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Surrender as Method, Subject, and Experience: Doing the Work that Undoes Us

Jessica Restaino Book Cover.jpg

Time: Nov. 10, 2020, 6 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.

Location: Virtual Event

Part of the Syracuse Symposium

Part of the Syracuse Symposium series.

Jessica Restaino (Montclair State University)

In her award winning book Surrender: Feminist Rhetoric and Ethics in Love and Illness, Restaino takes up a two-year ethnography project with friend and collaborator Susan Lundy Maute, through the last two years of Maute’s life with terminal breast cancer. This public lecture introduces a series of core concepts from Surrender: “cut pieces,” which can represent messy and destabilized researcher-writer subjectivities and the uncertain texts produced when we are engaged with work that overwhelms us; “misfit tools,” which are rhetorical guide posts for identifying methods that disrupt traditional expectations for how and why we do our work; and finally “love” as a (difficult) concept that has a necessary place in research and writing work that pushes our most deeply-held boundaries.

View the virtual talk.

This event is part of Syracuse Symposium’s year-long series on “Futures.”


Additional supporters:

  • Department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition
  • Health Humanities Integrated Learning Major

Lenny Grant, Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition