QUILTING POINTS:

**In solidarity with striking members of the UCU at the University of Leeds, we will be running our eighth session off-campus at the Packhorse Pub  from 4pm - 5:30pm. Staff, students and members of the public are very welcome.** In this session, we will be discussing the first chapter of Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism  (2004 [1998]), entitled 'Speaking Back.' A PDF is accessible via Google Drive here . Secondary reading: bell hooks ‘Postmodern Blackness’ in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (2015 [1990]). A PDF is accessible here . In these essays, both Sara Ahmed and bell hooks think critically about the relationship between (intersectional) feminism and postmodernism. For example, Ahmed considers the paradoxical manner in which postmodernism covers a broad spectrum of epistemological disruption and is yet underpinned by processes of exclusion (see Ahmed, 2004, p.4). Via Helen Tiffin, she also draws attention to how post...

For our seventh session, we will be joined by Dr Jay Prosser for a special session on 'Strangers.' The session is intended to develop and complicate our thinking on strangers in Ahmed's work. Dr Prosser is Reader in Humanities at the University of Leeds. He recommends that attendees read the following chapters from Tabish Khair's The New Xenophobia (2016) and Toni Morrison's The Origin of Others (2017) alongside a blog post from Ahmed on 'Making Strangers'. A PDF of the Toni Morrison text is available  here , and A PDF of the Tabish Khair text is available  here . Sara Ahmed's blog post, 'Making Strangers' is accessible here . Back in October, for our first session of the academic year , we explored the figure of 'the stranger' in Ahmed's work through a reading of her essay, 'Embodying Strangers,' and Audré Lorde's essay 'Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger*'. We considered how the stranger i...