“Biopolitics” has become a popular concept for interpreting the COVID-19 pandemic, yet the term is often used vaguely, as a buzzword, and therefore loses its specificity and relevance. This article systematically explains what the biopolitical lens offers for analyzing and normatively criticizing the politics of the coronavirus. I argue that…[Read more]

“Biopolitics” has become a popular concept for interpreting the COVID-19 pandemic, yet the term is often used vaguely, as a buzzword, and therefore loses its specificity and relevance. This article systematically explains what the biopolitical lens offers for analyzing and normatively criticizing the politics of the coronavirus. I argue that…[Read more]

This mini-essay was published as part of a “dossier” of authors discussing various forms of “queer inhumanisms.” In my piece, I address the relations between queer studies and post/humanist studies through the lens of Michel Foucault’s 1981 interview, “Friendship as a Way of Life.” These relations are tied together in critique but also in various…[Read more]

In the Arabic-speaking mahjar (diaspora), the plight of the working poor was the focus of women’s philanthropy. Scholarship on welfare relief in the interwar Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian diaspora currently situates it within a gendered politics of benevolence. This article reconsiders that frame and argues for a class-centered reassessment o…[Read more]

First translated into Persian in 1949, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is among the most popular works of American fiction in Iran. Although the anti-US policy of the post-1979 political system has tried to erase the manifestations of the previous period’s American influence, Iranian interest in Huckleberry Finn has been inc…[Read more]

نوگرایی شعری در کشورهای مختلف با پذیرش والت ویتمن، پدر شعر آزاد امریکا همراه بوده‌است. روندی مشابه در شعر فارسی نیز مشاهده می‌شود. آشنایی فارسی‌زبانان با ویتمن به زمانی برمی‌گردد که شعر فارسی در آستانة تحول بود. نخست یوسف اعتصام‌الملک در سال ۱۳۰۱ بخش کوتاهی از شعر ویتمن را ترجمه و در مجلة بهار منتشر کرد. بعدها پروین اعتصامی در شعر «جولای خ…[Read more]

An article (20 p., PDF) about the claims and reality of traditional spiritual and rational philosophy, how they have set back, damaged, and obstructed improvements of the human condition, and how we can overcome these impediments to a thriving existence and find a new beginning.

The dual curriculum model ubiquitous to Orthodox Jewish day schools in North America typically bifurcates into religious (Judaic) studies and general studies. While most classes generally fit into one of those two halves of the curriculum, some classes are not intuitively categorized as wholly belonging to one part over the other. One of those…[Read more]

This article reflects on the pedagogical legacy of bell hooks.

‘Independence’ for bantustans was universally rejected by the international community in
the late 1970s and early 1980s. How the status of Lesotho and Swaziland as
internationally recognised states deeply embedded in South Africa’s economic and
political orbit differed from that of the bantustans was clear in some cases, murky in
others. The a…[Read more]

The Irish Sea which separates Great Britain and Ireland has often been written about in terms of divisions, threats, and hazards. Facing each other across that sea, the coast of Wales and Ireland’s eastern seaboard have a more complex story to tell, one characterised by intimate if troubled lines of connection. A place of passage for centuries, t…[Read more]

Two sections of a book comparing creation myths from ancient Greece and Rome with their Japanese counterparts from the early 8th Century Kojiki (古事記, “Records of Ancient Matters”). These fusion essays are summations of previous book sections by Greek and Japanese authors on the elements of fire and air, respectively, and, drawing from Plato and J…[Read more]

This article probes the history of education and current pedagogical practices among Malayali physician-teachers, vaidya-gurus, of Ayurveda in central Kerala. Considering the sources vaidya-gurus cite as the bases of their teaching styles, especially a three-part method known as mukhāmukhaṃ (‘face-to-face’ instruction), I discuss the place, produc…[Read more]

Für ein Gespräch über die Themen Political Correctness, Identitätspolitik, Streitkultur und die Rolle der politischen Bildung kamen im Juli 2021 Saba-Nur Cheema von der Bildungsstätte Anne Frank und Dr. Karsten Schubert von der Universität Freiburg in einem Zoom-Raum zusammen. Die Fragen stellten Prof. Dr. Beate Rosenzweig und Petra Barz, beide…[Read more]

How could the ideal of a universal brotherhood of mankind be realized in an age of nationalism, colonialism and culture wars? “With God, for fatherland and humanity?” is the first comprehensive study of masonic internationalism. It explores, with a focus on England, France, Germany, and Italy, how European masonic associations promoted or opposed…[Read more]

The “Spanish influenza” pandemic that struck Egypt in fall 1918 resulted in the death of eleven out of every one thousand people. Despite the mass suffering caused by the pandemic, it has been largely ignored by historians. I describe how the Egyptian public health service was unprepared for a major health crisis because resources were red…[Read more]

Identity politics is subject to similar critiques in contemporary public debate and political theory. A central topos of this critique is that identity politics is essentializing: it fixes subjects to their social position and resorts to a politics of
particularity that leads to divisions in national citizenship and democratic discourse (the…[Read more]

In this chapter, I am chiefly interested in articulating a theoretical claim that cooperatively run schools can educate the commons causally and reproductively. Cooperatively run schools educate the commons because going to school at a cooperative can cause commons to come about by reproducing the kinds of knowledge and skills necessary to…[Read more]

In this article, I hitch the ever-present awareness of disease in my personal life and our shared world today to a pointed and academic reflection on the ways we consume and re-present information about disease from premodern South Asia that’s contained in texts.