From the Editors Archives - Page 98 of 170

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 ...

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

Feature

When Sexism Became a Word

1968 and Feminism

March 2, 2018 • by Maria Bucur

A year can only be a snapshot, an image at best partial and at worse distorting of the complex messiness of life. For me, 1968 is indubitably a very important year. I was born in September of that year and have lived my whole life with the lingering question of ...

Feature

The #MeToo Moment and the Reproduction of Silence

Can we talk and listen at the same time?

March 1, 2018 • by Ali Shames-Dawson

On February 8, 2018, The New School hosted an event entitled "Sexual Harassment and Assault: Eros, Power, Violation, and Consent." Psychologist Jeremy Safran moderated a panel featuring Lew Aron and Adrienne Harris from NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, Katie Gentile from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and ...

The #MeToo Moment and the Reproduction of Silence

Democracy

Contextualizing Catalonia

Part One on Catalonia’s constitutional crisis

March 1, 2018 • by Skyler Maassen, Lucia Pradel and Leng Wah Sing

In the early- to mid-twentieth century, repeated regime changes instigated the devolution of power from a centralized government to localized authorities. The desire for a stabilized, democratic form of government prevailed in the late 1970s with the fall of General Franco. Spain is comprised of seventeen autonomous regions. The Spanish Constitution of 1978, states ...