Greeting Cards

…it is a matter today of at least trying not to let old, reheated hatreds poison the new generation, the generation of activists who, on the ground, are confronting a State rationality that has become the servant pure and simple of the imperatives of growth and competition, and of all those who – often the same – are experimenting with the possibilities of manners of living and cooperating that have been destroyed in the name of progress.

~Isabelle Stengers*

Greeting Cards for the Anthropocene seeks to explore recipes for collaborating and communicating at a time of increasingly dire climate catastrophe. One might say that it is premised on urgent need to foster human and more-than-human convivialities. With support from the Planet Texas 2050 project, we are working to create a set of greeting cards as a way of thinking critically about the constitution of community and the rhetoric of greeting in a time of crisis.

Join us for reading groups, workshops, and other activities in the 2019/2020 academic year.

In past workshops we have assembled a small reading package that may be of interest to some of our participants. We will continue to build this reading list over the course of the 2018-2019 year.

Readings. [zipped folder of all readings]

Chua, Liana, and Hannah Fair. 2019. “Anthropocene.” Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, January. https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/anthropocene.

D’Angelo, Frank. 1992. “The Rhetoric of Sentimental Greeting Card Verse.” Rhetoric Review 10 (2): 337–345.

Jaffe, Alexandra. 1999. “Packaged Sentiments: The Social Meanings of Greeting Cards.” Journal of Material Culture 4 (2): 115–141.

Murphy, Keith M. 2017. “Fontroversy! Or, How to Care about the Shape of Language.” In Language and Materiality: Ethnographic and Theoretical Explorations, edited by Jillian R. Cavanaugh and Shalini Shankar, 63–86. Cambridge University Press.

*Stengers, Isabelle. 2015. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Open Humanites Press. http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/in-catastrophic-times/.

Van Leeuwen, Theo. 2005. “Typographic Meaning.” Visual Communication 4 (2): 137–143.