transparency as chains to the appearance of
data?
How can traditions born of coloniality learn to be answerable more than seeking to own?
Why this? Why now? Why me? (always – not just the conference, but always)
Thinking about what social science can learn from systems biology and vice versa
Intergenerational knowledge influential but not deterministic imprints.
 List five books/articles/performances/installations/experiences that have been very useful to your recent
thinking about the conference themes? (They can be recent or classic readings, academic or not academic,
artifacts, performances, events, ceremonies, etc.) Say briefly why each of these has been significant to
you. Please provide links, jpegs, or pdfs where appropriate. [Approximately 1 page]
Unsettling the Coloniality of Being by Sylvia Wynter
One of Wynter’s deeply intricate and historically supported points in this piece is that far more
impactful than labor and economic structure is the fundamental designation of who can be
human, who is merely man, and the overrepresentation of these differences, twisted and
stretched to define all existence. Human is designated as being closer to God, to Christian
God, and inherently better, smarter, more worthy. Man is ultimately and completely defined as
a political subject of the state, and his/her rights and punishments are delineated almost solely
through adherence to the rules of the state. I think about this piece in relation to everything but
certainly to what is knowable and how that is determined, protected as well as how it can be
upended.
Places of Learning: Media, Architecture Pedagogy – Elizabeth Ellsworth
Ellsworth’s book has stayed with me steady since I first read it. Being in a school of education,
her discussion of learning as transformation and investigations into designs of material spaces
that aim to facilitate transformations are illuminating and refreshing from technicism that
collapses learning into studenting.
The Mind at Work – Mike Rose
Mike Rose’s Lives on The Boundary is probably what kept me in my first year of teaching
when, although I was succeeding as an employee, I was grappling with how to teach in
contexts that I brokenheartedly learned to be about anything but learning. His writing style, to
me, has always maintained an ethos of teaching in it. In The Mind at Work, he explores the
intelligence in physical work, in labor, and aims to reconcile the Cartesion split between mind
and body that is used to facilitate strata of worth (that last part is more mine that what he
says). As the daughter of a seamstress, I am fascinated both by the deep intelligence in so
many moves/motions and how we’ve come to be hoodwinked into thinking that intelligence is
at its apex through language.
All our Names by Dinaw Mengestu – subjectivity/materiality/place
A novel that works the concept of coming into being materially, in time, space, and with others
brilliantly. Here’s an apt description of it. I’ve been reading it while reading the conference
papers and it goes hand in hand.

What are five questions you would like to pose to fellow participants at the conference? (These may be
directed to specific persons, disciplinary groups, or to all participants.) [Approximately 1/2 page]
o
While not a new question but one that feels more and more pressing to me
all the time, how do we best support students from nondominant
backgrounds to make it through their doctoral studies in programs that
expect those appearances of data, truth, and objectivity?
o
How can research as a fundamentally ontological and materially
shaped/shaping endeavor be framed such that the current colonial
instantiations are seen to be just that and therefore poisonous?
o
How do you use writing as thinking and not as the end of a line of research?
o
Thinking about Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang’s piece on refusals, what and how have
you refused colonial frames of knowledge and who can know?
o
Why this? Why you? Why now?

What intersections of two (or more) categories of the conference readings are you finding most
compelling and why? [Approximately 1/2 page]
I cannot remotely keep this to a ½ page, so I’ll just say briefly that the readings are pushing
me to constantly crush on ideas of materiality and how much we always always always come
into being in specific places, moments, and conditions. This week I was in a conversation
with a small group and we used a timeline to note when our relations first arrived on Turtle
Island and the conditions of those arrivals. As I listened and talked, so many of the readings
were bumping into each other in my mind: materiality, stories, coloniality, land, conditions –
all of it.

Can you provide five key words you would like to see and hear less of in fields of social inquiry? No
explanation required, but you may offer commentary if you wish. [Approximately 1/2 page]
intellectual property
criterion
validity
THE community (insert eye-roll here)
THE field (same eye-roll)

Can you provide five key words you would like to see and hear more of in fields of social inquiry? No
explanation required, but you may offer commentary if you wish. [Approximately 1/2 page]
answerability
intent with humility
land/space/movement
impermanence
coordinates