"The Politics of Futurity"

IAS Thursdays presents Deva R. Woodly (Associate Professor of Politics, The New School) and Sun Yung Shin (acclaimed poet, writer, & cultural worker). Co-sponsored by the Department of English; free and open to the public.

 

Barack Obama famously said that the purpose of social movements is to get a seat at the table. However, as Deva R. Woodly argues in her new book, Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements—a sweeping account of the meaning and purpose of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL)—the value of such movements is something much more profound: they are necessary for the health and survival of democracy.

 

Woodly will begin by sharing how a unique political philosophy—Radical Black Feminist Pragmatism—served as an intellectual foundation of the movement and the role it played in transforming public meanings, public opinion, and policy. The conversation will then turn to speculating on what a 21st-century paradigm that centers the politics of care might include. We will discuss how political horizons are constructed in popular discourse and political action; the structural relations of race, coloniality, and indigeneity and what it would take to change those relations; abolition democracy; the politics of gender; disability justice; and the political economy of degrowth. Together, we will ask: what ideas shape the politics of the future, and what consequences and possibilities are implied by their pursuit?