Myth or Meaning? Media & 2016 Elections

The 7th public lecture in our Fall 2016 Proseminar Speaker Series, "Who the People: Punctuating Politics in the USA, Being America in the World."

Speaker: Deena Guzder, Democracy Now

Deena Guzder is a news producer at the national, daily, independent, award-winning news program Democracy Now! hosted by Amy Goodman. She is the author of “Divine Rebels: American Christian Activists for Social Justice”. Guzder has reported on human rights issues across the world. Her work has appeared in Time, Washington Post, Mother Jones, Ms. Magazine, Al Jazeera, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Oberlin College, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and Columbia School of International and Public Affairs.

The Division of Social Studies presents the Fall 2016 Proseminar in Humanistic and Social Scientific Inquiry on 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?