Faculty Writing: Climate Change Legislation, “This is Not a Gun”, and Revolutionary Bodies

For Dissent, Alyssa Battistoni discusses the imperative of ambitious climate change legislation for the Biden presidency. On the inability of executive action to fulfill prescient climate needs, she writes: “But for climate policy to last longer than one presidency, we need policies that help build a popular base for climate action, connected to material improvements in people’s lives. This is where the use of executive action to achieve climate goals—the kind of programs that only climate hawks notice—comes up short.”

In Tohu, Rotem Rozental reviews Cara Levine’s public art project, “This is Not a Gun”, and its new manifestation—an eponymous book comprising 40 artists, writers, and activists reacting in texts and images to the items misidentified as weapons. Reflecting on Levine’s contributors, Rozental writes, “When Levine invites artists and writers to share texts and images in response to the incidents, she expands the individual story of the injured and the murdered, connecting them to a collective experience. Thus it becomes possible to reshape the relations of vision – directing our gaze toward those who were denied participation in the civic space.”

Lastly, Kristin Soraya Batmanghelichi’s new book, Revolutionary Bodies: Technologies of Gender, Sex, and Self in Contemporary Iran, is out now on Bloomsbury Press.