Updating this transformation, Zach Furness discusses in One Less Car how bicycling and driving dramatically shift your orientation to the world & others.

A quotation from p. 177:

"At the most basic level, cycling slows down the world in ways that tangibly affect interpersonal communication, most notably by promoting face-to-face encounters.56 Scott larkin, author of the zine Go by Bicycle, points this out in interview with the author: “The prospect of someone stopping to talk to someone when they’re jamming by at thirty-five miles an hour is unlikely.”57 in addition, there is a sense among critics that habitual driving engenders an experience of cities that is not unlike tourism, inasmuch as urban spaces and landscapes are often abstracted into “pure, rapid, superficial spectacles.”58 Driving, according to this line of reasoning, physically distances people from both the materiality and the material realities of cities (i.e., the built environment as well as prevailing socioeconomic conditions) by facilitating a process that allows people to metaphorically and sometimes quite literally bypass the problems of cities altogether. The driver’s gaze shaped through privatized mobility, nigel Taylor argues, also objectifies and depersonalizes the world outside of the car in such as way that it transforms the environment, other vehicles, and even human beings into mere “things” that obstruct one’s movement. That is to say, while the car—like all transportation technologies— operates as a framing device, the “visuality of the windshield” becomes more than a casual or temporary looking glass when one considers both the ever- increasing amounts of time people individually spend “sealed off from the public and the street,” as well as a broader cultural/legal context in which “the public” is increasingly being seen as a mere amalgamation of mobile private spheres—a condition Don Mitchell calls the “SUV model of citizenship.” The problem, in other words, is not necessarily what one sees or does not see each time one gets behind the wheel, but rather, the way driving shapes subjectivity and fosters a broader disposition toward urban space and urban life: an entire way of seeing."

This is really compelling methodologically. Taylor appears to paint speculatively -- what ways do you (or might you) track how you are differently constituted through intra-action with knowledges?

Clear definition of disabled ecologies.

Though every thing we call "world" blooms & constantly becomes through intra-action, I wonder to what extent a generous strategic essentialism is useful, particularly in advocacy.

I'm reminded of Jane Bennett:

“We are now in a better position to name that other way to promote human health and happiness: to raise the status of the materiality of which we are composed. Each human is a heterogeneous compound of wonder-fully vibrant, dangerously vibrant, matter. If matter itself is lively, then not only is the difference between subjects and objects minimized, but the status of the shared materiality of all things is elevated. All bodies become more than mere objects, as the thing-powers of resistance and protean agency are brought into sharper relief. Vital materialism would thus set up a kind of safety net for those humans who are now, in a world where Kantian morality is the standard, routinely made to suffer because they do not conform to a particular (Euro-American, bourgeois, theocentric, or other) model of personhood. The ethical aim becomes to distribute value more generously, to bodies as such. Such a newfound attentiveness to matter and its powers will not solve the problem of human exploitation or oppression, but it can inspire a greater sense of the extent to which all bodies are kin in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations. And in a knotted world of vibrant matter, to harm one section of the web may very well be to harm oneself. Such an enlightened or expanded notion of self-interest is good for humans…. [A] vital materialism does not reject self-interest as a motivation for ethical behavior, though it does seek to cultivate a broader definition of self and of interest” (Vibrant Matter 12-13).

Late 19th century (originally as oecology): from Greek oikos ‘house’ + -logy.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ecology

How do we account in our scholarship our practices of "unfocusing"?

One vector I think of is Jaishikha Nautiyal's piece in the Women's Studies in Communication 2018 special issue on New Materialities and Precarious Mobilities, "Becoming a Detour de Force: Dehierarchizing Directionality and Mobility in Rhetorical Research."

Nautiyal generally aligns becoming a detour de force with Braidotti's nomadic subjectivity & reflects on their fieldwork at SXSW to describe this modality of research.

Some quotations:

"As a research ethic, a detour de force opposes a tour de force, which views a critic’s inventions as the egocentric product of vertical excellence, geocentric mastery, and the telic exceptionalism of human agency. Invention as a tour de force privileges spatial economies that value the predominantly and largely masculinist faculties of vision and intellect at the expense of sense perceptions related to touch, sound, smell, and taste (Irigaray 25–26; Cimitile and Miller)" (430).

"Through this approach, I attempt to reclaim the traditionally inferior, haptic, gustatory, olfactory, and aural senses into the material corpus alongside the ocular, while also demonstrating the diminishing returns of distributed sensory attention within fieldwork (e.g., anxiety, overstimulation). In becoming a detour de force, my desire is to touch the earth before I can limit, subjugate, and fetishize it with my vision—a vision compromised and facilitated by the nexus of advanced capitalism (Cimitile and Miller 122). My desire is to take a sensuous detour of feeling and attention before cognition forecloses on navigation through the fixity of a destination" (432).

This transports me to Saya Woolfalk's "accessible and concrete" multi-modal art work and fantasy worlds of data colonialism. Pieces like "Ethnography of No Place" and her development of The Institute of Empathy (whose non-profit work gets appropriated by the company ChimaTEK) motion us toward Braidotti's calls to situate posthumanism within the intensification of technologies/capitalism.

Geometry & topography might springboard some useful ways to think about coalition/kin building that simultaneously hold up the work of standpoint theory & decenters humanness at the same time.

Fusing this "conceptual persona" with the persona of the "critic," my mind travels to some of Chuck Morris's work. Perhaps a generous twist on "critical liminality" and the persona of the "archival queer" offer initial resonances for how rhetorical scholars have done some of what Braidotti maps in a different register.

https://doi.org/10.1080/00335639609384153

https://www.academia.edu/3659972/Queer_Archives_Archival_Queers_co-authored_with_Charles_E._Morris_III_

What rhetorical concepts might lend themselves to anti-colonial "joyful acts of disobedience"? What pieces or scholars come to mind that practice, model, or are in proximity to this "joyful disobedience"?