Princess of Networks: Lisa Baraitser's Object-Oriented Maternities

This response to Lisa Baraitser's Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (2009 Baraitser , L. ( 2009 ). Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption . London , UK, and New York, NY : Routledge . [Google Scholar]) puts the book in conversation with recent speculative realist thinking and object-oriented philosophies. Drawing on the democratizing onticology of Levi Bryant, Graham Harman's object-oriented philosophy, Ian Bogost's alien phenomenology, and Jane Bennett's political ecology of matter, I argue that Baraitser develops a “vibrant maternality” and an object-oriented feminism that gives nonhuman actants their due in a constellation of relations between maternal subjects and the objects they encounter.     

Grounded Futurity: Time and Subjectivity in Lisa Baraitser's Maternal Encounters

In this article, I explore how moments of the “new” that Baraitser (2009 Baraitser , L. ( 2009 ). Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption . London , UK : Routledge . [Google Scholar]) describes throughout Maternal Encounters are characterized by a time of futurity, a time marked by the potentialities of change. By tracing how futuristic time operates in the various maternal encounters that Baraitser details, including naming, interruptions, love and crying, and maternal “stuff,” I argue that each transitory moment is marked by openness to possibility for the maternal self. One of the main innovations of Baraitser's theory is its concurrent ability to ground futuristic force in such a way that enables an articulation of subjectivity in the midst of processes that work to unsettle fixed sureties. And this works two ways. Conjoining maternal subjectivity with futurity, Maternal Encounters has the important, indeed groundbreaking, effect of refiguring the mother, so often constructed as generator of the future, as a futuristic subject in her own right.     

Book Review: The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice,Immigrant Workers,and the High-Tech Global Economy. By Pellow,David Naguib,and Park,Lisa Sun-Hee. New York: New York University Press, 2002. 303 pages,paperback. ISBN: 0814767109

Qualitative Sociology -     

Caraley,D. J. (ed.): American Hegemony: Preventive War,Iraq, and Imposing Democracy.

Review of Journals and Books

Caraley, D. J. (ed.): American Hegemony: Preventive War, Iraq, and Imposing Democracy.