Making Kin With Comprehensive Exams: Producing Scholar in Intra-Action

Abstract

This article is the response to a comprehensive exam question, and it exposes what is produced through the formal and informal practices of comprehensive exams and, further, asks how we might start somewhere else with comprehensive exams—a place that takes into consideration the exam as part of a posthuman, performative, and productive intra-action. The manuscript is an experiment in diffractive writing drawn from diffractive reading practices. The texts and images foreground comprehensive exams as all-encompassing and inseparable from all the myriad stuff of life, even as we are encouraged to put our lives on hold to get them done.

Keywords

intra-action posthuman diffractive writing academic writing subjectivity

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