Public Sphere Archives - Page 2 of 2

Education

The New Authoritarianism and the Structural Transformation of the Mediated Public Sphere II

The Sphere of Publics and its Bifurcation

August 19, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

As our seminar on authoritarianism and public life progressed, we focused on the work of Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, and Joshua Meyrowitz to develop an understanding of mediated public life. Their sociology of media is a sociology of mediated interactions, rather than studies of the media, i.e. major newspapers, ...

Education

The New Authoritarianism and the Structural Transformation of the Mediated Public Sphere I

Reviewing the work of Jurgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt with an assist from Nancy Fraser

August 18, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

It’s been two weeks since my return from Wroclaw. I am getting over the shock of teaching about the rise of the new authoritarianism, as the Polish parliament, The Sejm, seemed to be hammering the final nails into the coffin of Polish democracy. It turned out to be a little ...

The New Authoritarianism and the Structural Transformation of the Mediated Public Sphere I

Science & Technology

CRIT: Critical and Radical Information Theory

On Tiziana Terranova

February 13, 2017 • by McKenzie Wark

Contrary to certain popular narratives by latecomers, not everybody went gaga over ‘new media’ back in the late twentieth century. In the cyberculture period, from the popularization of cyberpunk in 1984 to the death of the internet as a purely scientific and military media in 1995, there were plenty of ...

Race

The (de)Construction of the “Illegal” Immigrant

Latinos respond to Donald Trump

October 2, 2015 • by Alexandra Délano Alonso

Donald Trump’s derisive statements about Mexican immigrants have mobilized a large portion of the Latino community in the United States. Faced with the same old accusations that Mexican immigrants are criminals, drug-dealers, or rapists, businesses and public figures such as Univision, NBC, ESPN, NASCAR, Macy’s, chefs Jose Andres and Geoffrey ...

The (de)Construction of the “Illegal” Immigrant

Uncategorized

My Living Room as a Public Sphere

An Iranian experiment in free society

May 19, 2015 • by Philippe Gonzalez

“I’m not certain that the ideal society should be religious. I start from the premise that the ideal society should be secular.” So spoke documentary filmmaker, Mehran Tamadon, in a conversation with the four conservative mullahs, advocates of the Islamic republic, he invited to be part of his new movie ...

Theory & Practice

Arendt’s Plurology

March 17, 2015 • by Zachary Sunderman

The sociologist reading Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition is bound to squint at the page in puzzlement when Arendt gives her definition of society. So would, I think, most readers of the text. Arendt’s fondness for assigning new meanings to commonly used words is most perfectly demonstrated in that ...

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Democracy’s Crisis

November 24, 2014 • by Nancy Fraser

We are currently experiencing a major crisis of democracy. What is at stake here is the specifically political dimension of a broader, multifaceted crisis, which also has other important dimensions -- for example, economic, financial, ecological, and social. Taken together, all of these aspects, including the political dimension of democratic ...

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Banning the Minarets in Switzerland

The limits of the liberal public sphere and the dark side of monstration

May 30, 2014 • by Philippe Gonzalez

There is no problem with Islam in Switzerland. At least, there was none until 2009. But then, confounding poll predictions, and stupefying the Swiss political institutions, religious organizations, as well as mainstream media, 57.5% of the citizen voted a constitutional ban on the construction of minarets. Yet, less than half ...

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The War on Fascism

April 2, 2014 • by Eli Zaretsky

By my title,“The War on Fascism,” I do not mean the war between the US, the Soviet Union and Great Britain, on the one hand, and Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy and imperial Japan on the other, the war that took place between 1939 and 1945. Rather I mean an unspoken ...

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Amusing Ourselves to Death? Still?

February 18, 2014 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Media monstration, the politics of small things, and The Daily Show -- Daniel Dayan and I are teaching two courses at The New School this semester, Media and Micro-politics and Theories of Publics. Both courses combine his media theory of “monstration” with my work on “the politics of small things.” The ...

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Against Anarchism

October 9, 2013 • by Nancy Fraser

For Edward J. Snowden and Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley): Heroes of transnational publicity -- in gratitude and with admiration.

One strategy for reimagining public sphere theory in the current conjuncture is neo-anarchism. Distrustful of global governance institutions, and of the expert networks entangled with them, this approach looks to anti-systemic movements ...