Aesthetics

"The Aesthetic is anything that trains the imagination for epistemological performance." the distinction between globalization as instrumental knowledge systems and the one in the margins, the Subaltern, and goes further to say that established systems of knowledge, affected by globalization, can only exist in the abstract, in quantifiable data. aesthetic education as an embodied practice. "A deeper cultivation of the Imagination, reading, writing, understanding, dwelling in otherness, performing knowledge." And developing a capacity to deal with double-binds, tensions between ethical demands.> Gayatri Spivak

"The split and contradictory self is the one who can interrogate positionings and be accountable. The one who can construct and join rational conversations and fantastic imaginings that change history." >

'Drag is what reveals all gender to be a copy of which there is no original.' Rather than being the imitation of a gender that supposedly properly belongs to some other group, it reveals that gender expressions were never fixed or 'naturally' belonging to a certain group in the first place. It's a sort of re-shuffling of the meanings of these categories that reveals the reproduction of that dominant story to be one copy among many. > Judith Butler

"The Distribution of the Sensible" how regimes of power influence what is seeable and hearable to it's subjects, who gets to speak and be heard, and how this defines what we can know about the world, which informs how we move through it, act in it. > Jaques Ranciere (he stays very abstract in his thinking though, quite removed from real-world experience)