Liberal ideas of human freedom were central to the founding of eighteenth-century republics, and to the international forms of empire, trade, and government taking shape throughout the nineteenth century. Lowe's book, The Intimacies of Four Continents, examines liberal philosophies and institutions of citizenship, free labor, and free trade, in light of transatlantic and transpacific encounters in the “new world,” Africa, and Asia. [read more»]

In the wake of the global financial crisis, new forms of social organization are beginning to take shape. Disparate groups of people are coming together in order to resist corporate globalization and seek a more positive way forward. These movements are not based on hierarchy; rather than looking to those in power to solve their problems, participants are looking to one another. [read more»]

The moments of political and economic crisis in Argentina in 2001, specifically the 19th and 20th of December do not merely mark an event, a day, or even a year. Rather 2001 is an active principle, a key to thinking about this past decade from the perspective of the crisis of neoliberalism between impasse and insurrection. It is a method, a way of looking by seeing the crisis in motion and in time. It becomes a premise with its multiple meanings, spaces, and temporalities. [read more»]

Economic crises are increasingly a product of the conditions of a global contemporaneity. As such, there is both an increasing convergence between the temporal structures of contemporaneity and crisis – contemporaneity is a temporality of crisis, of a sort – and a growing disjunction between the economic and political temporalities of crises themselves. At a structural level, long-established modes of articulation between processes, events and acts (and the historical narratives associated with them) are breaking down. This lecture reflects upon these issues from the standpoint of the philosophy of historical time. What does the philosophy of historical time have to contribute to rethinking the relations between crises and political action? [read more»]

Occupying Language is an open conversation. Through it, we invite you to join us to explore insurgent movements that have been organizing in Latin America over the past twenty years, and to connect key concepts and language from those struggles with what is new and beautiful in the social relations being created by people’s movements in the United States today. [read more»]