This episode is the first of two responding to our most recent cluster, which is titled Bored as Hell, and was edited by Busra Copuroglu.
Bored as Hell is a cluster of seven essays thinking about, thinking through, and thinking with ideas of boredom and boringness. It covers a lot of ground — boredom in academia, boredom in bureaucracy, the boredom of capitalism, the boredom of domestic labor, intersections between boredom and humor, and boredom as a gift, something that shows us the value of our time and spurs us to do something with it. The cluster has much to say about boredom as represented in and perhaps even induced by literature and film, and about boredom’s historical, social, and political dimensions.
The cluster is interested in how we define boredom and how we avoid it, and also in boredom as an affect that is always recognizable and yet strangely capacious and flexible, closely adjacent to and inflected by multiple other states of mind — desire, idleness, melancholy, anger. As the cluster shows, boredom is a phenomenon that’s been grappled with by everyone from medieval monks, to Tolstoy, Heidegger to Dennis Rodman, and its theorization is now the subject of the increasingly vibrant interdisciplinary field of boredom studies.
That interdisciplinary spirit is felt throughout this cluster and is borne out in particular in today’s guests. Joining Contemporaries co-editor Michael Docherty (@maybeavalon on Twitter) to discuss the Bored As Hell cluster and boredom more broadly are:
Busra Copuroglu (@buscopur on Twitter), a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Western Ontario, who edited the cluster and wrote its introduction.
James Danckert, Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Cognitive Neuroscience Area Head at the University of Waterloo, who contributed to the cluster with the essay "Give me death or give me boredom?" James' book Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom, co-written with John D. Eastwood, is out now and highly recommended.
Sarah Chant, PhD candidate in Anthropology at the New School, who contributed to the cluster with the essay "So Bored I Could Laugh."