Undisciplining the Fields: Abou Farman, with Tonya M. Foster

Join us for one in a number of programs taking place at SF State during February and March 2023 under the heading WOMAN. LIFE. FREEDOM., presented in solidarity with the Iranian Freedom Movement.

Undisciplining the Fields: Study, Performance, and (Re:)Creation
Undisiciplining the Fields is a new conversation, reading (and sometimes performance) series that will invite writers, artists, filmmakers, and scholars from a range of fields to discuss and share their cross-disciplinary practices and thinking. Initiated by George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry Tonya M. Foster, in collaboration with The Poetry Center, the series is envisioned as an unruly exploration of the ways that practice expertise is developed and encouraged through interest, study, and accident; and of the ways that creativity motivates / instigates investigations of the possible. Foster's guest for this second program in the series will be anthropologist, filmmaker, poet and educator Abu Farman, visiting from his home in New York City.

An anthropologist, writer and artist, Abou Farman is author of On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience and Clerks of the Passage. As part of the artist duo caraballo-farman, he has exhibited internationally and received several grants and awards, including NYFA and Guggenheim Fellowships. He is producer and writer on several feature films including Icaros: A Vision, Vegas: Based on a True Story, and Uyra: The Rising Forest. He has published widely in academic and literary publications, with essays nominated for a National Magazine Award in Canada, selected for the Best Canadian Essays and twice awarded the Arc Poetry Magazine Critics Desk Award. He teaches at The New School and is founder of Art Space Sanctuary as well as the Shipibo Conibo Center of NY, working alongside indigenous autonomy movements.

Tonya M. Foster, the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University, is the author of the poetry collection A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Belladonna*, 2015) and the bilingual poetry chapbook La grammaire des os (joca seria, 2016). She is coeditor of the essay collection Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2002). Forthcoming are a poetry chapbook, A History of the Bitch (AHOTB) (Sputnik & Fizzle), and the full-length collection Thingification (Ugly Duckling Presse). With the support of a Creative Capital Award, Foster is also developing a multimedia, multi-genre project titled Monkey Talk, that studies issues of race, paranoia, surveillance, and aesthetics.