Surrender as Method, Subject, and Experience: Doing the Work that Undoes Us

In her award winning book Surrender: Feminist Rhetoric and Ethics in Love and Illness, Jessica Restaino (Montclair State University) takes up a two-year ethnography project with friend and collaborator Susan Lundy Maute, through the last two years of Maute’s life with terminal breast cancer. This public lecture introduces a series of core concepts from Surrender: “cut pieces,” which can represent messy and destabilized researcher-writer subjectivities and the uncertain texts produced when we are engaged with work that overwhelms us; “misfit tools,” which are rhetorical guide posts for identifying methods that disrupt traditional expectations for how and why we do our work; and finally “love” as a (difficult) concept that has a necessary place in research and writing work that pushes our most deeply-held boundaries.

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This event is part of Syracuse Symposium’s year-long series on “Futures.” See the full season schedule at humcenter.syr.edu.

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