Verticals Archives - Page 4 of 5

Feature

How Utopia Became a Real Estate Leaflet?

Discursive formation of branded housing projects in Turkey

December 14, 2017 • by Bilge Serin

When it comes to gated communities, recurrences of similar everyday life images and spatial representations in mass media form a discourse of the future everyday life. It depicts an ideal living environment that aligns neoliberalization with an idealization of private urban services, commodified forms of housing production, enclave living and ...

Feature

Concrete Utopia

(Re)producing life in, against and beyond the open veins of capital

December 7, 2017 • by Ana Cecilia Dinerstein

Concrete utopia is a contradictory process that develops within, against and beyond the social relation of capital and its institutions. Concrete utopia is subsumed into the open veins of capital and is crisscrossed by the main contradiction of capitalist work: we live in a society where we need to work in ...

Feature

Bill Clinton, the NYC Subway, and GOP’s Tax Plan

Past Present Episode 109

December 3, 2017 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

In this episode, Niki, Neil, and Natalia debate the recent reckoning with Bill Clinton’s legacy, the state of the New York City subway, and the new tax reform measure.

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Bill Clinton, the NYC Subway, and GOP’s Tax Plan

Feature

Trump’s Head and Women’s Blood

Is Kathy Griffin’s controversial image a work of protest art?

December 2, 2017 • by Lisa Aslanian

Kathy Griffin released a picture of herself, wearing a navy or royal blue pussy-bow blouse and holding up a faux severed and bleeding head of Donald Trump. How to describe her gaze? Emotionless? Steely? Resolved. I am not going to spend this essay defending the image or deconstructing the fallout around ...

Feature

Life Sentences

Opening remarks from the Conference on Incarceration and the Humanities

November 30, 2017 • by N. D. B. Connolly

Now, you could imagine the horrors of a colonial prison in a black, economically depressed country like 1930s Jamaica, just as you can imagine the nightmare that the sound of wailing men might conjure in the mind of a nine-year old child like my grandfather. Even the most benign administrative ...

Education

Being a Woman is Work

How capitalist society (de) values ‘female’ labor

November 30, 2017 • by Judith Elster

This is essay is part of the OOPS course Law and Sexuality. The current division of labor has been perceived as equal for many, but remains impractical in the long term, especially in our contemporary capitalist America. The challenges that come with capitalism, such as inflation and recession, has forced each member ...

Feature

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia

An excerpt from Steven Stoll’s latest book

November 30, 2017 • by Steven Stoll

— J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, Letter III (1782) This is an ordinary map of southern West Virginia, adorned with shapes representing private property. Some of the shapes adhere to watercourses. Others run ruler straight, throwing squares and trapezoids across innumerable hills and hollows. Distant investors ...

Feature

(un-)imaging

Or: why the blank page is a lure in imagining the new

November 27, 2017 • by Pierre Schwarzer

In a dark room, projected onto a wall, we see the hands of a man, dressed in black, on a wooden table. In crisp detail, we see him holding a page from a magazine, with some advertisement on it. Slowly, the page is being crumpled, we hear the whispers of ...

Feature

Liz Smith, Interracial Friendships, and Roy Moore

Past Present Episode 108

November 25, 2017 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

In this episode, Niki, Natalia, and Neil debate Liz Smith and the history of gossip columns, whether interracial friendships are possible, and evangelical responses to Roy Moore’s pedophilia scandal.

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Liz Smith, Interracial Friendships, and Roy Moore

Feature

Democratic Wins, Twitter, and The Snowy Day

Past Present Episode 107

November 23, 2017 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

In this episode, Neil, Niki, and Natalia debate the Democratic wins in the recent off-year elections, the doubling of Twitter’s character limit, and the release of a postage stamp based on Ezra Jack Keats’ The Snowy Day.

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Democratic Wins, Twitter, and The Snowy Day

Feature

Reductio ad Absurdum

Zero-Hours Contracts, Bogus ‘Self-Employment’, and Welfare ‘Conditionality’ in the UK

November 6, 2017 • by Christian Garland

Bogus ‘self-employment’, takes two main forms: the first is known as the ‘gig economy,’ and involves companies such as Uber, Deliveroo, and Hermes making use of the labor of those who are classified as ‘independent contractors’, rather than employees. The fact that these independent contractors earn less than the minimum ...

Feature

Jefferson’s Two Bodies

Memory, protest, and democracy at the University of Virginia and beyond

October 19, 2017 • by Isaac Ariail Reed

The students who shrouded Jefferson pulled the memory of the author of the Declaration of Independence — that document so useful to Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., and so many others — into a larger series of conflicts over memorialization. These conflicts have tended focus on monuments to the ...