My next book project doesn’t simply interrogate the hyperindividualist cultural norms of our current moment; it waterboards them. It attaches electrical nodes to them and shocks them into submission. It commits every act of intellectual violence against them. All in furthering the empathetic, care-based philosophy of community-building that is central to my student-centered pedagogy.
My next book project excavates the intellectual terrain of my backyard, unearthing the deep-rooted ideologies of the intransigent local and surfacing fresh approaches to being-in-place to shed light on new ground. That is to say, it is about gardening.
My next book project arises from my experiences as a posthuman humanist, multiply constructed by the intersecting dynamics of late-stage capitalism, ecological collapse, and democratic ruination, foregrounding my own interstitial inhabitation of confounding identities to erode the hegemonic intractability of language itself.
My next book project is a trans-species manifesto-cum-collage assembled from excised first editions of Ernest Hemingway novels, decaying roadkill gathered over the course of a summer spent barefoot in rural Michigan, and a series of scatological limericks generated by my AI companion, Judith.
My next book project, which expands upon a single sentence in paragraph three of chapter four of my dissertation, which in retrospect probably could have just been a footnote, is a self-satisfied, indulgent bit of intellectual navel-gazing whose audience is seven specialists and my begrudging mother, who will read the first three pages out of parental obligation and then tell me I should have become a dentist.
My next book project goes beyond a simple clinical dissection of a critically underappreciated corpus of cultural production by ripping out the heart and feasting upon the bloody, palpitating mass of children’s bedtime stories.
My next book project rests at the intersection of two roads three-tenths of a mile southwest of my university because I threw the unfinished fifteen-page manuscript out of my car window as I drove to the local dive bar to drown out the nagging internal monologue of my imposter syndrome.
My next book project builds upon my current book project by embracing its very nextness. Inspired by the Emersonian distinction between the Me and the Not Me, my next book project articulates the schism between the Next and the Not Next in order to differentiate it from my current book project and my previous book projects. It is, in other words, a futurism firmly grounded in the present that is inherently informed by the past. Taken together, then, these book projects embody a holistic projectness unbound by time itself.
My next book project emerges from my 117 days of experience as Vice Assistant Regional Dean of Data-Driven Downsizing, Synergistic Co-locating, and Strategic Sunsetting, leveraging my status as a leaderful change agent whose impactful, collaborative praxis has transformed entrenched channels of power within the academy and reimagining the contemporary university itself by using metaphors of kitchen-table polyamory to destabilize traditional relationships between faculty and administrators in an effort, ultimately, to justify my next book project.
