Politics Archives - Page 102 of 112

Blue Monday

Blue Monday: Monday Morning Blues

An introduction to my new column

February 5, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Readers of Public Seminar will know that in the past couple of years I have become a regular and indeed somewhat relentless contributor of political essays on the dangers of Trumpism and the challenges to liberal democracy. I have greatly enjoyed working with the PS staff, and have been especially happy to collaborate with ...

Feature

A Conversation We Must Not Stop Having

The #MeToo movement

February 5, 2018 • by Elena Gagovska

I tried to speak out. I told our homeroom teacher and she yelled at the boys in our class in front of the girls, telling them that this was wrong. But no real disciplinary measures were taken. Most of the boys (at least in my class) engaged in non-consensual touching, ...

Politics

Recognizing Authority, Acknowledging Power

Concepts of control in Kojeve and Arendt, Part II

January 31, 2018 • by Eli Weiner

Below is the second segment of a three-part series adapted from a final paper for Sociology of Power and Authority at UVA. While Kojève offered us a fully formed taxonomy of authority, complete with four pure types of authority and their attendant legitimating theories, Hannah Arendt in her text On Violence, published ...

Politics

Recognizing Authority, Acknowledging Power

Concepts of control in Kojeve and Arendt, Part I

January 29, 2018 • by Eli Weiner

Below is the first segment of a three-part series adapted from a final paper for Sociology of Power and Authority at UVA. The specific characteristics of political authority, political power, and political violence have only grown more complex in the modern era, and the lessons offered by philosophers of the past ...

Politics

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Manually Bending the Arc of Time Towards Justice

January 27, 2018 • by Kristopher Burrell

Speech by Dr. Kristopher Burrell, January 16, 2017, St. Paul’s Church -- National Historic Site, Mount Vernon, NY Good afternoon, everyone. It is my pleasure to be here at St. Paul’s Church on this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Dr. King would have turned 88 years of age yesterday. I would ...

Politics

Sociology of Power and Authority

Fall 2017 at University of Virginia

January 23, 2018 • by Isaac Ariail Reed

The Sociology of Power and Authority was offered in Fall 2017 at the University of Virginia. It was an upper-division undergraduate seminar with 20 students, meeting for an hour and fifteen minutes twice a week. On the first day of the course, several students revealed, unprompted, that they had been ...

Education

Milo in Berkeley

Further reflections on the renewed academic free speech debate

January 23, 2018 • by Michael Weinman

What light if any, I will ask here, does this claim shine on the larger discourse about academic free speech, specifically as that discussion has come to focus, for historical and strategic reasons, on UC-Berkeley. The proximal cause of Berkeley’s centrality is the shutdown of an intended speech by Milo ...

Education

The Campus Speech Wars

You have conservative students, so teach them

January 17, 2018 • by Claire Potter

In the coming weeks, I want to write more about the meaning of free speech, how we understand free speech differently depending on how and where we are positioned, and whether our difficulty in listening to--and understanding--each other is a crucial context for exercising our first amendment rights. But since ...

Feature

The Myth of Black Confederates

And the rise of fake racial tolerance

January 14, 2018 • by Benjamin Alpers

One of the latest Confederate monument fights is currently brewing in South Carolina. State Representatives Bill Chumley and Mike Burns have proposed erecting a monument to black Confederate soldiers. The problem, of course, is that there were no black Confederate soldiers. The Confederate government refused to allow blacks to enlist ...

Feature

Thinking After C’ville

A meditation on more of the same

January 12, 2018 • by Marcus Toure B. McCullough

Reverend Marcus Toure B. McCullough is a pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He is a graduate Morehouse College, and has earned masters degrees in divinity and sacred theology from Harvard Divinity School and Boston University School of Theology.

Feature

Martin Luther King’s “False God of Nationalism”

Today’s animus against migrants is a legacy of Jim Crow

January 9, 2018 • by Vaughn A. Booker

A version of this essay was originally published on January 9 2018. Speaking on the first black-owned radio station in the US in 1953, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached on “The False God of Nationalism.” In the sermon, preached at Ebenezer Baptist Church and broadcast on Atlanta-based WERD radio ...

Martin Luther King’s “False God of Nationalism”

Feature

#Charlottesville: Before and Beyond

Public Seminar is launching a collection of essays that reflect on and respond to the violence in Charlottesville in August 2017

January 2, 2018 • by The Editors

These events occurred a year after a bitterly divisive election brought problems of racism, white identity politics, and America’s fraught history of racism to the fore. The violence that ensued — four casualties, including the murder of counter-protester Heather Heyer — left the country bewildered, angry, and frightened about ascendant ...