Patricio Cabello | Andrés LomeñaEvery day new challenges arise and grow in severity against the backdrop of a globalised world: war, inflation and supply chain crises are new flare-ups in a system that has failed at its core. If anything ties all these events together it is the complex relationship between the kind of energy needed to survive and the kind of energy that threatens to destroy the planet. For political economics professor Helen Thompson, the root of our precarious and...
Simone Buratti
The power of dissident solidarity in the rise of ultraliberal authoritarianism
Jean Wyllys | Judith ButlerOver the last decade we have witnessed a global resurgence of authoritarianism and the far right. The rise of Trumpism in the United States, Bolsonarism in Brazil, as well as Orbanism in Hungary and the consolidation of Putin’s power in Russia all show that the period of liberal politics following the fall of the Berlin Wall is drawing to a close. This period has brought with it two significant cultural transformations. On the one hand, there has been a growing and...
Medieval imaginary and Black Death: pandemic, medicine and religion
Mariano Gómez ArandaThe current pandemic will have a direct effect on how we view and think about politics for years to come. It seems difficult to predict exactly how, but if we look back at the medieval Black Death, one of the largest pandemic humanity has experienced to date, it may impart some points of comparison and help us to reflect on how exactly our collective trauma from this experience may unfold. Throughout history, humanity has experienced many pandemics like coronavirus. The...
Imagination and Action: Movements between Immanence and Transcendence
Romualdo DiasDreaming of the impossible to achieve what is possible. Embodying the connections between actions and dreams as different instances overlap with each other. Taking action and dreaming are both needed to forge our way through the world and take our place in history. In the dynamics of dreamspace, meaning is produced by our power to navigate different areas of reality, as well as our ability to stand up to the obstacles presented by reality. When we become involved in transformative...
Cultural mediation for social change in pandemic times
Sofía Coca“Navigating a communal geography differs from reading a text, purchasing a commodity, or from the self-consciousness of social media. You navigate a material place in the time of your body, rather than emitting dispatches into a dematerialized zone of no context. You are public, but not displayed, surveilled, and archived. You relate to others spontaneously, without any obligation to perform or expose yourself. Your self can stretch to its full social mobility, rather than indexing...
Commoning and Changemaking
David BollierIt is now abundantly clear that the world we have inherited is no longer working. This point hardly needs elaboration because the evidence pervades everyday life. We see it in the failures of the state’s credibly to address climate change, species extinctions, and countless other versions of ecological collapse. It is seen in the failure to reduce wealth and income inequality, and to meet basic human needs and assure baseline civil rights and liberties. Billionaires proliferate...
New poetics for the digital age
Antonio Penedo Picos1. From steady continuity to leaps and bounds: an introduction to the digital subject Nowadays, it is barely worth mentioning that digital language is causing an irrevocable shift towards a new society. However, assumptions that this change will consist of simply substituting oral/written communication for audio/visual are nothing more than a false, yet to be established dichotomy. If anything will herald the dawn of a new digital age, it will be the definitive, ingrained...
A new political imagination: creating realistic utopias
Andrés Lomeña | Patricio CabelloWe live in troubled times. We are witnessing how the climate crisis threatens life and jeopardizes the sustainability of the political and economic models in which we have operated for the last hundred years. There are great masses of refugees moving around the world to escape from war and famine, only to encounter fences, walls and ditches. Combined with the devastating impacts of the pandemic, the panorama resembles the end times, which summons and challenges...
Historical notes in a reflection on tolerance for a new political imaginary
Concha RoldánWe are used to talk of “tolerance,” or of “tolerant,” or “intolerant” attitudes, “intolerable” situations in socio-political and religious debates, in the media, and on social networks. But what do we want to say or mean when we talk about “tolerance”? What does it mean to be “tolerant”? What is the origin of this concept, and why has it become so relevant at this moment in history? If we survey all of those around us, we will receive a majority and perhaps even unanimous vote in...
Towards a new social contract for the 21st century
Towards a New Social Contract for the 21st Century_Maysoun DouasWe find ourselves going around in a loop. Our social model is giving out quickly as we exhaust the natural resources of our environment. What we used to call the endless cycle now has an expiration date. In configuring modern societies, democracy, industrialization, human rights, states, borders and so many other innovations that may manifest in an isolated manner, some converging at certain moments, but mostly they take their...