News & Events

Democracy at the Edge: A Global Consideration of the U.S. Election—a Kahn Institute Panel Discussion

Thursday, December 3, 5 p.m., online

The reverberations of U.S. presidential elections are felt around the world, perhaps never more than with this year’s recent election. Understanding the outcomes from multiple disciplinary perspectives, and with a view to transhistorical and transnational analyses allows us to "read" the results more powerfully and navigate our own paths more effectively. This panel assembles the co-organizers of both 2021-22 yearlong Kahn Institute projects: Coping with Democratic Precarity and the Prospects for Democratic Renewal, and Democracies Redux: Resumptions, Resilience, Reconciliation, and Restoration, to reflect on the results and consider the implications internationally and with a broad range of analytical lenses. Register to attend. 

Panelists are:

• Payal Banerjee, Associate Professor of Sociology
• Steven Heydemann, Janet W. Ketcham 1953 Professor of Middle East Studies
• Sujane Wu, Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures
• Andy Zimbalist, Robert A. Woods Professor of Economics

Kahn Poetry Reading

Pacific Eco-Poetry

Thursday, November 12, 5 p.m., online

Craig Santos Perez
University of Hawai'i, Manoa; Author, Habitat Threshold

View a video of this reading.

Craig Santos Perez, an indigenous Pacific Islander from Guåhan (Guam), is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Habitat Threshold. Perez will share his poetry, focused on climate change, environmental justice, human-animal relations, and the anthropocene.

This reading took place in conjunction with the Kahn 2020-21 yearlong project Imagining Climate Change: From Slow Violence to Fast Hope. 

Kahn Institute Lecture

Radical Hope in a Moment of Danger

Friday, October 16, Noon

Julie Sze
Professor of American Studies, University of California, Davis; Author, Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger
View a video of this lecture.

Drawing on an emerging archive of climate justice cultural production, I ask, what does non-naïve radical hope look like now in the face of interconnected environmental, political and social disasters? Culture and media, in abolitionist climate justice narratives, offer a partial answer. I argue that these narratives, grounded squarely within social movements, enact an imaginative reclamation and recognition in a brutalizing economic and political system that seeks to deny the rights of survival for vulnerable peoples and communities, animals and the ecosystems.

In conjunction with the Kahn Institute 2020-21 yearlong project Imagining Climate Change: From Slow Violence to Fast Hope.