Deva Woodly, Author at Public Seminar

Democracy

American Democracy in Crisis: Q & A on Tocqueville, Douglass, Dewey, and Arendt

Liberal institutions, abolition democracy, and civic virtue

February 1, 2023 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Juliet Hooker, William Milberg, James Miller and Deva Woodly

If we think about the way that liberalism anchors democracy, it largely relies on rights and institutional design. Just as a descriptive matter, it’s the case that the institutions that have been designed and the regime of rights that has been conceived, including the regime of human rights that has ...

Democracy

Inventing and Implementing a World We Wish to Share

How John Dewey’s notion of social intelligence can remake contemporary politics

January 31, 2023 • by Deva Woodly

For Dewey, the notion of social intelligence is that human beings are able to shape and change the world through the understandings that they gain from the fund of human knowledge that exists: old ideas combined and related through the world as we experience it, and latched onto something new. ...

Inventing and Implementing a World We Wish to Share

Activism

The Power of Black Feminist Pragmatism

Why the Black Lives Matter movement is the best alternative to the anti-democratic, white supremacist, authoritarian capture of the United States

January 20, 2022 • by Deva Woodly

The Black Lives Matter movement is not a “new social movement” that focuses on cultural transformation while eschewing policy intervention, nor is it fashioned after “old style,” “traditional” social movements that attempt to move policy while deemphasizing the need for deep changes in public understandings of the problems facing polities ...

Activism

We Are a Reckoning

Deva Woodly introduces her new book, Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements

January 17, 2022 • by Deva Woodly

This nation is mine. Mine to claim. Mine to hold to account. Mine to participate in reshaping. So I tell an American story because it is my story to tell....

Activism

An American Reckoning

The fire this time

June 4, 2020 • by Deva Woodly

In 1844, James Russell Lowell penned the anti-slavery poem “The Present Crisis” in response to the political tumult leading up to the Civil War. Inspired by Lowell’s poem, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) called its official magazine The Crisis, with W. E. B. Du Bois as ...

Feature

Is Equality Enough?

Black feminist views of justice

February 22, 2018 • by Deva Woodly

Race/isms Book Forum is a new series aimed at bringing established and emerging voices together in conversation around recent work that critically engages our world’s racial scripts, past and present. The structure of the forum is straightforward. We invite three to four thinkers to grapple with a book, highlighting a section ...

Feature

#BlackLivesMatter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements

What active citizenship can look like and what it can accomplish

November 8, 2017 • by Deva Woodly

– Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison 1787 “We who believe in freedom cannot rest.” – Ella Baker 1964[1] Social movements are often regarded as potentially hazardous disruptions, uprisings that interfere with the normal mechanisms of politics -- insurgencies that must be either repressed or swiftly re-incorporated into the regular legislative process. In ...

Feature

Towards Our Fugitive Striving

A Note from the Editors

November 6, 2017 • by Deva Woodly and Christopher Paul Harris

The Context We understand that race is made through the brutal craft of white supremacy: a political, social, economic, and interpersonal formation that both requires and produces anti-blackness to sustain itself. Equally clear to us is that racial “knowledge,” in all its forms, continues to structure our collective experience, both in ...

Feature

#PurpleReigns: A Tribute to Prince

October 21, 2016 • by Julia Ott, Simon Critchley, Deva Woodly, Ricky Tucker, Claire Potter and Alyson Palmer

On September 23rd, Pam Tillis, Director of Public Programs for the New School for Public Engagement organized a tribute to Prince inspired by the Black Lives Matter’s hashtag entitled, #PurpleReigns: A Tribute to Prince. Leading the crowd in celebration were musician Alyson Palmer from the band BETTY, guitarist Mishti Roy, dancer Darlene Arrington, Ricky Tucker, ...

Education

I Want You To Know You Are Powerful: Commencement Address to Eugene Lang College

A Commencement Address to the Graduates of Eugene Lang College

May 25, 2016 • by Deva Woodly

It is an incredible honor to be here with you today and to be entrusted with the task of speaking to you in this moment. You are here with your friends and family to celebrate what is, so far, the culmination of the journey you have undertaken to educate yourselves ...