Afternoon Program 4:30-5:30pm
Reception 5:30-6:30
Panel Discussion 6:30-8:30pm

Part of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics' Mobility in Post Democracy series, this event focuses on "Proliferation" as a feature of contemporary social and political interaction that the digital sphere facilitates. Early sociologists like Gabriel Tarde and Emile Durkheim were interested in crowds and their all-absorbing mentality that could overpower rational thought and action in individuals. Proliferation, or the overwhelming abundance of some phenomenon, is thus construed as a uniquely modern experience. The speakers on this panel consider the affective response social media elicits and the profusion of information we encounter in contemporary society. Together they discuss how contemporary media has the ability to obscure meaning and how we arrive at the selection of what is made to mean. 

The afternoon program is in the hands of a hypnotist who will determine what we do as a public. 

Participants: 

Dominic Pettman , Professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College and Chair of the Liberal Studies Program at the New School for Social Research

Hugh Raffles, Professor of Anthropology and Director, Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought

Deva Woodly, Assistant Professor of Politics The New School for Social Research

Mobility in Post Democracy

Post Democracy has recently arisen as a complex and contradictory term: for some it promises a new participatory platform for the mobilizing forces of social media, considered catalysts for political imagination. Others equate Post Democracy with democracy's demise due to the penetration of global capitalism into every regime type coupled with the increasing intervention of international actors in domestic politics. Decried as "democratic melancholy," such skepticism is considered ill placed by yet others for whom "democracy" was never a political system to aspire to. 

Under the heading Mobility in Post Democracy, the Vera List Center is presenting a series of interdisciplinary panels, seminars, and lectures that examine Post Democracy as a condition informed by mobility – across institutions, states, and ideologies. The series brings together an international group of scholars, activists, students, and artists to probe the concept of Democracy more generally at the time of the contested U.S. presidential elections, and the concurrent emergence and demise of democratic regimes throughout the world. 

Artist-driven, the events ask questions such as: How can new social movements counter networks of power? What creative organizing tactics are being developed to reinvigorate a democratic ethos? What forms of political institutions and alliances are flexible and resilient?

Post Human, Affect, Proliferation, as part of Mobility in Post Democracy, is a Vera List Center public seminar series and supported by the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility.

External Link »