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Get Ready for the Arendt Center Confernce!
Roger Berkowitz, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Uday Mehta joined WAMC Northeast Public Radio's The Roundtable to discuss some of the topics we’ll be delving into at our 16th annual fall conference on Tribalism and Cosmpolitanism this Thursday and Friday!All Categories
The Culture of Nationalism and the New Racism
By Roger BerkowitzEarlier this month at the National Conservative Conference multiple speakers sought to promote a “new American and British nationalism.” There was an effort to describe a nationalism grounded in strong national borders, and the superiority of “Anglo-Protestant culture.” Also held up as the roots of American nationalism were constitutionalism, the common law, the English language, and Christian scripture.
What We're Reading: How to Save the Amazon
By Roger BerkowitzRoberto Mangabeira Unger writes that lectures and stern words will do little to save the Brazilian Rain Forest. There are 30 million people living in the Amazon, Unger reminds us, and we “need to ensure that the forest is worth more standing than cut down. To that end, we must give the inhabitants of the Amazon the means to both use and preserve their environment.” Above all, what is needed is ways to make the people living in the Amazon aware of its worth to them.
Sexism in Academia & Bureaucracy
By Samantha HillAs a new semester approaches, Troy Vettese chronicles Sexism in the Academy. Littered with statistics about the ways in which academic structures, like teaching evaluations, halt the upward mobility of female academics, Vettese paints a bleak picture: There are two tenured men for every tenured woman. The proportion of black women among tenured faculty has fallen since 1993.
What We're Reading: Wealth Gap
By Samantha HillAre we living in a new gilded age? Two pieces this week address the tyranny of wealth and celebrity “culture.” In the American Affairs Journal, John Pierpont Morgan, compares two moments of economic crisis, thinking about whether or not inequality is good for capitalism. The wealth-gap, he writes, is self-reinforcing.
What We're Reading:
The Spirit of Free Speech
By Roger BerkowitzJason Richwine takes on the argument that free speech only applies to the government regulation of speech. Of course, legally it is true that only the Constitution only protects speech from governmental restraint. But Richwine rightly argues that there the culture of engagement requires a broader protection of free speech.
What we are Reading: Black Americans
By Roger BerkowitzNikole Hannah-Jones is well aware that she is “part of the first generation of black Americans in the history of the United States to be born into a society in which black people had full rights of citizenship.” She writes that while “Black people suffered under slavery for 250 years; we have been legally “free” for just 50.” And she believes that “in that briefest of spans, despite continuing to face rampant discrimination...
Tough Talks
By Charlotte AlbertThis week, we republish a QotW essay from one of our current students here at Bard College.
In our current political climate, media has exacerbated and publicized social tensions. Mostly these are tensions that have always existed but have not always been issues of large-scale public contention. The proliferation of mass media has led to increased political divisiveness...
The American Algerians
By Roger BerkowitzIt is well known that Richard Wright found in Paris the freedom he never found as a black man in America. Maybe less well known is that that James Baldwin, in his essay, “Alas, Poor Richard,” accused Wright, as Adam Shatz observes, “of celebrating Paris as a “city of refuge” while remaining silent about France’s oppressive treatment of its colonial subjects.”
What We're Reading:
Thinking
By Samantha HillLiane Carlson writes about thinking for The Revealer, and what happens when we lose faith in thinking as scholars. Echoing Hannah Arendt’s critique of academic thinking, and those who rank among the professional thinkers, Carlson emphasizes the communal nature of thinking as an activity that we engage in, while reflecting on the declining state of academia today.