This week's class discussion on Barad was very interesting as it posed various tensions. One of her biggest criticism is that people shouldn’t rely on moral judgments. She discusses the role of agency and how authors write text while the text also writes the author which leads me to question the role of power and who maintains it. Her basis of critique of Frayn’s play demonstrates that you can’t know all of the time, and that relying on content sometimes leads to points of ethics which doesn’t always lead anywhere. You can’t necessarily judge actions or intentions objectively because there’s no objectivity which ties into her discussion of the past which she argues never ends.

I will admit that my post this week veers a little bit from what we looked at in class. However, I do feel that it is relevant to the course as a whole.

Some background info:
Today, I was sitting at my laptop in my room listening to my Pandora station. A friend came into the room wanting to talk so I switched my tabs, paused the song I was playing and then saw the name of the album that was currently playing. It was called "Women in Technology". My initial reaction was woah, this GIST course is taking over my life! And then (after freaking out at my geekiness) I decided to look more into why the album was named 'Women and Technology' and I thought it would be interesting to write about.

Powers uses very detailed and strong descriptions. While it is good to used detail and strong descriptions in writing, I feel like Powers is going to far. He overuses such descriptions, employing them in practically every sentence. I believe he is trying to make to many references and make it obvious that the group of people he is talking about is creative writers. In a nutshell, think he is trying to hard to make his writing come alive.

 I've been thinking now about Anne's question in class about why we're reading this novel, and I keep going back to the part in the novel where they say that there are only 24 possible plots to write, and they debate whether that is true or not.  I'm starting to think that in a broad sense that may actually be true.  Because I think there really is a limit to what kinds of stories can be told.  I think that the variation comes not from the plot, but from the story.   Similar to how there are multiple stories of evolution, there can be multiple stories for a certain plot line.

Gentech notes 03-16:

-          Re-evaluate how resources are being spent (socially)—ex: $$$$’s spent on 88 year old for surgery—great choice personally. Socially, maybe not so much

  In class today we discussed what Generosity may have evolved from, and sources that may have inspired Powers. It motivated me to explore the origin of the name of the invented college, “Mesquakie College of Art”. Mesquakie is the name of a Native American tribe that settled in the Great Lakes region, and who were forced to leave their homes when European settlers came to the area. These people were displaced in their own homeland, much like Thassa had been when she became a refugee. 

Class notes 3/14

(Sorry if I misspell people’s names!)

We began with course keeping, as usual.

Liz reminded us that: This course is constructed to try to find some interesting intersections. What are the big ideas that connect these four areas? What is the overall road map? What are the connecting ideas?

We divided into smaller groups to discuss the reading, "Moored Metamorphoses: A Retrospective Essay on Feminist Science Studies." By Banu Subramaniam

My group, the Poppies said: