About this Event
Please note that an RSVP doesn't guarantee you a seat. We can accommodate approximately 50 seated and 80 total attendees. If you require a seat, please plan to arrive early.
About the book:
We live in uncertain times. But what does uncertainty mean for our ability to act?
While politicians, CEOs, and pundits reflexively invoke “uncertain times” to explain everything from pandemic responses to climate inaction, journalist and theorist Natasha Lennard offers a radical intervention. Lennard demonstrates how our obsession with uncertainty masks the violent certainties that dominate our fracturing world.
On Un/Certainty applies philosophical insight to political practice, offering readers not just analysis but hope—and conceptual tools with which to act. The book tackles contemporary flashpoints through an original philosophical lens, demystifying our constant talk of crisis, polycrisis, and omnicrisis. Lennard examines the way entrenched conceptions of gendered experience are weaponized to harass the most vulnerable. Dissecting the discourse around borders, she reveals their enforcement to be a site of paranoid vigilance and violent property logics, which threaten millions of lives. Lennard addresses head-on the limits to traditional forms of political persuasion and demands that we think anew about how to build more liberatory forms of life.
Drawing on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and placing his work alongside thinkers rarely put into conversation, Lennard contends with the nature of certainty, identity, and ideology as we struggle into the future.
About the participants:
Natasha Lennard is a British-born, Brooklyn-based writer. She is a professor of critical journalism at the New School for Social Research in New York and a columnist for the Intercept. Her work has appeared in the Nation, Bookforum, Dissent, and the New York Times, among others. She is the author of Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life and coauthor (with Brad Evans) of Violence: Humans in Dark Times.
Alyssa Battistoni is a political theorist with research interests in environmental and climate politics, feminism, Marxist thought, political economy, and the history of political thought. She is the co-author, with Kate Aronoff, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos, of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso 2019), and her work has appeared in Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, and Nature Sustainability. Battistoni also writes frequently for publications including the Nation, Dissent, Jacobin, n+1, and Boston Review, and is on the editorial boards of Jacobin and Dissent. She received her PhD from Yale (2019) and previously held the position of Environmental Fellow at Harvard University.
Event venue & nearby stays
Community Bookstore, 143 7th Avenue, Brooklyn, United States
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