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(IN)HABIT 2023
University of Toronto Graduate English Association Conference 2023
Please see event schedule here. We are pleased to announce Professor Monica Huerta as our Keynote Speaker.
In Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed writes, “The work of inhabiting space involves a dynamic negotiation between what is familiar and unfamiliar, such that it is still possible for the world to create new impressions, depending on which way we turn, which affects what is within reach.” Ahmed’s influential text on orientation and phenomenology in relation to queer sexuality offers a generative theoretical framework for thinking through issues of how we inhabit space as sexualized, racialized, and otherwise embodied subjects. Indeed, as we transition out of the defamiliarized virtual conditions necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, we live in an increasingly hybrid world where we exist both as physical and digital presences, further complicating the matter of inhabitance, of navigating what is or is not familiar. Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre similarly reminds us that “representations of space [...] have a substantial role and a specific influence in the production of space,” suggesting that our own habits—literary or otherwise—produce and are produced by the spaces we inhabit.....
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