What Do the June 2024 Elections in India Mean? with Angana Chatterji & Siddhartha Deb

What Do the June 2024 Elections in India Mean? with Angana Chatterji & Siddhartha Deb

/

What Do the June 2024 Elections in India Mean?

I think that the 2024 national elections in India signaled a slowdown in its slide into authoritarianism, but did not halt it. The BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) and the ways in which it secured votes merit analysis. In his June 4th victory speech, Narendra Modi's rallying cry was "Bharat Mata Ki Jai" (Hail to Mother India), a slogan promoted by Hindu nationalists. It objectifies and feminizes the state, linking control over women and control in general to nationalist assertion. "Bharat Mata" is also associated with "Akhand Bharat," or undivided India, the once and future homeland of Hindus. Modi did not show humility in his speech. Instead, he emphasized the exceptionalism of a third consecutive win, stating, "I believe that the country will write a new chapter of big decisions. This is the Modi guarantee." Nevertheless, he also talked about his government's efforts to weed out forms of corruption, which is ironic given the BJP's recent collusion in the electoral bond scandal.

Artists, Activists & Anarchists Seize Wetlands from the French Republic: We Learn How

Artists, Activists & Anarchists Seize Wetlands from the French Republic: We Learn How

/

Artists, Activists & Anarchists Seize Wetlands from the French Republic
Authors of We are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones
the story of a 40-year struggle to preserve 4,000 acres of wetlands from being destroyed to make way for an airport

KOHEI SAITO on Degrowth Communism & the Need for Radical Democracy

KOHEI SAITO on Degrowth Communism & the Need for Radical Democracy

/

Author of Slow Down! How Degrowth Communism Can Save the World
Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism

The Green New Deal presents itself as a kind of radical policy. If you look at the content, it's just simply the continuation of what capitalism wants to do. It's a massive investment in new, allegedly green industries, with the creation of more jobs with higher wages, but these are not the things that socialists or any environmentalists should be actually seeking because we recognize that capitalism is basically the root cause of the climate crisis and the misery of the workers. If so, I think it is high time to imagine something radically very different from business-as-usual capitalism.

SPEAKING OUT OF PLACE: BEN FRANTA on Weaponizing Economics - Big Oil, Economic Consultants & Climate Policy Delay

SPEAKING OUT OF PLACE: BEN FRANTA on Weaponizing Economics - Big Oil, Economic Consultants & Climate Policy Delay

/

Founding Head of the Climate Litigation Lab
Senior Research Fellow at University of Oxford’s Sustainable Law Programme

For 40 years, the American Petroleum Institute has hired economists to argue it would be too expensive to try and control fossil fuels and that climate change wasn't that bad. The same go-to consultancy firm has been involved in every major climate policy fight from the very beginning and hired by the fossil fuel industry, but what are the courts going to do? It's not just the historical deception. It's an ongoing deception.

DUANE L. CADY - Philosopher, Author of Moral Vision: How Everyday Life Shapes Ethical Thinking & From Warism to Pacifism

DUANE L. CADY - Philosopher, Author of Moral Vision: How Everyday Life Shapes Ethical Thinking & From Warism to Pacifism

/

Author of Moral Vision: How Everyday Life Shapes Ethical Thinking · From Warism to Pacifism
Philosopher · Outstanding Educator of the Year · United Methodist Foundation for Higher Education

Warism, taking war for granted as morally acceptable, even morally required, is the primary obstacle to peace. The task for us is to understand how we can get moral visions and then consider the ethics of negotiating between and among them, including collisions between moral visions. So my interest is in the extent to which various forms of reason take part in these different projects. I argue that contemporary technical philosophers tend to avoid this kind of problem. They tend to think of reason as much more narrow, whereas I want to include things like ordinary experience, the arts, theater, and reading a book. All those things can have an effect.

