L-355, R.D. Parker Building
(705) 675-1151, ext. 3709
ashotwell@laurentian.ca

RESEARCH INTERESTS

In general, I spend a lot of time thinking about gender, sexuality, knowledge,  racial formation, colonialism, and affect. My current research focuses on a category I am calling "relational gender formation." I explore the idea of gender as mutually constituted, such that other people’s gender experience and enactment is intimately involved with constellating and changing our own. So far, this project includes a co-written paper that attempts to explain non-trans people's fear, hatred, and worry about trans people, reflections on gender and voluntarism, and an engagement with novelist Shirley Jackson's depictions of co-constituted straight, white femininity.

I have also recently completed work on a book manuscript.  Knowing Otherwise: Implicit Understanding and Political Change explains how unspoken and unspeakable knowledge is important to racial and gender formation. Although it has long been clear that what people say in words does not encompass their racialised and gendered understanding of their social worlds, there has not as yet been a book that elucidates and applies a full conception of the implicit aspects of our political understanding. Drawing on philosophers, political theorists, activists, and poets, Knowing Otherwise offers a useable conception of implicit understanding.   

REPRESENTATIVE/SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

With Pamela Perry (co-authors), “Relational Understanding and White Antiracist Praxis” (forthcoming, Sociological Theory).

“A Knowing That Resided in My Bones: Sensuous Embodiment and Genderqueer Social Movement” in Susan Sherwin, Susan Campbell, and Letitia Meynell (eds.). Agency and Embodiment. Forthcoming Penn State, 2008

“Shame in Alterities: Adrian Piper, Intersubjectivity, and the Racial Formation of Identity” in Silke Horstkotte and Esther Peeren (eds.) The Shock of the Other: Situating Alterity. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Book series: Thamyris/Intersecting: Race, Sex, Place.

“Common Sense and Race: Nonpropositional Elements in Thinking through Gramsci.” In Joseph Young and Jana Evans Braziel (eds.) Race and the Foundations of Knowledge.  University of Illinois Press, 2006

L-355, Édifice R.D. Parker
(705) 675-1151, poste 3709
ashotwell@laurentian.ca

RESEARCH INTERESTS

In general, I spend a lot of time thinking about gender, sexuality, knowledge,  racial formation, colonialism, and affect. My current research focuses on a category I am calling "relational gender formation." I explore the idea of gender as mutually constituted, such that other people’s gender experience and enactment is intimately involved with constellating and changing our own. So far, this project includes a co-written paper that attempts to explain non-trans people's fear, hatred, and worry about trans people, reflections on gender and voluntarism, and an engagement with novelist Shirley Jackson's depictions of co-constituted straight, white femininity.

I have also recently completed work on a book manuscript.  Knowing Otherwise: Implicit Understanding and Political Change explains how unspoken and unspeakable knowledge is important to racial and gender formation. Although it has long been clear that what people say in words does not encompass their racialised and gendered understanding of their social worlds, there has not as yet been a book that elucidates and applies a full conception of the implicit aspects of our political understanding. Drawing on philosophers, political theorists, activists, and poets, Knowing Otherwise offers a useable conception of implicit understanding.   

REPRESENTATIVE/SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

With Pamela Perry (co-authors), “Relational Understanding and White Antiracist Praxis” (forthcoming, Sociological Theory).

“A Knowing That Resided in My Bones: Sensuous Embodiment and Genderqueer Social Movement” in Susan Sherwin, Susan Campbell, and Letitia Meynell (eds.). Agency and Embodiment. Forthcoming Penn State, 2008

“Shame in Alterities: Adrian Piper, Intersubjectivity, and the Racial Formation of Identity” in Silke Horstkotte and Esther Peeren (eds.) The Shock of the Other: Situating Alterity. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Book series: Thamyris/Intersecting: Race, Sex, Place.

“Common Sense and Race: Nonpropositional Elements in Thinking through Gramsci.” In Joseph Young and Jana Evans Braziel (eds.) Race and the Foundations of Knowledge.  University of Illinois Press, 2006