Notes on Craft: Dr Xine Yao and Ama Josephine B. Johnstone in Conversation

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As part of the Notes on Craft series, hosted by Queer Intersections Oxford, Dr Xine Yao will sit down with artist and activist Ama Josephine B. Johnstone to discuss the experiences that inform their work, and to explore vibrant intersections between life, activism, and scholarship. They’ll also be discussing Dr Yao’s first book, Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America, which was released in the UK earlier this year by Duke University Press. Described as a ‘powerhouse’ of a study, Disaffected looks at the racial and sexual politics of unfeeling as a means of survival and refusal in nineteenth-century America. In addition to being a remarkable intervention in affect theory and nineteenth-century literary scholarship, Disaffected looks towards an imaginative and intellectual space where precarious and systemically oppressed scholars ‘can be vulnerable’: ‘to be seen, process, and organize’. 

Notes on Craft aims to foster conversations between activism and academia, and to give context to students and early career academics on how their political, scholarly, and lived experiences might effectively feed and shape one another. To find out more about upcoming QIO events, you can follow the Network on Twitter @oxqueerstudies and on Facebook.