Feature Archives - Page 77 of 150

Feature

A Global Strike for a Global City

A call to action on March 8th

March 7, 2018 • by International Women's Strike NYC

New York City is often called the “center of the world”, the multicultural and multiethnic city, the city that never sleeps, the big apple loved by tourists and film-makers. But a different reality hides behind the glitter and the glamour. It is the reality of the exploited labor of millions ...

Europe & Central Asia

From Casting Director to Failed Coup

Unseating the Turkish military

March 6, 2018 • by Phyllis Jeffrey

The most recent period of competitive democratic politics in Turkey was bookended by two coups: those of 1980 and 2016. If the first heralded the re-organization of politics under the supervision of the military, the second instigated the transition to a civilian autocracy. The significance of the failed coup of ...

Feature

How Castoriadis read Weber

Meaning, values, and imaginary institution

March 6, 2018 • by Yannis Ktenas

I. The interest Cornelius Castoriadis had in Max Weber’s work, although quite apparent and confessed by the philosopher himself, has not drawn sufficient attention by scholars and commentators. [1] It is no coincidence that the first and the last texts Castoriadis published while living both deal with Weber. The first of these was ...

Feature

Why We Need More Essays About Media

And what we offer to democracy

March 6, 2018 • by Julia Sonnevend

Conversation may or may not be the soul of democracy -- but the essay is. Essays are about grey-zones, multi-layered meanings, ambiguity. These are all qualities any good autocrat detests. The autocrat wants you to absorb his one-liner, his all-encompassing propaganda slogan, his simplistic social media post. He wants you to be with him, his ...

Blue Monday

Strange Fruit

An improvisation on race, hybrid identities, and the blues

March 5, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington February was Black History Month. The Republican Party apparently decided to commemorate this by organizing a reception on February 26 to honor Black Republicans. Not invited was Michael Steele, the first African-American to chair the Republican National Committee ...

Europe & Central Asia

A Revolution in the Polling Booths?

The new constitutional order in Orbán’s “illiberal” Hungary

March 5, 2018 • by Mátyás György Endrey

In line with these ambitions, Orbán was also quick to announce that he considered the new parliament to be “a constitutional assembly,” tasked with setting the solid foundations for the new system in the form of a new constitution, The Fundamental Law, coming into force on January 1, 2012. This ...

Feature

The Ever-Expanding Field of Media Studies

Ideas for understanding the mediated world

March 5, 2018 • by Shannon Mattern

While poetry and prose, motion pictures and maps, listicles and landscape paintings, audiobooks and animated GIFs have all been reduced to “content” on our screens, the mechanisms that deliver that content to us are now revealing their own complexity. Substrates and filters and cables, we have come to see, possess ...

The Ever-Expanding Field of Media Studies

Democracy

The Current Situation in Catalonia

Part two on Catalonia’s constitutional crisis

March 4, 2018 • by Lucia Pradel

This piece is part of a two-part series. Part One is meant to contextualize Pradel’s essay. The Election on December 21st, 2017 The Catalonian independence movement won what appears like a clear victory on December 21. All the same, Ciudadanos (Citizens Party), a liberal pro-unity party that calls themselves “post-nationalist” won the majority ...

Democracy

America’s Hunger Games

The normalization of mass shootings will only stop when a majority of citizens start acting

March 4, 2018 • by Siobhan Kattago

In the dystopian novels of Suzanne Collins, the Capitol organizes annual Hunger Games, in which twenty-four youth – one boy and one girl from each peripheral district, which resemble colonies – are forced to fight to the death. The children, who are selected by lottery and mostly poor, are trained, ...

Feature

Virtual Walks in Arroyo Sarandí, Buenos Aires

Google Street View fails to capture significant threats to community

March 3, 2018 • by Margarita Gutman, Javier Nesprias and Ximena Carla Puppo

This is a presentation of two different approaches and visualizations of a stream crossing a low income community in the south of the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires. It illustrates how Google Street View, which could be considered a proxy to the formal city, fails to capture significant environmental and ...

Virtual Walks in Arroyo Sarandí, Buenos Aires

Feature

By Any Means Necessary?

Reflecting on the Book Launch of # Charlottesville: Before and Beyond

March 2, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

We had a party last night, a book launch of #Charlottesville: Before and Beyond. It was a great event, a milestone, inspiring and gratifying. Hard work has yielded important results. I am personally pleased that my intuition that there is room on the web for critical consideration of significant issues, informed ...

Feature

Black Insurgency, Anti-Racism, and the Student Mobilization Against Guns

The similarities and differences of these social movements

March 2, 2018 • by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

I have seen many comments on social media about the significant difference in how the emergence of the student mobilizations against gun violence has been greeted compared to the Black insurgency of Black Lives Matter. It is an important discussion to have because if these current mobilizations hope to grow into ...