pandemic Archives - Public Seminar

Extermination: From Plague, to War

If coexistence is unavoidable, why is “war on rats” discourse so ubiquitous?

April 3, 2023 • by Rafi Youatt

While extermination itself continues to present itself as the desired outcome in cities, the reality is that coexistence with rats is now tacitly accepted at the species level, even while death is pursued at individual and sub-population levels....

Uncategorized

What’s the Story at Creative Nonfiction?

A premier journal that pioneered a literary form has gone dark, and readers want to know why

March 1, 2023 • by Vicky Oliver

Was the decades-old, and recently suspended, Creative Nonfiction doomed? Is it even dead? ...

What’s the Story at Creative Nonfiction?

Podcast

Essential Workers and Labor Activism During the Pandemic: An Interview with Jamie McCallum

Unproductive Labor Podcast, Episode 20

January 26, 2023 • by Pete Sinnott and Luke Mergner

I talk to sociologist Jamie McCallum about his new book, Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice...

Essential Workers and Labor Activism During the Pandemic: An Interview with Jamie McCallum

Uncategorized

Behind Milan’s Millennial Renaissance

The hidden costs of becoming an Instagrammable global city

October 27, 2022 • by Giorgio Fontana

I love Milan. I was born in its suburbs and have been living here for fifteen years; it’s still a very special place, a unique city in Italy. But its ruling class (and its residents) must tackle the problem of architectural and social inequality seriously before this place swallows itself....

Feminism

Not a Labor of Love

The radicalization of motherhood

March 14, 2022 • by Catrin Ashton and Silvia Federici

t was argued that domestic work doesn’t produce any social wealth, is a backward activity, and that it isn’t really part of the capitalist organization of work and, therefore, women who are mostly involved with this kind of work do not have the power to change society....

COVID-19

Habermas on the Legitimacy of Lockdown

Habermas argued that the state’s duty to protect life outweighed all individual rights. His critics accused him of authoritarianism.

February 23, 2022 • by Peter J. Verovšek

Jürgen Habermas recently argued that the pandemic measures of the German government hadn’t gone far enough. To weigh the state’s duty to protect life against other rights and freedoms was unconstitutional, he warned. In the ensuing controversy, critics accused him of authoritarianism. ...

Literature

Decolonizing Daniel Defoe

How Black lives matter in A Journal of the Plague Year

February 9, 2022 • by Anna Neill

It isn’t hard to see why A Journal of the Plague Year has enjoyed renewed attention in recent times. But to invoke it without considering Defoe’s support for British imperialism and the expanding Atlantic slave trade is to make literary history complicit with colonial and racial injustice....

Literature

The Eleventh Mouse

A writer welcomes the unexpected at end of an old year and the start of a new one

January 3, 2022 • by Maureen Buchanan Jones

Here I was caring for another creature with more than a bit of martyrdom and annoyance in my heart. I had forgotten my self-administered advice as an antidote to despair that “something extraordinary is going to happen today.”...

Science & Technology

To Fight Covid Variants, Let’s Rethink the Sherman Anti-Trust Act!

We have another new threat, but two pills that might fight it. We know “cocktails” work but our laws prevent drug companies from cooperating to make them.

November 30, 2021 • by Donald G. McNeil Jr.

We are now threatened by Omicron, a new Covid variant with a name like a villain from a Transformers movie. Although on paper its genes look scary, we still know very little about its real-life behavior. So, while travel precautions make sense until we know more (and perhaps we could finally get serious about ...

To Fight Covid Variants, Let’s Rethink the Sherman Anti-Trust Act!

Activism

Teaching Through the Pandemic

In a course about memorializing HIV-AIDS, students learned about community by making one

April 21, 2021 • by Dan Royles

_____ Everyone involved in education has found the past year to be a special challenge for teaching, learning, and simply making it from one day to another. But how do you teach students about a pandemic during a pandemic? In December 2020, queer historian Dan Royles interviewed Theodore (Ted) Kerr and his ...

Politics

How Donald Trump Facilitated the Current Racist Attacks on Asian Americans

The long history of America’s hostility toward immigrants from China, Japan, and Korea

March 18, 2021 • by Nadia Y. Kim

_____ EDITORS NOTE: Last summer, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter uprisings around the country, Public Seminar published a prescient piece by Nadia Kim, a professor of sociology and the author of several books, including Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to LA, and Refusing Death: Immigrant Women ...

How Donald Trump Facilitated the Current Racist Attacks on Asian Americans

Migration

We’ve Never Been Global

How local meanings mattered in 1900 and still matter now

February 2, 2021 • by Jeffrey Wasserstrom

The last sun of the century sets amidst the blood-red clouds of the West and the whirlwind of hatred. The naked passion of self-love of Nations, in its drunken delirium of greed, is dancing to the clash of steel and the ...

pandemic

Extermination: From Plague, to War

If coexistence is unavoidable, why is “war on rats” discourse so ubiquitous?

What’s the Story at Creative Nonfiction?

A premier journal that pioneered a literary form has gone dark, and readers want to know why

Essential Workers and Labor Activism During the Pandemic: An Interview with Jamie McCallum

Unproductive Labor Podcast, Episode 20

Behind Milan’s Millennial Renaissance

The hidden costs of becoming an Instagrammable global city

Not a Labor of Love

The radicalization of motherhood

Habermas on the Legitimacy of Lockdown

Habermas argued that the state’s duty to protect life outweighed all individual rights. His critics accused him of authoritarianism.

Decolonizing Daniel Defoe

How Black lives matter in A Journal of the Plague Year

The Eleventh Mouse

A writer welcomes the unexpected at end of an old year and the start of a new one

To Fight Covid Variants, Let’s Rethink the Sherman Anti-Trust Act!

We have another new threat, but two pills that might fight it. We know “cocktails” work but our laws prevent drug companies from cooperating to make them.

Teaching Through the Pandemic

In a course about memorializing HIV-AIDS, students learned about community by making one

How Donald Trump Facilitated the Current Racist Attacks on Asian Americans

The long history of America’s hostility toward immigrants from China, Japan, and Korea

We’ve Never Been Global

How local meanings mattered in 1900 and still matter now

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