Today We Filled the Sidewalk
Marching Against Racism and Homophobia in Iowa
Paris Terror Events and the Dramaturgies of the Aftermath
The Armenian Violence Question
A Conversation on Means and Social Change
After the Firebombing: A Letter from Hillsborough, NC
How to Think through Cages
What Could History Have Been?
Imagining new approaches to the humanities
“What could history have been?” The question asks how events might have turned out otherwise, if only X had happened instead of Y. What if JFK hadn’t been assassinated? What if Hitler had? The official term for this kind of what-if thinking is “counterfactual history,” and it covers anything from ...
Refugee Movements and the Crisis of Europe
Theoretical Interventions
2016 Heuss Lecture: The Dialectics of Progress
Rahel Jaeggi
Claims to Populism, Danger to Democracy?
No US election campaign in living memory has seen as many invocations of “populism” as this one. Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are labelled as “populists;” the term is regularly used as a synonym for “anti-establishment,” irrespective of any particular political ideas; it is also associated with particular moods ...
Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment in an Early Modern Science Course?
Reflections on continuous contingent foundations for liberal education and liberal democracies
In my final post of the old year , I promised that my next post would defend my claim that “however much I believe the liberals’ heart is in the right place, I believe the critiques of liberal universalism both within the academy and without hit home in some real ...
How Not to Remember 9/11
There are two memorials for 9/11 at the site of the World Trade Center ("Ground Zero"). The first, the Memorial proper, is a park of around eight acres, consisting of paved space, rows of trees (swamp oaks) and grass, and concrete benches. Within this space are two large square pits ...