What Counts?: Election, Truth, and Power

Positions is an occasional show on culture and politics hosted by the New Media and Digital Culture Working Group of the Cultural Studies Association. In this episode, researchers working at the intersection of religion and politics discuss the figure of the witch. Is the witch a feminist figure? It seems that the fourth-wave feminists who take to the internet have claimed the witch for themselves. Does this deviate from the history of the witch? Or do their claims line up with an older approach to the practices of cunning knowledge production and worldmaking beyond-the-human? Our panelists begin with the gendered subject of the witch, yet their conversation takes them through whiteness, settler colonialism, environmental movements, and beyond. Rebekah Sheldon of Indiana University moderates, with Gabriel Saloman Mindel (University of California Santa Cruz) and Sandra Huber (Concordia University).  This episode was produced and edited by Andrew Culp. If you have a topic you'd like to discuss on positions, email us at  [email protected] with a brief proposal including a moderator and a  conversation partner. Rebekah Sheldon is an Associate Professor of English at Indiana University Bloomington and the author of The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe (Minnesota, 2016). Sheldon writes and teaches about feminist and queer theory, speculative philosophy, and speculative fiction. Her current book project concerns the relationship between the new realisms, vitalist philosophy, and the occult. Gabriel Saloman Mindel is a multidisciplinary artist based in Santa Cruz, California, who works in sound, text, visual medium and socially collaborative forms. He is currently pursuing a PhD in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he is researching the relationships between noise, power and protest. This past Fall he taught a lecture course entitled, “What is the Witch?: Terror, Subjectivity, Modernity”. Sandra Huber is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University. She focuses on communication with the dead in contemporary witchcraft and ceremonial magic. In her work in general, she is interested in approaching questions concerning the secretive or the occulted through embodied research. She wrote Assembling the Morrow: A Poetics of Sleep (Talonbooks, 2014) based on a collaboration with sleep scientists in Lausanne, Switzerland.

In this pilot episode, four cultural theorists discuss the fallout from the recent election. While pundits have covered the conspiracy myths, polarized culture, and militarized politics in the run-up to the election, these scholars offer insight to how disruptive media, anti-blackness, and antagonistic politics will live on for weeks, months, and years. Chris Richardson of Young Harris College moderates, with Jack Z. Bratich (Rutgers), Jeff Heydon (Wilfrid Laurier), Roopali Mukherjee (CUNY, Queens) and Khadijah White (Rutgers). This episode was produced & edited by Andrew Culp with special help from Marcus Breen.