Speaking Out of Place: BILL McKIBBEN, Co-Founder of 350.org, Founder Third Act & CAROLINE LEVINE, Author of The Activist Humanist

Speaking Out of Place: BILL McKIBBEN, Co-Founder of 350.org, Founder Third Act & CAROLINE LEVINE, Author of The Activist Humanist

/

Co-Founder of 350.org · Founder Third Act · Author of The Activist Humanist

Viewed one way, we live in a very hopeful moment. Thanks to in large part the work of university scientists and engineers, we now live on a planet where the cheapest way to produce power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. That is to say, we could run our Earth on energy from heaven instead of hell, and we could do it fast. The fast is the hard part here. The only difference between all the examples of the long victories of social justice activism that we're in now is that this one is a time-limited problem. If we don't solve it fast, then no one's got a plan for how you refreeze the Arctic once you've melted it. And so we have to move very quickly. Our systems are not designed to move quickly. It's the easiest thing in the world to slow down and delay change, which is all that the fossil fuel industry at this point is trying to do, and that means that it's time for maximum effort from all of us. The story to tell is that the planet is outside its comfort zone, so we need to be outside ours.

Highlights - HALA ALYAN - Dayton Literary Peace Prize Winner - Palestinian-American Poet, Novelist & Clinical Psychologist

Highlights - HALA ALYAN - Dayton Literary Peace Prize Winner - Palestinian-American Poet, Novelist & Clinical Psychologist

/

Dayton Literary Peace Prize Winning Novelist, Poet & Clinical Psychologist

We become the stories we tell ourselves…I started writing around the time I learned English because we moved to the States soon after my fourth birthday, and so I was here for kindergarten into elementary school. I grasped this new language just as I was learning how to also put things onto the page. Those two things really happened at the same time for me. I entered this world where I felt very different and very other, for all intents and purposes I was set to be raised in Kuwait. And then that of course got turned upside down after the invasion by Saddam. I think that so much of my trying to make sense of the world had to do with the displacement, exile and these experiences that my parents had experienced but then that I had as well as we were fleeing the war. It’s hard to know because I think that language was being formed in my brain at the same time that these things were happening.

HALA ALYAN - Palestinian-American Poet, Novelist & Clinical Psychologist - Dayton Literary Peace Prize Winner

HALA ALYAN - Palestinian-American Poet, Novelist & Clinical Psychologist - Dayton Literary Peace Prize Winner

/

Dayton Literary Peace Prize Winning Novelist, Poet & Clinical Psychologist

We become the stories we tell ourselves…I started writing around the time I learned English because we moved to the States soon after my fourth birthday, and so I was here for kindergarten into elementary school. I grasped this new language just as I was learning how to also put things onto the page. Those two things really happened at the same time for me. I entered this world where I felt very different and very other, for all intents and purposes I was set to be raised in Kuwait. And then that of course got turned upside down after the invasion by Saddam. I think that so much of my trying to make sense of the world had to do with the displacement, exile and these experiences that my parents had experienced but then that I had as well as we were fleeing the war. It’s hard to know because I think that language was being formed in my brain at the same time that these things were happening.

Speaking Out of Place: SARA AHMED discusses The Feminist Killjoy Handbook

Speaking Out of Place: SARA AHMED discusses The Feminist Killjoy Handbook

/

Author of The Feminist Killjoy Handbook
Independent Queer Feminist Scholar

You're more likely to progress if you say yes. It's a reproductive mechanism, which is why feminist culture knows so much about everything. We can explain how it is that institutions keep being reproduced in the same way. So what then do you do? Where do you go if your no has nowhere to go? And I think when you say no to the world, and you're pushed out by it, you still find your people. And that there's the world-making is in the people who find in the refusal of the institution a common ground.

