Essays Archive - Page 107 of 131

With Impeachment, Messaging is Everything.

And the Democrats seem behind the curve.

December 9, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Strategic communication. Trump’s White House has eliminated press briefings, viciously attacked the press and indeed all independent media sources, and organized a cynical and relentless campaign of disinformation via Twitter, Facebook, Fox News, Breitbart, YouTube, the One America News Network, and a range of other media. Trump in office -- with the ...

With Impeachment, Messaging is Everything.

Migration

Post-Workers of the World, Unite!

Reconciling Open Borders and Post-Work Politics

December 6, 2019 • by James Chamberlain

Labour party members passed a motion at the 2019 conference asserting that “free movement, equality and rights for migrants are socialist values and benefit us all.” This socialist framing of freedom of movement emphasizes that migrants are workers and marks a clear contrast with Bernie Sanders’s description of open borders as a “right-wing ...

Europe & Central Asia

Romania in 2020

Fighting Corruption Just Got Harder because of Trump

December 6, 2019 • by Maria Bucur

The big unknown for Romania moving into 2020 is its relationship with the United States. Though Romanians have become more anti-American in the last few years, they are still the second most pro-American post-socialist state in Europe (Poland is in first place). Since 1990, the U.S. ambassador has played a ...

Reviews

What Do Walls Do?

Reflections on William Callahan’s “Great Walls” — and on Filmmaking as an Ethnographic Method

December 5, 2019 • by Jiyoung Cho

What Callahan spurs us to challenge is the premise that walls are “problems” that need to be “solved” (Callahan 2018, 460). When Berlin Wall came down in 1989, it was meant to signal the end of the Cold War rivalry between a totalitarian East and a democratic West, a victory ...

Europe & Central Asia

The Romanian 2019 Presidential Elections

Populism on the retreat

December 5, 2019 • by Maria Bucur

Romania was one of the post-communist countries to join the neoliberal bandwagon slower than the Visegrad group and made it to EU membership just when the 2008 global crisis was about to break. For over a decade after the end of the brutal Nicolae Ceausescu dictatorship, old communist apparatchiks together ...

The Romanian 2019 Presidential Elections

North America

I Would Love to Vote for a Gay President

But Pete Buttigieg is not my guy

December 4, 2019 • by Claire Potter

Many remember this loss because of Dean’s cowboy moment at the lectern. Masochists and political junkies can watch the famous “scream” that provoked endless media mockery here. But the swift collapse of the Dean campaign following Iowa also revealed other weaknesses that early polling had not: the excitement of this ...

I Would Love to Vote for a Gay President

Latin America & Caribbean

Coup, Revolution, or Negotiated Regime Change

What is happening in Bolivia?

December 4, 2019 • by Andrew Arato

At the same time, I fervently hope that what is occurring in Bolivia is not a revolution. Of course that hope may well be disappointed, especially if the right wing (supposedly interim) government seeks to perpetuate itself by blocking the road to genuinely free elections through the repression, media manipulation, ...

Coup, Revolution, or Negotiated Regime Change

Uncategorized

Reclaiming Victimology

Why there are no victims – only survivors

December 3, 2019 • by Alyson Cole

It’s not the poor, marginalized, or dispossessed, but those who occupy positions of privilege and power who seem most eager to assume the victim mantle today, those Lawrence Glickman classifies as “elites.” On the one hand, this is not new: American history is littered with examples of dominant groups deploying iconic imagery ...

Europe & Central Asia

The EU’s University in Exile

December 3, 2019 • by Laszlo Bruszt

On November 15, Central European University (CEU) officially inaugurated its new campus in Vienna, Austria, having been arbitrarily ousted from Hungary. On the same day, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government opened another large sports stadium in Budapest. Predictably, the government-controlled Hungarian media focused on the latter event and ignored the departure of ...

Race

Paul Gilroy: Race and ‘Useful Violence’

December 3, 2019 • by McKenzie Wark

Aimé Césaire called it: the so-called west is a decaying civilization. In both the United States and Europe, where institutions are receding, a base level of race-talk and racial solidarity is revealed as metastasizing beneath them. In such dim times, I turn to the writings of Paul Gilroy as offering ...

Activism

Write Back Soon

Mass Incarceration and “Writing Intensive” Vulnerability

December 3, 2019 • by Ianna Hawkins Owen

Throughout that typically chilly Bay Area summer, I was turning over in my mind the problem of satisfying the “writing intensive” designation of my new undergraduate seminar, “Black Writing To/From/About Prison.” I struggled to come up with a way to make the course’s mandated four papers, or 20-pages of writing, ...

New York City

Initiating Inmates

Closing Rikers Island without oversight will expose thousands of transferred inmates to new violence

December 2, 2019 • by Brittany Friedman

Let the initiation begin. The Team snatched the bewildered young men from the van and placed them in metal cages. “Take your shirt with your right hand and pass it backward over your left shoulder,” the officers commanded. Perplexed, the young men reacted too slowly and quickly received blows to the head. The officers continued ...

Essays

With Impeachment, Messaging is Everything.

And the Democrats seem behind the curve.

Post-Workers of the World, Unite!

Reconciling Open Borders and Post-Work Politics

Romania in 2020

Fighting Corruption Just Got Harder because of Trump

What Do Walls Do?

Reflections on William Callahan’s “Great Walls” — and on Filmmaking as an Ethnographic Method

The Romanian 2019 Presidential Elections

Populism on the retreat

I Would Love to Vote for a Gay President

But Pete Buttigieg is not my guy

Coup, Revolution, or Negotiated Regime Change

What is happening in Bolivia?

Reclaiming Victimology

Why there are no victims – only survivors

The EU’s University in Exile

Paul Gilroy: Race and ‘Useful Violence’

Write Back Soon

Mass Incarceration and “Writing Intensive” Vulnerability

Initiating Inmates

Closing Rikers Island without oversight will expose thousands of transferred inmates to new violence

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