Events
Talking Politics is a virtual series where humanists, qualitative social scientists, language and media specialists, and cultural analysts examine how language and other media shape the nexus of race, history, and political institutions.
Talking Politics 2024–25 primarily focuses on the 2024 US Presidential Election, but our programming also showcases comparative perspectives that track the global movement of discourses, media, and messages.
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Upcoming events
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Talking Politics with Nathan Schneider: Governable Spaces and Democratic Design for Online Life
Wednesday, December 11, 2024 | 7 pm EST
When was the last time you participated in an election for a Facebook group or sat on a jury for a dispute in a subreddit? Platforms nudge users to tolerate nearly all-powerful admins, moderators, and “benevolent dictators for life.” In this webinar, Nathan Schneider argues that the internet has been plagued by implicit feudalism: a cultural and technical bias for building communities as fiefdoms. But online spaces could be sites of a creative, radical, and democratic renaissance. Schneider shows how the internet can learn from past governance to become a medium that is more democratic, responsive, and inventive than anything that has come before.
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Talking Politics with Greg Thompson: Imagined Disunities, Political Ontologies, and Political Polarization in the US
Monday, January 13, 2025 | 6 pm EST
This presentation brings a concern with “ontology”—culturally specific ways of understanding the nature of reality—to understand the problem of political polarization in the US. Greg Thompson analyzes the different worlds that political actors inhabit and explores how these worlds, made out of the stuff of everyday life, become the basis for misunderstanding, disconnection, distrust, and dysrecognition in political arenas: when individuals and groups are recognized in a manner that is discomfiting or disconcerting.
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Talking Politics with Leah Sprain: Making Non-Answers Hearable
Tuesday, February 4, 2025 | 7 pm EST
A common view of politicians is that, when they are asked questions, they rarely answer them. Question evasion is deeply bothersome to publics, but experiments show that audiences are not good at identifying dodging techniques. In this talk, Leah Sprain explores what debate moderators can do to make politicians’ evasion easier to notice—in other words, how moderators can make a non-answer hearable as a non-answer. This webinar offers practical theory that can moderators can use to make candidate forums and debates more accountable to their publics through ground rules, formats, and goals.
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Panel: The Environment in Electoral Politics
Wednesday, March 19, 2025 | 1 pm EST
How does the environment figure in electoral politics in the US and around the world? Environmental politics is typically understood broadly as the policies and state negotiations focused on water and air pollution, natural resource conservation, greenhouse gas emissions, or public lands management. Viewed more expansively, however, “the environment” is a concept under constant renegotiation at multiple scales. From school board nominations to state representative run-offs to the Presidential Election, the environment is both a complex sphere of governance and a space to imagine alternative relationships with nature and the state. This panel features the authors of recent publications on Engagement, the online publication of the Anthropology and Environment Society.
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Final Colloquium
May 2025
Join the Talking Politics organizers and guests from the Talking Politics 2024–25 series.
Past events
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Speaking and Listening Politically with Juan Luis Rodríguez and James Slotta
Wednesday, October 30, 2024 | 5:30 pm EST
Discussant: Tyanna Slobe (Dartmouth College)
Facilitators: Students of Political Anthropology at Dartmouth College
Elections, wars, and other major global events draw academic and public attention and inspire intense debate, but these spectacles are only the tip of the political iceberg. To understand how language shapes politics, we need to pay attention to local, mundane political realities. In this webinar, linguistic anthropologists Juan Luis Rodríguez (CUNY—Queens College) and James Slotta (University of Texas at Austin) will reflect on their studies of political speaking and listening in local communities in Venezuela’s Orinoco Delta and in the Yopno Valley of Papua New Guinea.
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Election Day Watch Party with Leah Sprain and Nathan Schneider
Tuesday, November 5, 2024 | 8 pm EST
Moderators: Mervenur Çetin (University of Colorado Boulder) and Roberto Young (University of Chicago)
Election night is always a time of heightened public attention, but researchers who focus on language and politics pay attention to events and dynamics that go far beyond campaigns, government, and voting. This Election Day Watch Party will open with short presentations by Leah Sprain and Nathan Schneider (University of Colorado Boulder). Leah will share brief examples from her research on political extremism, deliberation, and candidate debates. Nathan will discuss some of the democratic methods we're not using in this election and explore new methods of decision-making emerging around the world and online. The event will close with an interactive conversation among attendees.