Agitation as a Form of Conduct
Mel Y. Chen

This talk considers agitation in relation to temporalities of embodiment, environment, and political gesture, against a context of histories of conduct and encroachments of civility.

Mel Y. Chen is Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Director for the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture at the University of California, Berkeley. Their 012 book, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Duke UP, MLA Alan Bray Award), explores questions of racialization, queering, disability, and affective economies in animate and inanimate “life” through the extended concept of animacy. Chen’s current book project concerns relationships among the conceptual territories of toxicity and intoxication and related histories of the shared interanimation of race and disability. Elsewhere, Chen writes on slowness, gesture, inhumanisms, and cognitive disability and method. Chen co-edits a book series entitled “Anima” at Duke University Press and are part of a small and sustaining queer of color arts collective in the Bay Area.