Beginning Monday May 24th, and running serially for a week, a new dossier entitled 'Thinking Through Violence' will be appearing on the Social Text website. Check back for essays by Arvind Rajagopal, Banu Bargu, Allen Feldman, Drucilla Cornell, and Mary Louise Pratt.
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Full disclosure: I wrote this on my office computer and I sent it to Social Text Online via my university email. To give fair warning, I use "recall," "protest," and other words that the Republican Party of Wisconsin latched onto in requesting that my colleague, historian Bill Cronon, turn over his emails in an effort to curtail academic freedom. It's been more than two months since Governor Scott Walker introduced a controversial budget bill to strip public employees in the state of Wisconsin of collective bargaining rights. The mass protests have subsided for now, but the dust hasn't settled yet.  Signs voicing support for unions and urging Walker's recall are still visible in many places. Meanwhile, Sarah Palin is... >>

The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America
by Anna McCarthy
Formed in the shadow of the early Cold War, amid the first stirrings of the civil rights movement, the idea of television as a form of unofficial government inspired corporate executives, foundation officers, and other members of the governing classes to imagine TV sponsorship as a powerful new form of influence on American democracy in the postwar years. The Citizen Machine tells the story of their efforts to shape U.S. political culture, uncovering a dense web of fantasies and rationalizations about race, class, and economic power that have profoundly shaped not only television, but our understanding of American citizenship itself. >>

As we exit a more contentious than usual month of Gay Pride, Social Text brings you this dossier of critical appreciations of long-standing collective member José Esteban Muñoz's new book, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Read responses from Lauren Berlant, Barbara Browning, Gayatri Gopinath, and Ricardo Ortiz. Muñoz responds to his responses, and performance art legend Vaginal Davis contributes an original illustration inspired by Cruising Utopia. >>

Greece is in revolt. Not surprisingly, though, the protests there are being totally misrepresented in the mainstream media. Much attention in the U.S. press has focused on the spectacle of the riots and on the three tragic deaths in a bank in Athens. Cogent analysis of the underlying crisis has been hard to find. This relatively neutral sounding article in The Guardian is typical. The article describes the sovereign debt crisis in Greece as a product of the fact that the Greek government relies on foreign loans in order to balance its debt.  In a thinly veiled racist reference that's typical of these sorts of crises (remember the rhetoric about lack of fiscal discipline during the Asian crash in... >>