Speaking Out of Place: ANTHONY ARNOVE & HALEY PESSIN discuss Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century

Speaking Out of Place: ANTHONY ARNOVE & HALEY PESSIN discuss Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century

/

Co-Editors of Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century
(Arnove) Producer of the Academy Award-nominated Dirty Wars · Director of Roam Agency

We have to create alternative institutions to understand history. And to have conversations about how we can intervene because these conversations are increasingly being criminalized, and librarians are being fired and punished. Teachers are also being fired. Whole colleges are being taken over and certain courses are being labeled as not credit-worthy and being canceled. And while conversations around critical race theory and other topics are being declared illegal, there's a long history of book banning in this country. There's a long history of criminalizing dissent in this country, but I do think we all have to recognize that we're in a much more dangerous moment right now, where a new form of McCarthyism is emboldened and we have to speak out against that. - Anthony Arnove

Speaking Out of Place: SILVIA FEDERICI discusses Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons

Speaking Out of Place: SILVIA FEDERICI discusses Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons

/

Scholar · Educator · Feminist Activist
Author of Caliban and the Witch
Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons

When I came to America I had a shock. I never knew what it meant to be in a country that seems to have no history, being in a place where you feel like you are nowhere, you could have been dropped by a plane in a cultural, historical desert. In the United States, they're destroying historic buildings. They've paved over cemeteries of African slaves. They're changing the environment so that memory is destroyed.

Because you are placing yourself in a broader arc of time, I asked a woman from Guatemala: how can women keep fighting for so much power? And she said, "Because, for us, the dead are not dead." This gives them the courage to go on when everything seems to be lost. I think that this is the kind of struggle that we need to make against war, against the destruction of nature.

Speaking Out of Place: SUSAN ALBUHAWA discusses “Palestine Writes”

Speaking Out of Place: SUSAN ALBUHAWA discusses “Palestine Writes”

/

Novelist · Poet · Essayist · Scientist · Mother · Activist
Organizer of “Palestine Writes” · the only North American literature festival celebrating Palestinian Writers & Artists
Founder of the Children’s Organization Playgrounds for Palestine

Palestinians have been facing erasure for decades. There's the physical erasure of our villages, the names of our villages, the erasure of the word Palestine from the map, erasure of our identities. And now there's this kind of colonization of our narratives, of our stories, and our history. And Palestine Writes is part of a counterforce against this new form of colonization. The Zionist colonial narrative has always shifted with shifting wind, depending on what's in vogue at the time. Initially, it was a sort of romantic ending to Europe's genocide of its own Jewish population. And there was this epic myth of "a land without people for a people without land". And of course that was unsustainable.

Speaking Out of Place: JEFF CHANG discusses the Supreme Court’s Recent Decision on Affirmative Action

Speaking Out of Place: JEFF CHANG discusses the Supreme Court’s Recent Decision on Affirmative Action

/

Journalist · Activist · Public Intellectual
Author of We Gon' Be Alright: Notes On Race and Resegregation ·
Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation

This conversation focuses on the Supreme Court’s recent decision on affirmative action and presenting a ”true and historically honest confrontation with America’s racism.”

Speaking Out of Place: CHING-IN CHEN & KATE HAO discuss the cancellation of the Asian American Literary Festival 2023

Speaking Out of Place: CHING-IN CHEN & KATE HAO discuss the cancellation of the Asian American Literary Festival 2023

/

on the cancellation of the Asian American Literary Festival 2023

This August, the Asian American Literary Festival was to take place in Washington, DC.. The longstanding event had been on hiatus because of the pandemic, so this year’s event had generated a lot of buzz.  Organized by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center (APAC), the event had already garnered substantial investments and expectations from both national and international groups and states. Ching-In Chen is a poet who was curating a festival event featuring books by trans and nonbinary writers. Kate Hao is a program coordinator who was on contract with the Smithsonian for the festival.

Speaking Out of Place: JENNIFER JACQUET discusses The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World

Speaking Out of Place: JENNIFER JACQUET discusses The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World

/

Author of The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World

They weren't able to employ scientists to not find a fingerprint of anthropogenic climate change. They weren't able to pull that off, and when they're not able to do that, what they do instead is create an arsenal of expertise who just create the illusion of disagreement, and they were so successful at doing that with climate change that it's remarkable because there actually was scientific consensus. There wasn't this giant rift in the scientific community, and for decades, they created an illusion of disagreement that we all bought. And they're able to do that using Stanford University, Rockefeller University, these names of institutions as well as individuals, but they're not actually publishing science. And so I think it deserves a kind of special carve out of all of the tactics because it really says: actually these systems are working pretty well. You're just not getting the right information. And they do that again through the media and PR firms and controlling the dialogues and press releases and journals, and especially their relationship with the media, is very, very privileged.

