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 aim to 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?

The current lineup of programs includes:

Wendy Brown: Neoliberalism, Financialization and Democracy: Ten Theses
Keynote Lecture
October 20, 2016 6:30-8:00 PM

Right of Refusal
October 24, 2016 4:00-8:30 PM

Prefigurative Politics on the Eve of the U.S. Presidential Elections
November 7, 2016 4:00-8:30 PM

Post Human, Affect, Proliferation
February 13, 2017 4:30-8:30 PM

Indigeneity, Stack, Sovereignty
March 2, 2017 4:00-8:00 PM

Mobility in Post Democracy is a Vera List Center public seminar series, supported by the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility.