Farewell, Fall
The semester in review, from reproductive freedom to student debt forgiveness
December 22, 2022
In this week’s issue of Public Seminar, we’re looking back on some of favorite features of the Fall 2023 semester—from Kian Tajbakhsh’s analysis of the Iran uprising to Frida Berrigan’s call for nuclear disarmament.
Happy reading, and happy holidays!
“We are so used to sentimentalizing and naturalizing ‘reproduction’ as ‘nature’—i.e., specifically not labor—that it’s quite startling to most of us to encounter the idea of ‘gestational labor’ for the first time. It sounds blasphemous: Surely pregnancy is too intimate, too loving, too sacred of a thing to talk about in that way?” Scholar Sophie Lewis talked with Natasha Lennard about reproductive freedom and the politics of care. (August 30, 2022)
Anticipating Italy’s general election, graduate student Sophie Boulter outlined the new face of European fascism: female. (August 31, 2022)
“First there were mostly tags of evade (meaning ‘evade’ the subway fare), but within a week the walls were covered with stencils, posters, and ‘paste-ups.’” Professors Terri Gordon-Zolov and Eric Zolov spoke to Jordi Mariné Jubany about art and activism in Chile’s Estallido Social. (September 21, 2022)
Political scientist David Lay Williams reminded us that why Bernard Mandeville’s economic theory was reviled in his own time—and should not be taken for granted now. While some contemporaries decried Mandeville as the Antichrist, Karl Marx described him as “a honest man with a clear mind,” Williams explains: Mandeville “was the one capitalist who spoke honestly about the real implications of capitalism—that it must, by definition, impose poverty on the vast majority of workers.” (September 27, 2022)
“I believe we are witnessing something unprecedented in Iranian history: a feminist social movement.” Scholar Kian Tajbakhsh wrote about the women-led uprising in Iran. (September 28, 2022)
Journalist Susan Hartman chatted with Marisa Budlong about how the down-and-out city of Utica, NY, was revitalized by refugee resettlement. (October 4, 2022)
“If, after six decades of consistent writing and sporadic activism, I was no longer a war-objector, who was I?” Author and activist James Carroll offered a six-part reflection on peace activism in the wake of war in Ukraine. (October 10, 2022)
Our symposium of responses to Carroll’s series included replies from Robert Jay Lifton, Jeremy Varon, and Frida Berrigan. “What would it look like to strategically sacrifice and struggle for peace without bloodshed?” Berrigan asked. “The short answer is: we do not know. The history of nonviolent successes is underreported, understudied, and under-understood.” (October 27, 2022)
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Curators Carin Kuoni and Laura Raicovich chatted with Lindsey Scharold about using artistic and poetic registers to contend with the right to freedom of speech. (November 1, 2022)
“We’re pretty much locked into defining ourselves socially: status infects all of that, even if we don’t want it to. So instead of ignoring it, we should understand its mechanisms.” In an interview with Alla Anatsko, journalist W. David Marx discussed the “Grand Mystery of Culture”: how we develop and enforce the hierarchy we call “taste.” (November 9, 2022)
Confronted by the fragmentations of mass migration, it may be tempting to harden linguistic and cultural boundaries, noted New School MA graduate Ken Hu. “However, it is precisely when we force our language and culture to be rigid and definitive that the fragmentation and disorientation of identity occur.” (November 9, 2022)
“That was it. My dream of finally paying off my student loans and helping my daughter pay for college came to a halt.” Author Chivas Sandage charged the Biden administration with betraying a generation of indebted students. (November 15, 2022)