Jane had the neat idea of mapping we #rhizo15 participants onto a Google Map (still time to fill in the form with your info, if you’ve not already done so ). 🙂 One of the questions that she asked us was this:
Tell us about your favorite photo of yourself (or post it somewhere on #rhizome15)
What can be seen there? What can’t? (Just a few sentences please … blog the rest!
I replied saying that it would probably be a picture of my cat Lacey in a bag or a box. That’s not because I think my cat is the cutest cat in the world (she is, but that’s a different issue), it’s a decision that I made a few years ago when I was involved in the student occupation movement here in Glasgow. Many of my friends have been arrested for activism, some of them were attacked by other students (I can’t find the link I want, but that one gives a flavour of the attitude of some towards us), at the time it seemed sensible not to use pictures of our faces for our social media profiles, and that’s become a habit.
There’s also another reason for choosing Lacey as an example of who I am in #rhizo15. When we got here, along with her wee pal Cagney, they were poor, timid wee mites who hated being picked up that we fell in love with at a local rescue centre. Ten months later they are confident and affectionate and Lacey now shouts at me to get me to pick her up and stroke her. Much like the difference in me from the beginning of #rhizo14 to now – my online confidence has grown as I have learnt to trust this wonderful rhizomunity.
Finally, this is a response to Terry Elliot’s post and also Doug’s  Both of these posts made me think I should share a bit more of who I am.
My favorite photo of myself is one of me holding a 4-foot long corn snake and yours is of your kitty friends. An analytical approach to those two facts would figure out ways to connect the dots, to map the analogous points between them. A rhizomatic approach would be to acknowledge that multiplicities lurk within them, that there are margins where neither subject not object exists separately, and that, like any multiplicity, the whole is in flux as the collective expands and contracts with folk and act and ideas and creation.
You bring many identities to the rhizome. I like knowing that. I like knowing that your love of kitties informs your political activism in ways that are both analyzable and mysterious and emergent. Yeah, that’s pretty cool to think about all the experience that is held in abeyance around us as we swim in and through each others currents and rivers, each step a new current and a new river, objective and subjective simultaneously. Sweet.
Heraclitus says something about not being able to step into the same river twice that always reminds me of rhizomes. I’m getting less and less sure who I am as time goes on, and I’m cool with that. Might be a problem when I have to teach students about personal identity next semester though 😉
The cat in the bag looks like an Ewok, or someone from Tatooine…:)
I had to look the latter up. I never learned to love Star Wars
Me neither, but my son educates me! When the pic is small it looks like a pair of eyes under a deep hood with an arm stretching up to the left.