Author: Social Text Collective

The Social Text Collective began in 1979.

The Social Text Collective began in 1979.

Authored by Social Text Collective

Ben Reiss article discussed in media

Social Text Collective

Ben Reiss’ article, “Madness after Virginia Tech: From Psychiatric Risk to Institutional Vulnerability” in the current issue of Social Text, will be the topic of discussion on KPFA’s Against the Grain this Wednesday, February 2, beginning at noon Pacific/3 Eastern and worldwide via kpfa.org. The audio will be archived afterward at againstthegrain.org.

Reiss has also published a related commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Campus Security and the Specter of Mental-Health Policing,” which you can read here.

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Towards a Politics of Solidarity

Social Text Collective

The call for proposals for next year’s Left Forum is now out. The Forum will take place March 18-20, 2011, at Pace University in New York. Click here for more information.

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Social Text Special Issue 104: Introduction

Social Text Collective

The cover article and accompanying special report in the September 9, 2010 issue of The Economist, “A Latin American Decade?” somewhat tentatively hail renewed ties between the region and the “developed” world after attempts to foster national industries and intraregional integration “have stagnated or fallen apart.” Not surprisingly, the ties that matter to the magazine derive from market-oriented reforms and commodity-driven booms that are “starting to attract increased interest from outsiders.” Despite a pattern of similar claims about foreign interest that began around 1492, The Economist knows what it sees: the transnational moment has arrived.

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Featured on NPR: The Citizen Machine

Social Text Collective

Social Text Collective member Anna McCarthy was a guest on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show to discuss her recent book The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950’s America.
The interview aired on the August 3rd broadcast but can be listened to in its entirety by clicking the link above.

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New from a Social Text Author: The Citizen Machine

Social Text Collective

The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America
by Anna McCarthy
Formed in the shadow of the early Cold War, amid the first stirrings of the civil rights movement, the idea of television as a form of unofficial government inspired corporate executives, foundation officers, and other members of the governing classes to imagine TV sponsorship as a powerful new form of influence on American democracy in the postwar years. The Citizen Machine tells the story of their efforts to shape U.S. political culture, uncovering a dense web of fantasies and rationalizations about race, class, and economic power that have profoundly shaped not only television, but our understanding of American citizenship itself.

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Performing the Future

Social Text Collective

Social Text collective member José Muñoz will be among the presenters at this state of the field conference on performance, to be held July 8th – 10th, 2010, at the House of World Cultures in Berlin. Click here for the full conference program.

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New dossier on Cruising Utopia

Social Text Collective

As we exit a more contentious than usual month of Gay Pride, Social Text brings you this dossier of critical appreciations of long-standing collective member José Esteban Muñoz’s new book, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Read responses from Lauren Berlant, Barbara Browning, Gayatri Gopinath, and Ricardo Ortiz. Muñoz responds to his responses, and performance art legend Vaginal Davis contributes an original illustration inspired by Cruising Utopia.

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Desiring Just Economies / Just Economies of Desire

Social Text Collective

Social Text collective member Lisa Duggan is among the speakers at this conference to be held 24-26 June, 2010 at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin. Desiring Just Economies / Just Economies of Desire, according to it’s organizers, will “explore how desire not only sustains current economies, but also carries the potential for inciting new forms of understanding and doing economy.” Read the full conference statement and get more details here.

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Middle Passages: Histories and Poetics

Social Text Collective

The Middle Passage has long been a trope for unspeakable terror. But a recent generation of scholars has been keen on discerning how the Middle Passage as social experience defined lives, histories and contemporary social selves. This event brings together some of the most prominent writers on the subject to present papers and participate in discussion. May 6-7, 2010 at the Graduate Center, CUNY. 365 Fifth Avenue, New York City.

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Issue 102 Reception April 30th

Social Text Collective

Please join the collective Friday April 30th in celebrating the publication of Social Text 102, a special issue on “The Politics of Recorded Sound,” guest edited by Gustavus Stadler.

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Postcard: Heaven and/or Hell

Social Text Collective

By Ernest Larsen and Sherry Millner. Suppose you take a barefoot walk along the sweeping stretch of white-powder China Beach toward what the marines called Monkey Mountain (toward Da Nang, that is, where U.S. soldiers were sent for R&R–the first marines deployed to Vietnam, came ashore at Namo Beach, on the north end of Da Nang in ’65). It’s best, if you have any sort of a sensitive streak, not to allow your gaze to stray too far ashore.

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