A PhD does not prepare you for a school shooting. My students are afraid. We are afraid. It’s been almost a week since the tragedy in Isla Vista. A student came into my office Tuesday saying, “Professor, you look hella … Continue reading “Week One: Fear in the Shadow of Violence”
Beginning Monday May 24th, and running serially for a week, a new dossier entitled ‘Thinking Through Violence‘ will be appearing on the Social Text website. Check back for essays by Arvind Rajagopal, Banu Bargu, Allen Feldman, Drucilla Cornell, and Mary Louise Pratt.
Full disclosure: I wrote this on my office computer and I sent it to Social Text Online via my university email. To give fair warning, I use “recall,” “protest,” and other words that the Republican Party of Wisconsin latched … Continue reading “Democracy in America… and Wisconsin”
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.
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.
Greece is in revolt. Not surprisingly, though, the protests there are being totally misrepresented in the mainstream media. Much attention in the US press has focused on the spectacle of the riots and on the three tragic deaths in a … Continue reading “Capitalism=Crisis”
If you read the literature on tricksters, you will confront a string of words that capture the moral quality and sensibilities of these figures, figures scattered across time and place and largely enshrined in myths and stories: Cunning, deceit, … Continue reading “Hacker and Troller as Trickster”
