New TPPI Webinar Series: China Keywords

Announcing a new Telos-Paul Piccone Institute webinar series, “China Keywords,” beginning Thursday, March 21, at 10 a.m. Eastern Time.

Register for the event here.

Tipping our hat to Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, by Raymond Williams, the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute announces its newest webinar series: “China Keywords.” Each webinar will introduce and explore a single concept essential for understanding contemporary Chinese social and political theory. The series will illuminate these concepts with an eye toward non-specialists in the West, while also addressing deep contestations of interest to experts in the field. “China Keywords” is part of TPPI's larger Telos China Initiative.

Continue reading →

Sexual Violence, Feminism, and the Hamas Massacre

The third webinar in the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s yearlong series reckoning with the response to October 7 will take place on Thursday, March 7, 2024, at noon Eastern Time.

Click here to register for the event.

All subsequent panels are likewise scheduled for noon Eastern Time on the seventh day of each month. Panels will run between 90 to 120 minutes, followed by a colloquy among the panelists and audience Q&A.

Our third webinar considers feminist perspectives on sex and violence in the Israel–Hamas conflict. Our panelists are Mariam Memarsadeghi and Batya Ungar-Sargon. Our respondent is Nina Power.

Continue reading →

Democracy in India: Mark Kelly Speaks with Salvatore Babones

On today’s episode of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute podcast, TPPI’s Mark G. E. Kelly, organizer of the 2024 Telos conference on “Democracy Today?,” speaks with Salvator Babones of the University of Sydney about democracy in India, asking him in particular about his sympathetic reading of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The podcast is available in both video and audio-only formats.

Continue reading →

Frantz Fanon and October 7: A Conversation with Abe Silberstein

In today’s episode of the TPPI Podcast, Gabriel Noah Brahm talks with scholar and writer Abe Silberstein. Their podcast follows a webinar about the role of critical theory in the response within higher education to the atrocities of October 7. During the webinar, which also featured Cary Nelson and Manuela Consonni, Silberstein had presented a working paper about Frantz Fanon. The podcast conversation with Silberstein and Brahm is available as a video or in audio-only form. A podcast conversation with Cary Nelson is also available here.

Continue reading →

Historians on Ideology and Politics in the 1948 War: October 7 and the Aftershocks of World War II

The video of the second webinar in the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative is now available and can be viewed here. Titled “Historians on Ideology and Politics in the 1948 War: October 7 and the Aftershocks of World War II,” the webinar featured historians Jeffrey Herf, Matthias Küntzel, and Benny Morris. Their conversation was moderated by Israel initiative director Gabriel Noah Brahm.

Continue reading →

How the Subjective Experience of War Affects Its Political Meaning

As much as war has become automated and mechanized, the subjective experience of the horror of war remains central to its meaning today. Russia, through its intentional bombing of civilians, and Hamas, with its massacres, have both sought to manipulate personal experience by terrorizing their enemies to achieve their war aims. Such tactics have also become the basis of their rule, in which they use fear to intimidate domestic political opponents to maintain their power. While they seek to create fear, the response of Ukrainians and Israelis alike has been to respond to subjective horror with the courage to maintain resistance while also affirming their values. War continues to be grounded in the way in which the participants’ most personal experiences can create a unified political will.

Continue reading →