A collaboration with The New School & the European Democracy Institute
Issue: Issues
Issues gathers thematic collections of essays, reflections, interviews, and reports exploring contemporary challenges to democracy, human rights, political culture, and public life from diverse international perspectives.
Category: Issues
Issues gathers thematic collections of essays, reflections, interviews, and reports exploring contemporary challenges to democracy, human rights, political culture, and public life from diverse international perspectives.
This issue marks a new chapter in the Democracy Seminar’s history. Four decades after its founding as a forum for democratic correspondence across borders, the Seminar begins a new phase through its partnership with the European Democracy Institute at Bard College Berlin and the New School for Social Research. The relaunch comes at a moment when democratic institutions face renewed pressures around the world. Growing authoritarianism, democratic backsliding, …
We relaunched the Democracy Seminar back in 2018 as a “worldwide committee of democratic correspondence” in the hope that “democrats of the world can learn from each other as we oppose the dark forces of our times.”
Pastors Ben Atherton-Zeman and Andy Oliver protested the state of Florida’s attempts to erase a “Black History Matters” asphalt mural outside the Woodson African American Museum in St. Petersburg. Florida governor Ron DeSantis had ordered a crew to remove the mural as “non-standard road art.”
I live in Washington, DC and I am the Policy Director for a homeless services agency called Miriam’s Kitchen. Since Trump won the election, we have been involved in organization efforts to both plan for and then defend potential threats that the Trump Administration poses across numerous issue areas. The week after the election last November, I attended the first convening of Defend DC, a loose coalition of organizations that …
If the upending of democratic society by the Trump administration were a literal nightmare, then it would be plausible to expect to wake up to a reasonably sane reality. The dream could be shaken off. Or if the venomous ideology of this administration could be understood as performative, dystopian theater of the absurd, then it would be possible to laugh, however nervously, at the ridiculousness of its palpable lies and its self-serving manipulations of public policy, the legislature, the courts, the armed services, and foreign relations.
“Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles.” —Woodrow Wilson February 2025: It was my third year serving on one of Berlin’s integration advisory boards, an appointment I had eagerly sought as a way to help residents in my district who had fled their homelands for a safe haven in Germany. But my enthusiasm at being appointed to my first German advisory …
Lynn Feinerman is the producer of Women Rising Radio, which she describes this way: Women Rising Radio project had its first broadcast in 2003, profiling visionary women in leadership across the globe for all the critical issues of today, including human rights, democracy and civil society, ecology and sustainability, and all the freedoms. Based in California, we’ve been syndicated on over 200 radio stations in the USA, and in …
Photo: artwork by Sarah Jane Lapp I reproduce my paintings as jigsaw puzzles to invite dialogue and delight, joy and justice, maybe some jokes, too. My producing partner, Rani MacNeal, and I produce several public art-oriented resistance initiatives under the rubric of Puzlkind Jigsaw Puzzles. Our most popular event, “Puzzical Chairs & Pie with Live Music,” asks strangers to puzzle together despite partisan politics. In a public space we …
Dan Shore is an opera composer and the author of Freedom Ride, an opera set in New Orleans in 1961. The opera tells a story of the Freedom Riders, young civil rights activists who risked their lives to desegregate interstate travel. The opera premiered in February 2020 with Chicago Opera Theater, directed by Tazewell Thompson, conducted by Lidiya Yankovskaya, and starring soprano Dara Rahming. The opera was inspired by …
How many small actions (like Emily Feiner’s civil disobedience at a Mike Lawler townhall) are “making a dent” in the MAGA onslaught. Two weeks ago, Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) held a congressional town hall meeting in Somers, a small suburban town in northern Westchester County. Even though his team imposed a set of ridiculous requirements on attendees—that they had to prove they were residents of the district, that they couldn’t …
