Lawrence Grossberg

These are hard times for many people in many places and positions—politically, intellectually, and emotionally. The contemporary context of the USA poses real challenges to intellectuals. As I write this, large parts of the nation are working towards—and holding their breaths until—the midterm elections in November. At best, this will provide a temporary roadblock. Effective social and political change requires the best possible analyses of what’s going on—not only of the popular successes of the reactionary rights, but also of the limits of progressive oppositional forces. This paper contributes to an imagined conversation of intellectuals and activists, to consider what it would mean to tell better stories and enable more effective transformational politics. – Lawrence Grossberg

Lawrence Grossberg is the Morris Davis Distinguished Professor of Communication and Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. He has published ten books and edited another eleven, over 200 essays and dozens of interviews. His work has been translated in eighteen languages. His most recent books are We All Want to Change the World (available free online) and Under the Cover of Chaos. He has edited the journal Cultural Studies for almost thirty years.

His work brings together his passions for politics and the popular, always framed by an assumption that good ideas and better knowledge matter. He has researched, thought and written about a wide range of topics, from rock music and youth culture to modernities, from political economy to contemporary theory, and from left countercultures to right hegemonies. All of his work expresses a commitment to the practice of cultural studies, an analysis grounded in contingency, complexity and contextuality, with a good dose of humility.
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Public Talk + Reception co-sponsored and organized by the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology, Innis College, Writing & Rhetoric Program, and OISE.

Under the Cover of Chaos: Trump and the Battle for the “American” Right from Pluto Press will be available for purchase.