From the Editors Archives - Page 152 of 172

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Borders and the Politics of Mourning

Social Research: An International Quarterly (Summer 2016)

November 11, 2016 • by Douglas de Toledo Piza

The Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility (ZIMM) is honored to host the launch event of “Borders and the Politics of Mourning” a special issue published by Social Research: An International Quarterly (Summer 2016), with a keynote address by Judith Butler. With more than 15,000 migrants dead and disappeared since 2014, ...

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American Fascism

The Presidency of Donald J. Trump

November 10, 2016 • by Matthew Filner

The United States did the unthinkable on November 8th: we elected a fascist. No, I don’t mean we elected a Nazi or any leader from the 1930s in Europe or Asia. But we also didn’t elect a neo-fascist, or a proto-fascist. Those caveats diminish the fascism that we face: Trump’s ...

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The Day After

November 9, 2016 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

I didn’t sleep much last night. I think it was near 4 am when I was finally able to shut off the lights after watching Trump’s victory speech. Perhaps I slept fitfully for a few hours. I don’t know. My mind raced through so many scenarios, so many questions. And ...

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The Mo(u)rning After

Finding Words for Political Disaster

November 9, 2016 • by Claire Potter

Waking up in a state of mourning after Donald Trump's horrifying victory in yesterday's presidential election has caused me to take refuge in one of my favorite childhood movies. The Poseidon Adventure was released in 1972, as political life in the United States was turning from explosion to implosion. This cheesy ...

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Can You Text Your Way to Mental Health?

A New Approach to Therapy Raises Concerns Among Professionals

November 9, 2016 • by J.D. Finkelstein

Visiting the website for a popular app which advertises confidential, anonymous, 24/7 text psychotherapy, I was struck by how similar it looked to those adult chatrooms which advertise “hot singles in your area are waiting to talk to you now.” Replace the words “hot singles” with “licensed therapists” and you ...

Education

Utopian Niche-ings and the Politics of If and Otherwise

November 8, 2016 • by Abou Farman

Despite the radical role of utopian thinking in early revolutionary and social change movements in Europe, by the latter half of the 20th century utopian projects had been largely discredited as idealistic and unrealizable or as preludes to an inevitable dystopia. But there has been a revival of utopia talk ...

Utopian Niche-ings and the Politics of If and Otherwise

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Never Tell Me The Odds

Learning from the Powerball Experiment

November 7, 2016 • by J.D. Finkelstein

In the beginning of 2016, the world saw what was perhaps the largest social psychological experiment of all time. It involved more than 635,000,000 participants and was conducted across 44 states, as well as Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and Washington, DC, and its results gave researchers an astonishing ...

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Why Vote for Clinton If You Don’t Believe in Her?

A pragmatic defense of the Democratic Party in 2016

November 6, 2016 • by Zachary Sunderman

The following was a message I wrote to my friends on the morning of November 6, 2016. Jeffrey Goldfarb recommended that it be published at Public Seminar. I have revised it slightly for this version, but it remains an informal piece. ZVS With a few days left before the end of this election, ...

Why Vote for Clinton If You Don’t Believe in Her?

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New Catastrophe in Turkey

An open letter from Zeynep Gambetti

November 6, 2016 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Nancy Fraser just sent me this important open letter from Zeynep Gambetti on the escalating crisis in Turkey. J.G Dear friends and colleagues, We are going through very, very hard times all over the world. The rate of catastrophe is perhaps higher in Turkey, due to the State of Emergency that accelerates ...

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Why I am Not a Libertarian

November 4, 2016 • by Cam Clayton

I used to call myself a libertarian. I still believe that market forces are the best way to allocate non-essential resources. And I still believe that government should stay out of people’s personal business. But I now realize that libertarianism is based on a number of conceptual confusions. Libertarianism holds out ...

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The Pursuit of Happiness… and Cruelty

American Politics and its Commitment to Oppression

November 3, 2016 • by Kye Barker

The most disturbing trend of 2016 has been the progressive revelation of cruelty in American political life. As someone who has always believed in the kindness and generosity of Americans, I have found this extremely difficult to acknowledge. I'm not only thinking of the Trump campaign, which seems to have, ...

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Prophets of Irony: a Discussion with Richard J. Bernstein

November 2, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

Richard J. Bernstein, Ironic Life (Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2016), pp. 184, $64.95 hardcover, $22.95 paperback. There is a certain irony about contemporary attitudes toward irony. According to the late novelist David Foster Wallace, our culture is steeped in the ironic reluctance to commit to ideals and thus embrace moral seriousness. ...