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February 07, 2002
Harriet Malinowitz-Speaker 2002
Harriet Malinowitz
As part of the Diversity Speaker Series, the Writing Program and Executive Vice Provost Howard C. Johnson are pleased to announce speaker Harriet Malinowitz, Associate Professor of English and former Director of Women's Studies at Long Island University. Professor Malinowitz will speak on "The Uses of Literacy in a Globalized Post-September 11 World" at 3:00, Friday, April 5, in Kittredge Auditorium, H.B. Crouse Hall. This talk is open to the SU community: all are welcome. An informal reception will follow.
In her published works, Harriet Malinowitz examines rhetorical theory and criticism, institutional and professional authority, and feminist theory, lesbian studies, and queer theory. Her publications include Textual Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Students and the Making of Discourse Communities (a book which was originally her dissertation and received the CCCC Best Dissertation award in 1994), and numerous essays and reviews in College English, Conditions, Frontiers, JAC, The New Lesbian Studies, New Directions of Women, the National Women's Studies Association Journal, Pre/Text, The Women's Review of Books, and The Right to Literacy.
Master Class Seminar
"The Uses of Literacy: Personally, Professionally, and Politically"
The Orwellian presumption that "ignorance is strength" is a key survival skill in the market-driven, post-September 11 world of the 21st century. The techniques of capturing our consumerist hearts and our voting minds are being practiced by a complex public relations apparatus—including major media, government agencies, corporations, think tanks, PR firms, universities, scientific journals—promoting what I have come to call mass "stupidification" as a cultural practice and cultural value. Living in this climate of "stupidification" affects us personally, professionally, and politically.
In this seminar, I would like to sketch some of the ways that my own life and career trajectories have been shaped by my attempts to respond to the effects of stupidification—from my earlier work in lesbian and gay, women's, labor, and race studies, through my interests in consumerism, the idea of "fairness" in liberal political discourse, "unmotherhood," queer pedagogy, and secular Jewishness, to my current interests in (as George W. Bush might dichotomize them) the "evils" of globalization, Sept. 11, and the War on Terrorism and the "good" of the pleasures afforded by literature and the personal essay. I hope to engage participants in a discussion of how they, too, might use the analytical skills in which they've been trained toward the erosion of mass stupidification and its discontents.
Posted by mryonker at February 7, 2002 02:50 PM