Ideas

Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science, Yasmine Bouagga, Isabelle Coutant, Jean-Sébastien Eideliman, Fabrice Fernandez, Nicolas Fischer, Carolina Kobelinsky, Chowra Makaremi, Sarah Mazouz, and Sébastien Roux...

In his 1951 poem “Harlem,” Langston Hughes, writer and social activist, famously questioned the outcome of a “dream deferred.” Does such a dream dry up, fester, stink, crust and sugar over, or sag like a heavy load, he pondered. Then, foreshadowing the hundreds of race riots that would take place in the 1960s and 1970s, he ends his poem with an emphatic query: Or does it explode?

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What is real about this ethnography—what hasn’t been altered or rendered anonymous—are the events that I describe and the voices of my collaborators. Their voices bring to life the activities that take place on Chicago’s street corners. Their voices bring dimension to people’s identities and life struggles. Their voices paint a portrait of the variegated desires that stem from imagining life anew.

Michael Walzer, Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Science, has authored The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions (Yale University Press), which asks the question "Why have secular democratic movements...

Éditions du Seuil has published L'Ombre du monde. Une anthropologie de la condition carcérale (2015) by Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science. Fassin conducted a four-year-long ethnographic study of prison life...

Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science, has authored Ripoliticizzare il mondo: Studi antropologici sulla vita, il corpo e la morale (Ombre Corte, 2014), which is a series of essays on the anthropology of life...

Developing countries, led by Asia, have grown ­significantly more rapidly than mature economies over the last two decades, closing the gap between them. This experience is quite anomalous, since ­historically economic convergence has been the...

Oxford University Press has published Towards a Better Global Economy: Policy Implications for Citizens Worldwide in the 21st Century (2014) by Dani Rodrik, Albert O. Hirschman Professor in the School of Social Science, Franklin Allen, Jere R...

What do the humanities have to do with the environment? As they are commonly understood, environmental problems are issues that manifest themselves primarily in the environment itself. Natural scientists research these problems and suggest solutions...

What is consciousness? “It is being awake,” “being responsive,” “acting,” “being aware,” “being self-aware,” “paying attention,” “perceiving,” “feeling emotions,” “feeling feelings,” “having thoughts,” “thinking about thoughts,” “it is like this!”

Wh...

Images that convey the essence of war are more likely to resemble the frenzied, merciless, mutual slaughter between the Aegeans and the Trojans as told in The Iliad, the rapes depicted in Goya’s The Disasters of War, the torture portrayed in The...