What did you think she was going to talk about? Making cookies?

First the bona fides: “Jasbir K. Puar is Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999 and an M.A. from the University of York, England, in Women’s Studies in 1993. She has written widely on South Asian disaporic cultural production in the U.S., U.K., and Trinidad; gay and lesbian tourism; terrorist studies; surveillance studies; bio and necropolitics; queer theory; disability and debilitation; theories of intersectionality, affect, and assemblage; animal studies and posthumanism; homonationalism, pinkwashing, and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Puar’s forthcoming monograph, States of Debility and Capacity (Duke University Press, 2016) takes up the relations between biopolitics, disability, and forms of active debilitation pivotal to the operations of war machines and racial capitalism. The book will be among the first to appear in a new book series, ANIMA, which she co-edits with Mel Chen (author of Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Duke University Press, 2012).”

And now her speech topic: Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters. Lecture by Professor Jasbir Puar

“This lecture theorizes oscillating relations between disciplinary, pre-emptive, and increasingly prehensive forms of power that shape human and non-human materialities in Palestine. Calculation, computing, informational technologies, surveillance, and militarization are all facets of prehensive control. Further, the saturation of spatial and temporal stratum in Palestine demonstrates the use of technologies of measure to manufacture a “remote control” occupation, one that produces a different version of Israeli “home invasions” through the maiming and stunting of population. If Gaza, for example, is indeed the world’s largest “open air prison” and an experimental lab for Israeli military apparatuses, infrastructural chaos, and metric manipulation, what kinds of fantasies (about power, about bodies, about resistance, about politics) are driving this project?”

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/02/todays-outstanding-academic-gibberish.php

Link at: http://politicalhat.com/2016/02/07/news20160207/

It’s a good thing I got’s me a degree, elsewise I wouldn’t understand Zionist use of oscillating relations against downtrodden Palestinians.

Why do we pay attention to college nonsense?

Really, most people don’t. What goes on in college classrooms and dorms and faculty offices matters to very few Americans.

What goes on does matter to makers and shapers of opinion and to politicians.

When college graduates can’t find jobs in their degree fields, commenters and politicians start making noise. And when politicians make noise, few good things happen.

During the great unemployment period that has or has not lessened over the last two years, stories abound about of out of work college graduates. Those degrees in comparative religions/women’s studies, psychiatry, anthropology meant little, other than proof of sitting in classrooms for four years.

For a time, there were lots of whiners, now former students complaining they had been shortchanged, misled, lied to by college guidance counselors.

Degrees that showed ability to do things were what was needed, but too many people went in to feel-good areas.

Much of the whining comes from this: 60 percent of college students are women, and women are more likely to focus on feel-good courses, areas in which “I can help people. I can make a difference.” Men are more likely to look at “Things I can do,” because men fix things.

Jane S. Shaw says here http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=2959

“It is hard to find a legitimate justification for women's studies.”

Amen, Sister.

At maggiesfarm.