Brittany Halley
Livable Futures graduate student fellow 2023
Biography
I am committed to the ethical research of contemporary rhetorical theory + criticism and critical human rights. The research questions that sustain me through this work involve violence as a worldview and violent worldviews, as well as corporations’ and governments’ overlapping complicity in human rights violations. In these questions, I seek to understand how communities form around and for the purpose of violence so that we might find sustainable ways to intercede in their formations. I challenge the eurocentric conception of “rights” that have (unsurprisingly) centered white lifeways. And in doing so I push back on the rhetorics of exploitation and identification that inform our beliefs on who gets to count as human or who—the human, the natural, the technological, etc.—is deemed “worthy” of life.
Q & A
What makes more livable futures for you?
The degrowth movement; local prairie restorations; small moments of kindness; community-tended gardens; breaking down systemic barriers to food security, housing, and clean water; Black and women of color feminist practices; collaboration + coalition; creating safe + supportive spaces for trans and queer youth. Actions, relationships, rhetorics happening now to build equitable presents and futures.
What are you reading, viewing, listening to right now?
The readings informing my research right now are Bratich’s On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death and Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillence Capitalism: The Fight for the Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. I’ve also started VanderMeer’s Ambergris trilogy after having loved his Southern Reach trilogy.
I’m currently going through the entire catalog of Emergance Magazine’s podcast, where, among other things, they have author-narrated recordings of their online/print publications. I’m greatly inspired lately by the podcast Becoming Visible: Trans Stories.
You can often find me watching video essays from creators like CJ the X, Folding Ideas, and Khadija Mbowe.
What practices are sustaining you?
Reading + writing poetry after walks along the Scioto River. Tending to my beautiful, clean-oxygen-giving houseplants and watching them grow day-by-day. The work I do in the classroom and the many generative conversations I get to have with my classmates and professors in the English department.