“Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do.” — Graeber & Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, p.133 #Anthropology #HumanNature #Freedom #History #PoliticalTheory #Politics

“I used to think [at least they don’t suffer]. But then, I was suffering. And I’d rather be me than them. It’s like, there’s dignity in suffering. If you can’t suffer, you’re just a different type of monster.” — Logic, Ultra 85, 174 #Philosophy #HumanExperience #Suffering #Dignity #Ultra85

“…these robots don’t obey us, they reflect us. We build them, they build us right back.” — Logic, Ultra 85, p.143 #AI #Technology #PhilosophyOfTech #ContemporaryThought #SocietyAndTech #Culture #Reflections #CriticalThinking

“You walk, to go sit. You get up from sitting to walk to sit somewhere else. Walking is just something we do between seats…” — Logic, Ultra 85, p.78 #EverydayLife #PhilosophyOfLife #Movement #ModernLife #Reflection #ContemporaryThought #Culture #Quotes

“So novelty is imperious: it demands the remaking of the world according to its own standards.” — Claeys, Utopianism for a Dying Planet, 366 #Change #Innovation #FutureOfSociety #CultureAndSociety #ClimateConversation #TechAndSociety #HumanValues #SocialImagination #HistoryOfIdeas #CriticalThinking

“Late nineteenth-century literary utopianism was torn between appeals to simplicity and the ‘natural life’ and an increasingly dazzling vision of a new world of scientific and technological innovation.” — Claeys, Utopianism for a Dying Planet, 317 #UtopianStudies #CriticalTheory

“Being a modern meant pretending to be someone else, to make a stage of all the world.” — Claeys, Utopianism for a Dying Planet, p.270 #Modernity #UtopianStudies #CulturalTheory #PoliticalTheory #CriticalTheory #IntellectualHistory

“…our greatest challenge in the climate crisis today is our spirituality… our unwillingness to accept that we are moral and vulnerable creatures.” — Roslyn Fraser, “Utopia on Earth,” p.234 #Utopianism #ClimateCrisis #EnvironmentalHumanities #EcoTheory #PoliticalTheory #SustainableFutures

“The most important modern secular [intentional] communities have emerged from socialism, the chief utopian response to industrialisation and capitalism.” — Claeys, Utopianism for a Dying Planet, p.158 #UtopianStudies #IntentionalCommunities #PoliticalTheory #Socialism #History

“Rousseau presents an implicit utopian fantasy of what would be the case if a mythical lawmaker had created the perfect society…all follow the general will without any need for coercion.” — Andres Beck Holm, Utopianism in the Social Contract #UtopianStudies #PoliticalTheory #Philosophy #Utopia

“It’s impossible to know what the future will bring…What matters is that here and now, inequality is real, grotesque, and a cancer on society...” — Tom Malleson, conversation with Bryant Sculos, New Political Science 43.3 (2024) #Inequality #PoliticalTheory #NewPoliticalScience #SpeculativePolitics

“The relation of festivals to utopia thus rests not on celebration of excess…but on their pointed and often irreverent, anarchic egalitarianism.” — Claeys, Utopianism for a Dying Planet, p.135 #UtopianStudies #PoliticalTheory #Festivals #Literature #utopianism #CriticalTheory

Honored to give the Lindon Barrett Award in Black Studies talk. 📅 Dec 4, 3:00 PM 📍 HMNSS 1500, UCR I’ll share work from “Here and Now,” on how everyday Black life makes utopia a lived practice of imagining + living otherwise —hope to see you there #BlackUtopias #Otherwise #BlackLiterature #fiction

“…truth [is] a collage of competing perspectives.” — Robertson, The Black Utopians, p. 257 #BlackStudies #BlackUtopians #HistoryTwitter #Epistemology #CriticalTheory

New paper with Marina Bedny out in eLife (elifesciences.org/articles/101...). Main takeaway: Different kinds of causal knowledge are supported by different semantic brain networks - consistent with the "intuitive theories" framework from developmental psychology. 1/

IN NEW ISSUE: Analysing protest participation - @danmercea.bsky.social, @feligsantos.bsky.social & Matthias Hoffmann argue it's a gradient, beyond the binary of participation and non-participation & suggest practical mobilisation pathways: buff.ly/XfEkdYm (OPEN ACCESS) @polstudiesassoc.bsky.social

How can something as small as a pronoun fuel identity politics? Hear UCR professor Jennifer Merolla introduces a recently published study on how Trump framed the in-group in the 2016 presidential election. youtube.com/shorts/-EUf3... #polisky

In #FirstView by Donald H. Zárate, Jr: "From Exclusion to Utopia: A Comparative Study of Intentional Community Formation" journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Utopian thinking isn’t naive—it’s what drives people to build new institutions when old ones fail them. My latest article explores how exclusion becomes imagination. doi.org/10.1177/1065... #RadicalHope #Utopia #SocialChange #Community #Imagination #Hope #Politics #IntentionalCommunities #Society

That’s me ☺️