Today, when collecting my work mail for the first time in months, I found a copy of the most recent issue of American Studies, where I published an article called “The Limits of Recognition: Rethinking Conventional Critiques of Drone Warfare.” Thanks to the editors and the two anonymous readers for their thoughtful engagement with my ideas and all the nudges in the direction of making them better.
Thanks to Melissa Gerr and Sheilah Kast of WYPR’s On the Record for the invitation to talk about Coronavirus Lost and Found (my public archival project) on this morning’s show. The episode is available here.
… available here. Thanks to Jonathan Vincent for giving my work such thoughtful consideration.
… about Coronavirus Lost and Found, the public archive I launched earlier this spring.
It’s available here.
I continue to be astonished by contributions I’ve received, the candor and generosity with which people have shared their pandemic stories of losing and finding. I’m so grateful to the writers who allowed me to share their work again with a broader audience.
I don’t usually use this forum to talk about my students’ work, but it’s been such an eventful week that I couldn’t resist.
Ali Knowles published a *peer-reviewed* paper, “How Donald Trump Tweeted his way into the White House,” in the UMBC Review, a journal of undergraduate research.
And Kenneth-Julius M’Bale presented – virtually, of course – on “Cuckolding Culture in Rap” at this year’s Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day (URCAD).
I’m really proud of them both.
I just launched a website where anyone can log the things they’ve lost, or found, because of coronavirus. Please visit and contribute your story.
… the Collins Avenue Streamside Community has invited me to come and talk about Figuring Violence. I’m looking forward to chatting with this intentional community of peace activists and friends about how we might craft more substantive and thoughtful responses to militarism.
Wednesday! Baltimore! Nerd Nite! Because I’m still wondering “If her loose lips sink ships, what can her other parts do?” Here is my tantalizing first slide:
Thanks so much to Melissa Miles and Edward Welch for including my chapter, “Hospitable Looking: Towards a Different Way of Seeing the War in Syria,” in Photography and Its Publics. This chapter builds on the paper I presented (thanks for that invitation too!) at a symposium by the same name in Prato, Italy, a few years ago. In “Hospitable Looking,” I reflect on the pattern of optimism that global publics seem to evince about images from the war in Syria: the sense that each new photographic revelation of atrocity will be the one that finally compels an end to this conflict. Tracing the upwellings of this optimism, I explore the vexed, often solipsistic assumptions about spectatorial empathy that underpin it. Ultimately, I argue that this conflict requires a different visual ethics.
rebecca a. adelman, ph.d. 