Online Features

Resources of Hope

Ashley Dawson

Last Saturday was a remarkable day of NYC-based, globe-spanning eco-activism.  The day began with a trip up to the South Bronx, where friends of mine were involved in various local environmental justice initiatives.  The organization Sustainable South Bronx sponsored a … Continue reading “Resources of Hope”

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Counting Towards Tenure

Tavia Nyong'o

Who is counting on tenure? We are all counting on tenure, it seems, as the professional horizon of intellectual work, as the foundation of security upon which any edifice of independent thought might withstand the forces of erosion in our time. However, as far as the New York Times can tell, tenure primarily counts as a politically neutral reward for professionalism and an accommodation to a hierarchical ideal of expertise. Missing from this is any body count of those intellectuals whose activity inside and out of the academia, while crucial to its functioning, are not tracked for tenure.

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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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The Decision

Khalilah Brown-Dean

As a scholar who is deeply intrigued by both the ingredients and political consequences of public opinion, I often gauge public sentiment by simply reading the status messages and posts of my friends on Facebook and Twitter. These social media … Continue reading “The Decision”

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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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