Material + Visual Worlds Presents: Prof. Jane Bennett

Jane Bennett delivers a talk at Binghamton University entitled “Anxiety, Whitman, Sympathy”. Bennett is the author of, among other books, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010). She is renowned for her work on nature, ethics and affect. Her more recent work shifts from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of non-human forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and non-human.