Democracy Archives - Public Seminar

The Magic Bridge

The mythic promise of the world’s longest suspension bridge

September 29, 2026 • by Giuliano Beniamino Fleri

On June 7, 1955, the Italian national newspaper La Stampa announced—with the pompous optimism typical of the postwar years—that “work on the bridge over the Strait of Messina will begin in one month.” The bridge would stretch across the Mediterranean to connect Messina, the port city at the northeastern corner ...

Migration

Temporary Protection, Permanent Precarity

The human consequences of terminating TPS

September 23, 2026 • by Georges E. Fouron and Nina Glick Schiller

In August, The Wall Street Journal reported that in South Florida several home health care agencies were closing, “nursing homes are scrambling to fill vacant positions and restaurants are scaling back operating hours. Hotels, retailers, airport contractors and small businesses are also grappling with new staffing shortages.” Meanwhile, in neighborhoods such as New ...

Temporary Protection, Permanent Precarity

Activism

Waiting for Revolution in Bangladesh

On the fortnight before the July 2024 uprising

September 21, 2026 • by Ned Wontner

Fourteen days before Bangladesh’s 2024 revolution, I arrived in Dhaka. The plane, half-empty, held Bangladeshi construction workers returning from Malaysia, one South Korean businessman, and myself. I had no real plans beyond spending a couple of weeks with activists and political scientists in Dhaka. They were friends, colleagues, and strangers ...

Genocide

Windows

A new translation of Keinheimisch

September 10, 2026 • by Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus

Introductory Note: Keinheimisch (Ullstein Verlage, 2025) weaves together personal experience, literary analysis, and political theory: Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus draws on his grandparents' stories—Holocaust survivors and Nakba participants alike—and his own upbringing in a militarized society to trace how Jewish indigeneity in the land is constantly reasserted, and how that reassertion curdles into ...

Labor

Tariffs to Eliminate Forced Labor

Trump’s cynical, ineffective and misguided trade policy

August 27, 2026 • by Thomas Liess and William Milberg

President Trump’s latest effort to impose tariffs on 60 trading partners (collectively accounting for 99.4 percent of US imports) is the use of Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to tax them for failing “to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with ...

Genocide

Learning Trust and Reconciliation in Rwanda

On weaving communities back together

June 22, 2026 • by Tamir Bell, Paul Draus and Anna Müller

We arrived in Rwanda at 2:30 a.m, jet-lagged and not knowing what to expect. Our hosts greeted us as we staggered out of the airport, offering a few words in English, then promptly hustled us to a nearby hotel. We had come to the land of a thousand hills, the ...

Learning Trust and Reconciliation in Rwanda

North America

Judging Presidents

The hidden logic of C-SPAN’s expert survey

June 18, 2026 • by Larry Schwartz

C-SPAN’s Presidential Historians Survey has become one of the most widely cited efforts to evaluate presidential performance—shaping how figures such as Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush are understood alongside their predecessors. Its rankings circulate in classrooms, media coverage, and public debate, offering what appears to be a ...

Democracy

Simulacra of Democracy

Between erasure and reactivation

June 16, 2026 • by Elzbieta Matynia

The following lecture was first presented as part of the Memory Study Network conference “Routes and Roots: Migration, Memory, Transnationality” at the New School for Social Research Festival of Ideas, on April 16, 2026. Let me begin with a proposition that may sound unsettling. Democracy does not disappear only when it is ...

Migration

Three Years After Roxham, Canada Still Scapegoats US Immigration Law

The irregular border crossing is a metonym for the complications of Canada’s changing immigration policies

June 4, 2026 • by Rachel Charney McKenzie

On September 25, 2023, about 30 miles southeast of Montreal, a lime-green excavator advanced like a centipede over concrete and gravel. Its claw-like appendage tore at the gable roof of a long white rectangular building. The structure’s walls folded inward under the pressure, and the ghost of a dark blue ...

Three Years After Roxham, Canada Still Scapegoats US Immigration Law

Democracy

Resisting Cynicism and Neototalitarianism

The ideological dogmatism of left and right might dissipate within a radical center that is open and inclusive

May 28, 2026 • by Siobhan Kattago

As part of an ongoing symposium on Jeffrey Goldfarb’s latest book on the retreat of democracy, Gray Is Beautiful: Confronting the Retreat of Democracy from the Radical Center, Siobhan Kattago opens up another window on the concept of the radical center, noting that while the term “radical center” may sound like a ...

Resisting Cynicism and Neototalitarianism

Democracy

Thoughts on “the Radical Center” and the Defense of Democracy

On the limits of the limits of either/or thinking

May 28, 2026 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

As part of an ongoing symposium on Jeffrey Goldfarb’s latest book on the retreat of democracy, Gray Is Beautiful: Confronting the Retreat of Democracy from the Radical Center, Jeffrey C. Isaac suggests that this “paradoxical idea” (paradoxical, for how can “radicalism” be “centrist?”) is best defended by Goldfarb himself but that ...

Democracy

Understanding the Retreat of Democracy With Jeff Goldfarb’s Gray Is Beautiful

On creating a free space of exploration

May 27, 2026 • by Irit Dekel

As part of an ongoing symposium on Jeffrey Goldfarb’s latest book on the retreat of democracy, series editor Irit Dekel reflects on how the book’s subtitle, Confronting the Retreat of Democracy From the Radical Center, poses the potent tensions that are crucial for attempting to solve the problems at hand, suggesting that ...