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Archive for the ‘Cultural politics’ Category

A social media conversation prompted me to dig up something I had written in my notebook years ago after reading Serhii Plokhy’s masterful book on “premodern identities” in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Which in turn prompted me to realize that coronavirus provides an answer to the question I had just finished writing an article about […]

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A casual comment on a minor article in a provincial newspaper in a faraway country (Ukraine) got me going on a response to what is, essentially, the white world’s default position on all things racial. (Social media comments, as a rule, aren’t indicative of anything, but this one is so symptomatic it’s worth examining.) The […]

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As I explain in Shadowing the Anthropocene, process-relational philosophy in a Peircian-Whiteheadian vein takes aesthetics to be first, ethics to be second, and logic (which, in our time, we need to think of also as eco-logic) to be third. This is not a temporal sequence, but a logical one: aesthetics is found in the response […]

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People’s identities are an object of study in a range of fields, but it’s the field of cultural studies that has most singularly, even obsessively, sought to understand how identities interact with politics in changing media environments. Cultural studies first emerged in a British milieu marked by very specific relations between socio-economic classes, media industries, […]

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Or, Why Ukraine- and Russia- literacy should now be mandatory studies for every voting American One could start with another question: Why are both the politics of climate change and politics in general so polarized these days? Political polarization, after all, remains the main complaint of Americans, and it has made it impossible to make […]

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An off-the-cuff essay, written not for any particular occasion, but just to get it out of me. It’s probably mostly common knowledge (among people on the green left), just maybe not well articulated yet, and too easily forgotten. Politically, we’re all playing a little catch-up these days. Understanding the apparent global turn we are seeing […]

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Some say the problem in today’s political world is the lack of civility. Others say the problem is civility itself, or the pretense of it (and use of it as a bludgeon), when what is called for is outrage. It seems to me that there is no universal “civility.” Civility is a matter of fitting […]

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A post-Commencement pep talk for myself (& academic friends who care to listen) It should be pretty obvious by now that predatory, extractive capitalism is not working, and that we need to move swiftly to a regenerative mixed economy grounded in a respect for living systems. The implications of that are pretty simple, but also […]

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I think it’s fair to say that the United States is in a state of cultural civil war. It is cultural war in the sense that it is a war fought with signs and symbols rather than with guns — signs and symbols intended to elicit affiliation, allegiance, and identification with one or another party to the […]

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Based on its title and on the snippets I saw being quoted, I fully expected to dislike Lee Jones’ article “Charlottesville and the Politics of Left Hysteria,” posted a few days ago at The Current Moment. Instead, I’ve found it nuanced, cogent, and well worth reading. I myself have tried to broach this topic of the […]

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Here I go wading into a type of debate this blog does not often venture into: the debate surrounding Google employee James Damore’s firing for his ‘Ideological Echo Chamber’ manifesto. I find this to be a complicated and interesting conversation, and I’m curious to know how my thoughts align with others.

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Just as I=PAT serves as a handy, if problematic, formula for thinking about the causes of environmental impact, so I think there is a similar formula underlying tragedies like the massacre at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub. It goes something like this: Hate + Technology + Distress = Carnage/Chaos

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