My name is Krista Comer, and this is my research blog. I am a feminist scholar born in the US West who grew up between Colorado and California. My writings have focused on the “where” of literature, critical theory, and cultural politics. Attending to the where of things is a quick entry to places that power hides.  For more on me, see here.

The Living West as Feminists book project goes on the road to have conversations about how feminists live their relations to place and to land.  Each participant chooses a place of significance. In those places we sit down for a time, we talk. We take up the vexed terms “feminism,” “whiteness,” and “the West,” and work with them. The conversations will shed light on the where of feminists now. The bigger hope, beyond the conflicts of feminism, is to nurture whatever we share, to learn from cross-cutting histories, to create “rest areas” or places of wellbeing and security across all kinds of trouble.

The actual road trip to these conversations, ah the iconic road trip, offers too tempting an opportunity for feminist commentary to pass it up. This blog chronicles that journey, with love for the lands through which we travel and also mindful of the basic facts of mobility – that who moves when, under what conditions, tells us about power. We depart from Houston, Texas, ancestral home of the Karankawa and Atakapa Ishak people, who lived in the southern Gulf Coast before colonial arrivals, before the days when cotton economies and the labor of enslaved people created new sources of settler wealth. The descendants of Atakapa Ishak continue to make their lives in southern Louisiana and northeastern Texas. We are guests on this land and we pay respects, and ask others to pay respect to the memory of their elders and the continued flourishing of Native people.

Thanks to the Project Team.

Clark Whitehorn, Executive Editor at University of Nebraska Press
Professor José Aranda, Rice University, cameraman, and van driver
Zainab Abdali, PhD Student, Rice University, Clancy Taylor Summer Intern in Public Humanities
Megan Corona, Visual Artist and Web Design
Department of English, Rice University
School of Humanities, Dean’s Office, Rice University