Bio

Sara Perryman is pursuing her doctorate in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers, after receiving her B.A. at the University of California, Berkeley (Stillness As Horizon: Re-thinking Transnational Trans-Subjectivity and the Master Trope of Mobility—senior thesis on gender, sexuality, and passing in contemporary Iranian film). Her current work examines post-industrial risk culture in Detroit and how ordinary objects and affect shape the contours of urban landscapes in ways that are always already gendered, raced, classed, and sexed. Using Derridean, Deleuzian, and postcolonial theoretical frameworks, she approaches the city as an ecological sensorium and attempts to move beyond ‘assembly line’ narratives that structure (and limit) our understanding of futurity by paying close attention to the ways that ‘empty space,’ ‘inactivity,’ and urban ‘decay’ are deeply productive and exciting sites of potential change.