Abstract 

In the United States, our lives are marked by an abundance of convenience. From fresh produce year-round to two-day shipping, convenient choices feel soft, easy, and frictionless, as they have specifically been engineered to feel. Until relatively recently, it has been possible to maintain a cultural and systemic sense of alienation that makes the cost of our convenience invisible to us—to localize all of the necessary precarity and exploitation for convenience “somewhere else,” (often in the Global South) and then to ignore it. 

However, the veil is lifting, and “somewhere else” has reached us directly–-worker and labor exploitation, droughts and systemic extermination of wild animals, widening class gaps, heat waves, short and snowless winters, floods, wildfires, unprecedented weather patterns, booming microbe populations that alter the very soil we stand on. A sustainable future must be an inconvenient one, and perhaps a precarious one, unless we can remake communities with a focus on outmoded forms of convenience: reciprocity, mutual aid, de-suburbanization, and anti-capitalism.

In this panel, we hope to facilitate a conversation about art, in/convenience, precarity, and resistance in community. We also hope to consider alternate views of in/convenience: What can we do to create communities in which the inconvenience of slowness is celebrated rather than derided? How can we utilize writing to grieve futures that didn’t materialize? How might we create work that celebrates the pleasure of systemic and interpersonal inconvenience? How can we build resilience to inconvenience and precarity at once, together? In the tradition of scholars and writers like Lauren Berlant, Hanif Abdurraqib, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and Margaret Price, how can we embrace the inconvenient as a site of connection and resistance? 

We welcome writers of creative nonfiction, poetry, fiction, art pieces, and hybrid works who seek to consider community and in/convenience. We are looking for writing about all forms of convenience and inconvenience, from the granular to the esoteric. After panelists share their work, the chairs will facilitate a conversation between writers and audience members.