RSS FeedUpcoming EventsAmerican Thanatocracy vs Abolition Democracy: On Cops, Capitalism, and the War on Black Life, March 20https://events.berkeley.edu/gradiv/event/239372-american-thanatocracy-vs-abolition-democracy-on

This lecture is part of the Jefferson Memorial Lecture series

About this lecture

This talk will examine how police in the neoliberal era–in tandem with other state and corporate entities—have become engines of capital accumulation, government revenue, gentrification, the municipal bond market, the tech and private security industry—in a phrase, the profits of death. The police don’t just take lives; they make life and living less viable for the communities they occupy. The growth of police power has also fundamentally weakened democracy and strengthened “thanatocracy”—rule by death– especially with respect to Black communities. And yet, these same communities have produced a new abolition democracy, organizing to advance a different future, without oppression and exploitation, war, poverty, prisons, police, borders, the constraints of imposed gender, sexual, and ableist norms, and an economic system that destroys the planet while generating obscene inequality.  

About Robin D.G. Kelley

Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and Freedom Scholar Award. His books include the award-winning, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original; Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression; Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination; Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class; Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Beacon Press 1997); Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times.

Kelley is currently completing two books, Making a Killing: Cops, Capitalism, and the War on Black Life and The Education of Ms. Grace Halsell: An Intimate History of the American Century (both forthcoming Metropolitan Books).

His essays have appeared in dozens of publications, including The Nation, New York Times,American Historical Review, American Quarterly, African Studies Review, Social Text, Metropolis, Journal of American History, New Labor Forum, and The Boston Review, for which he also serves as Contributing Editor.

https://events.berkeley.edu/gradiv/event/239372-american-thanatocracy-vs-abolition-democracy-on
The Authority of Craft - Tanner Lectures on Human Values with Rachel Barney, April 24https://events.berkeley.edu/gradiv/event/243301-the-authority-of-craft-tanner-lectures-on-human

About the Lectures


The aim of these lectures is to recover Plato’s idea of craft or art, Greek technê, in the expansive sense which includes not only the handicrafts but skilled practices from housebuilding to navigation. Plato and other Greek thinkers are fascinated by the craft model: the idea that both the moral virtue of the good person and the political widom of the expert ruler are — or could be made into — skilled practices as reliable as shoemaking or carpentry. Similar ideas appear in classical Chinese philosophy, developed in very different ways by Daoist and Confucian thinkers. In our time, craft is in a bad way: marginalized in theory and everywhere endangered in practice. Ancient thinkers can help us to see what remains valuable and urgent about craft today, and what a reinvigorated understanding of it might contribute to our ethical and political thought. Crafts to be considered include carpentry, medicine, drawing, film editing, the ‘multicraft’ of the restaurant, tennis, and traditional Polynesian navigation. Philosophical points of reference, in addition to Plato, Aristotle, Zhuangzi, and Xunzi, include Murdoch, MacIntyre, Korsgaard, and the Hart-Fuller debate, as well as literary reflections from Kazuo Ishiguro and Cormac McCarthy.

Lecture 1 - The End of Craft

What is a craft? For Plato, paradigmatic craft-practitioners include the doctor, carpenter and navigator; an updated, more generous conception should include the dancer, coder, waitress, painter, chef, professional athlete, and firefighter. Each of these skilled practices is oriented to the achievement of a distinctive end, the goodness of which is independent of the self-interest or inclinations of the practitioner. This Platonic conception of craft as involving disinterested teleological rationality can explain how craft sets objective norms for correct action, and for the excellence of the practitioner. And it shows that to master a craft is not merely to acquire knowledge or skills but to take on the ‘internal standpoint’ definitive of the craft, internalizing its values and treating its reasons for action as authoritative.

Lecture 2 - Craft, Métier, Utopia

Especially when practised as a line of work — as a job or métier — craft sets norms for its practitioners. On the whole, a shoemaker should try to be a good shoemaker, and the good person who is a shoemaker routinely does just that. But what kind of ‘should’ is this, and what could connect these two kinds of goodness? Prominent philosophical conceptions of craft, ancient and modern, offer wildly various explanations of its normative authority. The picture is complicated by the way in which craft-as-work is paradigmatic both for successful practical reason and for social roles or practical identities in general. But the most fundamental source of craft’s normativity is the one which Plato and Aristotle bring out: the fact that, when practised as a job or métier, practicing your craft can be a way to realize the human good. And so thinking about craft turns out to be a way of thinking about Utopia: a society in which a just distribution of work could secure both the flourishing of the worker and the common good.

Lecture 3 - Seminar and Discussion

About Rachel Barney


Rachel Barney is Professor of both Classics and Philosophy. She was an undergraduate at University of Toronto, and returned after earning a PhD at Princeton and teaching at the University of Ottawa, Harvard, and the University of Chicago. Her research has ranged from the early sophists to the late Neoplatonic commentator Simplicius, but focuses on Plato. Her particular interest is in areas in which questions of ethics, psychology, epistemology, and philosophical method meet, as in Plato’s theory of the good.

https://events.berkeley.edu/gradiv/event/243301-the-authority-of-craft-tanner-lectures-on-human