Speaking Out of Place: CYNTHIA G. FRANKLIN discusses “Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea”

Speaking Out of Place: CYNTHIA G. FRANKLIN discusses “Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea”

/

Author of Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea
Professor of English at University of Hawai'i · Coeditor of the journal Biography

I posit narrated humanity as a lens through which to study how narratives participate in struggles to conceive human being beyond juridical and narrative humanity. What I was thinking about was just the kind of narrative codes and conventions and genres that help us to understand who counts as human in ways that people who are fighting for human rights as a thing that you have to do, even as there are all kinds of critiques that can and have been made rightly so of human rights, but that you have to do it.

(Highlights) DAVID PALUMBO-LIU

(Highlights) DAVID PALUMBO-LIU

/

Writer, Activist, Comparative Literature Professor
Author of Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back

To explore different worlds. That’s what literature has taught me. Reading has taught me how difficult it is to write well, to do you something other than the mundane or the expected, so all those things point to a kind of human creativity and a human capacity to both create and also to learn. To learn about life in different ways and to pass on those lessons to other people. One thing I think great teachers do is to embody what they talk about, the values that they profess, the things they feel are important in their everyday lives outside of the literature. So when I become involved in politics or a cause, it’s a reflection of what I've learned through any number of things including literature. Literature doesn’t stand alone. Literature is part of the world.

DAVID PALUMBO-LIU

DAVID PALUMBO-LIU

/

Writer, Activist, Comparative Literature Professor
Author of Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back

To explore different worlds. That’s what literature has taught me. Reading has taught me how difficult it is to write well, to do you something other than the mundane or the expected, so all those things point to a kind of human creativity and a human capacity to both create and also to learn. To learn about life in different ways and to pass on those lessons to other people. One thing I think great teachers do is to embody what they talk about, the values that they profess, the things they feel are important in their everyday lives outside of the literature. So when I become involved in politics or a cause, it’s a reflection of what I've learned through any number of things including literature. Literature doesn’t stand alone. Literature is part of the world.

(Highlights) HALA ALYAN

(Highlights) HALA ALYAN

/

Dayton Literary Peace Prize Winning Novelist, Poet & Clinical Psychologist

We become the stories we tell ourselves…I started writing around the time I learned English because we moved to the States soon after my fourth birthday, and so I was here for kindergarten into elementary school. I grasped this new language just as I was learning how to also put things onto the page. Those two things really happened at the same time for me. I entered this world where I felt very different and very other, for all intents and purposes I was set to be raised in Kuwait. And then that of course got turned upside down after the invasion by Saddam. I think that so much of my trying to make sense of the world had to do with the displacement, exile and these experiences that my parents had experienced but then that I had as well as we were fleeing the war. It’s hard to know because I think that language was being formed in my brain at the same time that these things were happening.

HALA ALYAN

HALA ALYAN

/

Dayton Literary Peace Prize Winning Novelist, Poet & Clinical Psychologist

We become the stories we tell ourselves…I started writing around the time I learned English because we moved to the States soon after my fourth birthday, and so I was here for kindergarten into elementary school. I grasped this new language just as I was learning how to also put things onto the page. Those two things really happened at the same time for me. I entered this world where I felt very different and very other, for all intents and purposes I was set to be raised in Kuwait. And then that of course got turned upside down after the invasion by Saddam. I think that so much of my trying to make sense of the world had to do with the displacement, exile and these experiences that my parents had experienced but then that I had as well as we were fleeing the war. It’s hard to know because I think that language was being formed in my brain at the same time that these things were happening.