Social Movement Politics

The 10th public lecture in our Fall 2016 Proseminar Speaker Series, "Who the People: Punctuating Politics in the USA, Being America in the World."

Speaker: Brooke Lehman, The Watershed Center

Brooke Lehman is a life-long activist with 15 years of radical program design and teaching experience. Brooke has been teaching and designing programs for the Institute for Social Ecology since 2000. The programs she designs are 9-14 day intensives focused on radical politics, strategic visioning, direct democracy, climate justice, alternatives to capitalism, organizational development, and radical pedagogy. She is on the board of The Yansa Foundation, an energy justice organization that has been working in Oaxaca, Mexico to create the first indigenous-owned utility scale wind farm. Brooke is an organizational transformation consultant and offers workshops on meditation, yoga, leadership, facilitation, communication, democratic decision making, and organizational development.

***

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?