Power Archives - Public Seminar

Democracy

“If You Wish to Know Who a Man Truly Is, Give Him Power”

By eroding the values of inclusivity and fairness, Trump’s rhetoric cultivates instead an exclusionary ethos, one deliberately designed to undermine the idea that all citizens possess equal moral worth and deserve equal opportunities to participate in public life

February 25, 2025 • by Melvin L. Rogers

Reflecting on Abraham Lincoln in 1894, the American orator and lawyer Robert Green Ingersoll observed that “nothing discloses real character like the use of power. It is easy for the weak to be gentle. Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, ...

“If You Wish to Know Who a Man Truly Is, Give Him Power”

Interviews

Generations of Women in The Witches of El Paso

“The rules are going to be broken”

December 11, 2024 • by Marisol Aveline Delarosa and Luis Jaramillo

In his debut novel, The Witches of El Paso (Primero Sueño Press and Atria Books, 2024), Luis Jaramillo provides readers a sweeping multi-generational story about Nena, a woman living in World War II–era El Paso who begs for a new life and finds herself transported to colonial Mexico, where she ...

Generations of Women in <em>The Witches of El Paso</em>

Democracy

Bloodless Democracy?

A response to John Keane

April 11, 2023 • by James Miller

Does democracy offer any kind of solution, however partial, to ecological challenges that are inherently global, not just national, never mind local?...

Uncategorized

Why Does a Powerful Nation Form an Alliance with a Minor Power?

The India-Armenia arms deal opens a window on the value of asymmetrical alliances

February 14, 2023 • by Georgi Asatryan

India-Armenia relations have been actively developing in recent years. In a series of consultations and meetings, India and Armenia have signed defense deals, a significant development in the global arms trade. For India, a great power, this was the first export deal of its weapons, while Armenia, a minor power, ...

Why Does a Powerful Nation Form an Alliance with a Minor Power?

Europe & Central Asia

Robert Jay Lifton on Psychic Numbing and the Warning from Ukraine

The renewed threat of nuclear war—and the importance of distinguishing between fear and anxiety

October 25, 2022 • by James Carroll and Robert Jay Lifton

Nuclear complacency is multifaceted. A certain amount of nuclear fear is appropriate to our situation. When we give in to what you’re calling nuclear complacency, it’s because we have insufficient fear of what is actually dangerous....

Robert Jay Lifton on Psychic Numbing and the Warning from Ukraine

Higher Ed

The Problem Is Not Harvard, the Problem Is Graduate School

Sexual harassment is a normal feature of the current power arrangement. What will you do about it?

February 15, 2022 • by Hannah Leffingwell

This is because the system is built to protect, enable, and encourage harassers. Graduate students, whose cheap labor is used by the university to buttress the outrageous salaries of star faculty and senior administrators, are often broke, disempowered, terrified, and exhausted, even prior to being sexually harassed....

The Problem Is Not Harvard, the Problem Is Graduate School

Colonization

A Pencil For Your Land

Ngũgĩ and Achebe on colonial public school

September 20, 2021 • by Casper Andersen

_____ Oppressed people who retaliate are up against the privileged and powerful. Fighting back often places them outside the system. But what happens when the suppressors’ tools are turned on themselves? Can a colonial education—the underhand offer of ‘a pencil for land’—be turned into an emancipatory counter movement? ‘Colonial mimicry’ describes a ...

Democracy

A Political Paradox

Power, fallibility, and the Twenty-Fifth Amendment

October 7, 2020 • by Rebecca Lubot

The Twenty-Fifth Amendment was ratified on February 10, 1967, in the wake of the Kennedy assassination and a period of great anxiety about nuclear weapons. The first section deals with a vacancy in the presidency, the second section with a vacancy in the vice presidency. But it is Sections 3 ...

Democracy

Why the Harper’s Letter Got It Wrong

The most serious threats to protest and open debate come not from the left or the right but from the state and powerful political institutions

July 16, 2020 • by Nicole Hemmer

So I took a new job in a new city and began again. I have been thinking about my decision to speak up, and its costs, in light of The Letter. You know the one: the open letter in Harper’s magazine that praises the “needed reckoning” of the past few months ...

Why the <em>Harper’s </em>Letter Got It Wrong

Feature

The Formal Ethics of Metony#metoo

Poetics, Power, Primal Scene

April 18, 2018 • by Jamieson Webster and Kyoo Lee

Last year the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality published a panel called "The ontology of the rape joke," organized around a performance by Vanessa Place of her piece, "Rape joke." The panel included responses from Jamieson Webster, Jeff Dolven, Gayle Salamon, Kyoo Lee, Katie Gentile, and Virginia Goldner, and ended with ...

Uncategorized

Revisiting Bartky on Foucault

The production and discipline of femininity

March 21, 2018 • by Alexandra Tadros

In “Femininity and Domination,” Sandra Lee Bartky examines the underlying causes and effects of women’s subjugation in contemporary society. Though women are generally understood to have equal rights, oppression, she argues, does not have to involve “physical deprivation, legal inequality, nor economic exploitation” in order to have a systemic and ...

Uncategorized

Philosophers on Fake News

Arendt and Foucault on power and truth in media politics

March 19, 2018 • by Haeun Kim

Despite their irrefutable and continued presence in the world today, for some time the practices of banning and censorship have struck me as antiquated, almost quaint, like a desperate but not wholly effective grasp for control by a declining State. My admission of this admittedly unsubstantiated and impressionistic outlook—although not ...