Tuesday, October 6, 2026, 4 – 5:30pm EDT
Worlding: Finding a Way in Broken TimesReading and Conversation with Kathleen Stewart
This talk will be a reading from Kathleen Stewart’s forthcoming book, Worlding: Finding a Way in Broken Times. Worlding is a series of tryouts or improvs learning to approach a new ordinary long unfolding in the United States since the 1950s. Its pieces move like a flip book trying to get down with worldly bits and pieces of immanent potential in aesthetic, affective, material modes of being. It suggests a creative-critical propositional practice of knowing otherwise that might sustain the complexity of reals that shift, settle, or falter on thresholds.
Katie Stewart is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. Working to theorize in the resonance of forces coming into their own, she writes on affect, the ordinary, and modes of attunement from a speculative curiosity. A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an `Other’ America(Princeton, 1996) thinks with the textured sensations laid down in social use in an abandoned America. Ordinary Affects (Duke, 2007) maps the buildup, at the turn of the century, of the force of an affective mode of being lived as immanent and prolific. The Hundreds (with Lauren Berlant, Duke 2019) is a writing experiment in feeling out a history and future of a present presenting in scenes of life. Worlding (Duke April 2027) is a series of try outs to think worldly, with and through things rather than about them. Thought is not an angle of refraction between a self in here and a world out there but a pressure point, a condensate, a sediment somehow inhabited by bodies, affects, events and matter, a contact dermatitis.