Performances of Democracy

An excerpt from Jessica Pisano’s Staging Democracy

This book is about performances of democratic politics in Russia and Ukraine: why people take part in such performances, how they are related to economic change, and how they affect the meanings that attach to political participation. ...

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Performances of Democracy

How Science Fiction Can Address the Crisis of Political Imagination

Making a case for revising the future

Imagining alternative futures could help breach some of today’s most pressing political and philosophical concerns: for example, the Anthropocene and environmental catastrophe, renewed calls for decolonization against the rise of fascism(s) around the world, our complicity with imperialist violence abroad and political impotence at home. ...

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How Science Fiction Can Address the Crisis of Political Imagination

Reading Your bell hooks

Alone, together, or in community, this Black feminist icon always insisted on reading as a transformative act

bell hooks was blessed, and I believe that she transitioned to the land of milk and honey knowing how important her work was for so many people’s lives. Reading bell hooks is an action and a step towards personal and social transformation. ...

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Reading Your bell hooks

The University Ate My Neighborhood

A conversation with urbanist and cultural historian Davarian L. Baldwin, author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities

Claire Potter sat down with urbanist Davarian L. Baldwin to discuss his new book, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities (Bold Type Books, 2021), to hash out what these relationships do to reshape our cities....

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The University Ate My Neighborhood

In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower

In this excerpt, Davarian L. Baldwin introduces his new book, The Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities

I never thought a university would foretell the future of our cities. But there I was, on a December afternoon in 2003, stepping out into the brisk South Side air after hours holed away in the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library. I immediately heard chants of protest and saw people ...
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In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower

What Freud Would Say About Left-Wing Infighting

Sanders supporters and others need to resist the temptation to retreat into ideological purity

At the 2008 reunion of veterans of the 1968 Columbia occupation, I remember sitting near him at one session and watching the abuse he patiently took from aging movement heavies who voiced their anger at him for having raised doubts, in his books, about the wisdom of their most violent ...
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What Freud Would Say About Left-Wing Infighting

The Future of the GOP

Has the Republic National Committee firmly dragged the Republican Party into Trump’s war on our democracy?

Coming as the statement did, just after former President Trump said that Pence had the power to “overturn the election” and, that if reelected, Trump would pardon those who attacked the Capitol, it has put the Republican Party openly on the side of overturning our democracy....

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The Future of the GOP

What’s at Stake in Ukraine

“If you want peace, prepare for war”

Thus, the potential occupation of Ukraine should not be seen as a local affair, nor should the country be viewed as a strategic sacrifice to appease Putin’s fears about NATO. Instead, it should be seen as a warning of how far he can push his might, if not properly restrained. ...
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What’s at Stake in Ukraine