Please do not sign up later than Tuesday, January 12, in order to get full access to the first live online webinar on Thursday, January 14.
Course Description
Learn about and discuss today’s most urgent issues with one of the greatest public intellectuals of our time. Professor Noam Chomsky and UA emeritus professor Marv Waterstone will co-teach this newly revised seven-week class that is both a general education course for UA undergraduates and open to life-long learners from the general public. Connecting students from multiple generations and political outlooks, this course is sure to stimulate ideas, debate, and dialogue.
The course will examine how a “capitalist realism” worldview has come to dominate the way we organize the political economy to satisfy human needs and wants. From this premise, the course will take up a number of the more salient consequences of this orientation and will make the connections between these phenomena and the essential features of this form of late stage capitalism.
The course content will consist of two weekly, pre-recorded lectures (available for viewing at participants’ convenience), as well as weekly live online Q & A sessions with the instructors (on Thursdays) and with social change practitioners (on Tuesdays).
Schedule of Tuesday guests:
1/19/21—Common Sense, the Taken-for-Granted and Power
Live online visitors (9:30-10:45 am, MST): Jeff Cohen, Founder, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Co-founder, Roots Action Network; Janine Jackson, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Host Counterspin Radio
1/26/21— The Current Common Sense: Capitalist Realism
Live online visitors (9:30-10:45 am, MST): Robin Hahnel, Professor Emeritus, American University; Abby Maxman, President and CEO, Oxfam America
2/2/21— Capitalism and Militarism
Live online visitors (9:30-10:45 am, MST): Vijay Prashad, Executive Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and Chief Editor of LeftWord Books; Phyllis Bennis, Director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies
2/9/21— Capitalism vs. the Environment
Live online visitor (9:30-10:45 am, MST): Kieran Suckling, Executive Director, Center for Biological Diversity
2/16/21— Neoliberalism, Globalization and Financialization
Live online visitors (9:30-10:45 am, MST): Yanis Varoufakis, Founder MeRA25 Political Party, Member of Greek Parliament and former Greek Finance Minister; Lisa Graves, Founder and President, True North Research, Senior Fellow, Center for Media and Democracy, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General in US Department of Justice
2/23/21—Resistance and Response
Live online visitor (9:30-10:45 am, MST): Angela Davis, Professor Emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz
3/2/21—Social Change
Live online visitors (9:30-10:45 am, MST): Eduardo Moreira, Brazilian Landless Workers Movement; Erin Araujo, Mexican Zapatista Collectives, Generator, Department of Decolonial Economics, El Combalache
