Faculty Writing: the Supreme Court, Anthropocene Politics, and Poetry in Parentheses
In the wake of Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Ajay Singh Chaudhary published a piece in Public Seminar critiquing the anti-democratic character of the Supreme Court, one of four constitutional “veto players” that make the U.S. “institutionally the least democratic among nominally democratic countries in the OECD world.” In N+1, responding to a Trump administration memo predicting a 4°C rise in average temperatures and the latest IPCC report, Chaudhary carries the theme further—to create “a sustainable Anthropocene,” we need to democratize: “The democratization of state and society…is the political and material medium through which the power for an actual Anthropocene politics can flow.” In Jacobin, critiquing the gradualist environmental economics of Nobel Prize-winner William Nordhaus, Alyssa Battistoni offers a similar diagnosis: the Anthropocenic future is now, “urgency…has to spur our political aspirations and expectations.” Finally, in Practice Catalogue, Rebecca Ariel Porte writes of writing poetry in parentheses, in bits of time “when capitalism-patriarchy-power mean for me to be doing something else.”