R has final (mostly final) drafts of chapters 2 and 3 and i am reading for 4. this is all good stuff.
in the meantime, though, i need to start working on preparing my materials for the job market. which means being able to write an entire paragraph on What My Dissertation Is About.
so what is it about? it's about asking how rhetoric of and about citizenship influences what we think citizenship means, i think. thus the way that rhetorical ecologies throw citizenship and weird together and shopping becomes a citizenly activity. thus the way demonstrators speak about "what democracy looks like" in Seattle in 1999 even as the mayor calls them criminals. and thus the way we accept that participants in the arab spring were fighting to become citizens even though many of them didn't vote, and in egypt have tried to stall voting.
so there's confusion over what citizenship means. to what extent are things like shopping, locking into a human chain, and setting fire to buildings acts of citizenship? and how does place fit into this?
because another thing i need to be able to justify if why these three topics. i start with louisville because of place. the concern of the citizen-consumer, in BL movements, is only with their city. and in reality, the movement only involves parts of the city. (is there potential for more, sure, yeah. but we're not there.) in seattle, there are global concerns, but the objective of the crowd, as a whole, was to shut down this event in this city. and the way we talk about the events of N30 reduce it to an epic battle in that one city, not to a city in a network of worldwide struggle.
so then what about the arab spring? well, it's different, because protesters had local concerns, but saw themselves as part of a pan-arabic movement.
so do i end by saying this is the best example? i mean, maybe it is. but the point maybe is that because it's so hard for us to think about these activities as citizenship that people don't know what to do next?
i don't know. this is as close as i'm getting.
