Freedom and Climate Violence

The 5th public talk in the Fall 2016 Proseminar Lecture Series on the theme of "Who the People: Punctuating Politics in the USA, Being America in the World"

Speaker: Prof. Elisabeth Anker, George Washington University 

Elisabeth Anker is associate professor of Amerian Studies and Political Science at George Washington University. She is the author of Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom, which was a finalist for the 2015 Lora Romero Book Prize for the Best First Book in American Studies. Her next book is titled Ugly Freedoms.

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The Division of Social Studies presents the Fall 2016 Proseminar in Humanistic and Social Scientific Inquiry, with the theme of "Who the People: Punctuating Politics in the USA, Being “America" in the World." This Fall, we engage with questions of the vitality, legitimacy, promise, im/possibility of democratic life that haunt one of the largest democracies in the world, which is also, indeed, one of the largest global imperial powers. How do the frames of polis, nation-state, colony, and postcolony intersect in the United States of America, and how are we to understand the people that fill out or outline these enclosures? What are the self-conceptions and proclamations, indeed also sighs and laments, of “the people” enclosed within these frames, and how do they impact the claims the people are able to make with regard to the meaning of politics, the political process, participation, and possibility--and indeed the very possibility of life within and without the polity. What must a transdisciplinary and decolonial inquiry into these matters of life and death look like, where does and must it happen, who does and must undertake it--and what affects and actions must it seek to enable and disable in us?