Ladelle McWhorter

Queer defies categorization and resists preset developmental trajectories. Practices of queering identities emerged near the end of the twentieth century as ways of resisting normalizing networks of power/knowledge. But how effective are queer practices at resisting networks of power/knowledge (including disciplines) that are not primarily normalizing in their functioning? This essay raises that question in light of expanding neoliberal discourses and institutions which, in some quarters at least, themselves undermine normalized identities in favor of a proliferation of personal styles susceptible to governance through market forces. Special attention is given to Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics in this analysis

Charles Scott has always encouraged his students to take up the questions they find most troubling, difficult, and even possibly unanswerable. For him, philosophy is about movements of thinking themselves rather than arrival at reasonable conclu­sions. In tribute to Scott as a teacher, this paper takes up a troubling and perhaps unanswerable question: How might we teach our students today so as to prepare them for life in a world of ecological instability beyond what any member of our species has ever experienced? It looks at the question of ethics in the midst of pollution, peak oil, and climate change.