This is a paper I delivered at the 2023 ALSCW conference in Houston earlier this month as part of the “Mystery and Secrecy: Ancient Origins, Modern Expressions” panel. I’ll likely cannibalize it toward later essays and eventually as part of the second disappearance manuscript currently in the works. the inflections Read more…
Indigenous women in North America disappear at ten times the rate of the general population. Cases tend to occur in Canada along Highway 16 in British Columbia, in the Pacific Northwest, and in the Dakotas, but the crisis is ongoing everywhere. The causes are various, but include a longstanding attitude Read more…
In Hisham Matar’s writing, I saw a rhetoric of missingness punctuated with lyricism. The strength of Matar’s keen lyric sense – the ways he captures small, vivid perceptions that convey a deeper and grander sense of place or situation – works as a tool for exploring missingness by catching and Read more…
Disequilibria has its many chords. This blog series might lead to fruitful projects toward a second work, perhaps also within the scope of missingness. One way I’m thinking toward a follow-up work exploring missingness is to focus in a more sustained way on place and space as theoretical concepts, somewhat Read more…
A fact or a theory that takes its meanings from a particular discipline interests me in the ways it might be useful outside that discipline. How might a biologist’s ideas about morphology transfer to literary form? Do literary texts have feedback loops, like thermostats or software? From architecture, Christopher Alexander Read more…