How We Got Here

Transition failures, their causes, and the populist interest in the constitution

The answers to these questions are related. In the following, in the form of six theses, I start with what I mean by “populism”. Next, I wish to point to the two deficits of liberal democracy that provide the context for the rise of populist politics. These deficits have been ...
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Public Seminar Interview with Khary Lazarre-White

Lazarre-White discusses his latest book ‘Passage’

Mr. Lazarre-White recently spoke with Public Seminar about where Passage came from, the experience of writing it, and what he hopes the novel will communicate. Copies of Passage can be found at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or at your local book retailer.   *** Public Seminar: Thank you for taking some time with Public ...
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Triangulation is the Not-So-New Black

Party Coalitions, Racial Scapegoating and the Carceral State

Bill Clinton vilified African-Americans with his draconian crime bill while pushing for economic deregulation policies that he hoped would woo Republicans while also not upsetting the labor base of the Democratic Party too much. By the time Obama came around, African-Americans went from being vilified by the Democratic Party to ...
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Full Frontal Feminism

Why Billie Jean King Made History in the Battle of the Sexes

If only the 2016 election had turned out so well. “The Battle of the Sexes” puts its politics -- both feminist and sexual -- front and center, which is rather remarkable for a mainstream Hollywood offering. King takes on the male tennis establishment, personified by unctuous tennis promoter and former champion ...
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Reading Adorno on Fascism in the Age of Trump

A New School roundtable

In an era marked by the rise of a paradoxically international right-wing populism, and in the midst of ethno-nationalist tumult in the United States, this roundtable reflects on the legacy and contemporary utility of “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda.” Might Freud and other psychoanalytic theorists still have something ...
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Memory and Kent State

The Past is Always Present on May 4

I fell into the field of communications by default because I took a debate class at Miami from a professor who turned out to be chair of the department. I was an English major looking for an easy minor. No one could have been more surprised than I that the ...
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March for Racial Justice and March for Black Women

Sept. 30, 2017 DC

Black Women First! Black Women First! Shouted several thousand people as they marched up Pennsylvania Ave. from the Capitol on September 30.  They were leading two marches, which started at two different points on Capital Hill before joining to march to the Department of Justice on 10th St. There they planned to turn south to go to ...
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March for Racial Justice and March for Black Women

The Sound of a Thunder

Weatherman and the Music of Late-Life Regrets

Meteorological images of all sorts -- with their implications of inevitability -- found their way into the narratives about the group. “Looks like we’re in for nasty weather,” plucked from Creedence Clearwater Revival went a 1969 headline in the Underground Press about the group. And in a late 1970 communiqué called “New ...
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Global Histories of Capitalism Conference

A Conference at The New School

Our conference aims to address the one-sidedness of the recent European and U.S. historiographic turn to the “history of capitalism” by providing one of the first venues to direct comparative investigations of emergent scholarship on the history of capital in the non-west. Our conference assembles a range of scholars from ...
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