Achille Mbembe: Democracy and the Ethics of Common Life

Etienne Balibar is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris-X. As one of Louis Althusser’s most brilliant students in the 1960s, Etienne Balibar contributed to the collective theoretical masterpiece of Reading Capital. Since then he has established himself amongst the most subtle philosophical and political thinkers in France. He has worked extensively on general problematics such as the theme of universalism and difference…

Immigration law’s focus is nation-state sovereignty and the ability of the state to exclude or deport aliens, who are understood to move spatially to the nation state, seeking entry or admittance. But this vision of immigration law fails to recognize settler colonialism, and, in particular, its grounding on preexisting indigenous populations’ territory…

Join Deborah A. Thomas as she discusses the process of archive-building in relation to epistemological violence and the effects on this project for Caribbean Studies[…]

The first in a series of conversations that will take place between global social movement actors framed around both the nature of the global crisis and the various ways the new mass movements are responding. Our first conversation focuses on the origins of the movements in Egypt, Spain and the US, and the novel democratic forms that each movement is inventing, from direct democracy and mass assemblies to spokes councils. The second part of the events discussion will be organized around questions that the various movement participants will ask of one another. We hope to facilitate a discussion that both answers questions and raises even more questions.

Although information has been coming in from Japan since 3/11, there is a huge gap between what the Japanese are actually experiencing, doing and thinking after the Fukushima nuclear accident, and what the people in the US know and think about it. We are inviting three intellectuals/activists from Japan to share their first hand experiences and thoughts with us here in the US, and to discuss together the significance of the situation, the question of our human survival and the global struggles for it.

Is the global hip hop ‘hood more a fantasy than a reality? Hip hop galvanized the imagination of young people around the world, but it couldn’t erase the difficulties of translating lives, cultures, and political visions […]