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"Voting Fiction."
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Lillian's right to vote : a celebration of the Voting Rights Act of 1965
As an elderly woman, Lillian recalls that her great-great-grandparents were sold as slaves in front of a courthouse where only rich white men were allowed to vote, then the long fight that led to her right--and determination--to cast her ballot since the Voting Rights Act gave every American the right to vote.
Book
Engineering Territory: Space and Colonies in Silicon Valley
Although space colonization appears to belong to the world of science fiction, private corporations owned by Silicon Valley billionaires—and supported by the US state—have spent billions making it a reality. Analyses of space colonialism have sometimes viewed these projects as distinct from earthly histories of colonialism, instead locating them within traditions of libertarianism, neoliberalism, or techno-utopianism. By reconstructing technology elites’ political visions for celestial settlements within the literature on colonial-era corporations and property, this study argues that the idea of outer space as an empty frontier relies on the same logic of territorialization that was used to justify terrestrial colonialism and indigenous dispossession. It further traces how the idea of “engineering territory” has inspired wider Silicon Valley political exit projects such as cyberspace, seasteading, and network states, which, rather than creating spaces of anarchical freedom, are attempting to recreate the territorial state in new spaces.
Journal Article
Mary Shelley's The Last Man: Existentialism and IR meet the post-apocalyptic pandemic novel
Mary Shelley mined the ideas of international thought to help develop three new subgenres of modern political science fiction (‘poliscifi’): post-apocalyptic, existential, and dystopian. Her two great works of poliscifi, Frankenstein (1818), and The Last Man (1826) – confront the social problems that arise from humanity's technological and cultural interventions in the wider environment. This article recovers The Last Man not only as the first modern post-apocalyptic pandemic novel, but also as an important source for the existentialist tradition, dystopian literature, and their intersections with what I call ‘Literary IR’. Comparing The Last Man with its probable sources and influences – from Thucydides and Vattel to Orwell and Camus – reveals Shelley's ethical and political concerns with the overlapping problems of interpersonal and international conflict. The Last Man dramatises how interpersonal conflict, if left unchecked, can spiral into the wider sociopolitical injustices of violence, war, and other human-made disasters such as species extinction, pandemics, and more metaphorical ‘existential’ plagues like loneliness and despair. Despite these dark themes and legacies, Shelley's authorship of the great plague novel of the nineteenth century also inspired a truly hopeful post-apocalyptic existential response to crisis and conflict in feminist poliscifi by Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, and Emily St. John Mandel.
Journal Article
Explicit and Implicit Bundling in Shareholder Voting on Cleansing Acts
Delaware courts have expanded the cleansing effect of a shareholder vote, thereby endowing shareholder votes with greater normative weight than at any time in the modern period. Outside the context of a conflicted transaction involving a controlling shareholder, a fully informed uncoerced disinterested shareholder vote on a transaction is treated as a full defense against any claim for breach of fiduciary duty. This implicitly bundles the consummation of the transaction with the cleansing of fiduciary duty breaches. We argue that this weight is misplaced from an internal corporate law perspective and represents a departure from the traditional treatment of shareholder ratification. A vote by a majority of target shareholders in favor of a transaction can be seen at most as evidence that shareholders believe that the value of their shares will be higher if the transaction takes place than if it does not take place as of the time of the vote--but such a vote does not indicate fairness and should not substitute for a fairness analysis. As a more rational regime, we suggest holding separate votes on the transaction and cleansing. Importantly, though separate, a board may decide to couple these votes by making consummation of the transaction contingent on an affirmative vote to cleanse. This explicit private ordering bundling has two advantages over the present implicit bundling by fiat: boards can limit the scope of breaches submitted for a cleansing vote; and the board's decision to condition a transaction on a cleansing vote could itself be analyzed for whether it amounts to coercion. Given the conceptual problems with imputing a cleansing effect to a vote on the transaction, what then explains the confidence in the normative significance of shareholder votes? We suggest that judges adopted a legal fiction in response to what was perceived to be excessive deal litigation. If that is the case, the question becomes whether it is a useful legal fiction or whether relying on other measures to reduce deal litigation would have been preferable.
Journal Article
Policy-making and truthiness
From “alternative facts” to “fake news,” in recent years the influence of misinformation on political life has become amplified in unprecedented ways through electronic communications and social media. While misinformation and spin are age-old tactics in policy making, and poor information and poorly informed opinion a constant challenge for policy analysts, both the volume of erroneous evidence and the difficulties encountered in differentiating subjectively constructed opinion from objectively verified policy inputs have increased significantly. The resulting amalgamation of unsubstantiated and verifiable data and well and poorly informed opinion raises many questions for a policy science which emerged in an earlier, less problematic era. This article examines these developments and their provenance and asks whether, and how, existing policy making models and practices developed and advocated during an earlier era of a sharper duality between fact and fiction have grappled with the new world of “truthiness,” and whether these models require serious revision in light of the impact of social media and other forces affecting contemporary policy discourses and processes.
Journal Article
Aristocracy Must Advertise: Repurposing the Nobility in Interwar British Fiction
In the interwar years, authors Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham wrote popular detective fiction that explored possible roles for the aristocracy in an age of universal suffrage. Critics have seen these novels as nostalgic encomia for hierarchy and tradition. This article argues that they should be seen instead as part of a larger trend in interwar fiction that sought to make connections between aristocracy, national identity, and social cohesion. Far from celebrating an imagined idyllic past, these novels suggested possibilities for the continuing relevance of the nobility to the upholding of justice, and indeed, to the success of British democracy.
Journal Article
\Where Is the Story?\
The \"literature\" he referred to consisted entirely of comic books and sports magazines. The study (Sun et al., 2023) evaluated cognition, mental health, and other factors in more 10,000 US kids from diverse backgrounds. [...]on top of this, we found significant evidence that it's linked to important developmental factors in children, improving their cognition, mental health, and brain structure, which are cornerstones for future learning and well-being\" (University of Cambridge, para. 11). Lewis and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led the massive march from Selma to Montgomery in March of 1965, completing the journey Lewis had started earlier in the month.
Journal Article
Jesting international politics: The productive power and limitations of humorous practices in an age of entertainment politics
Humour has recently emerged as an important research topic in International Politics. Scholars have investigated how states and state leaders practice humour as part of their diplomatic exchanges, in misinformation campaigns, and nation-branding. Important knowledge has been gained as to how humorous practices partake in constituting identities, managing recognition, and international anxieties or contesting global orders. Yet, little attention has been devoted to interrogating the risk that humorous practices may give rise to in international politics, to the underside of humour's productive power. This article aims to begin unpacking these risks both theoretically and empirically. To do so, it engages with the critical thinking on humour by Kierkegaard and Foster Wallace in particular, suggesting three challenging implications: (1) humorous entrapments; (2) facile forms of detached engagement; and (3) ambiguous blurring of fiction and reality. It then shows how these unfold empirically in: Iran's meme war with the US, a Yes Men's parody during COP15, and the Pyongyang Nuclear Summit, developing a three-pronged analytical strategy for studying humorous practices and their different relations to formations of power/knowledge.
Journal Article
The future of control/The control of the future: Global (dis)order and the weaponisation of everywhere in 2074
In this article, I am going to suggest that questions of societal and political control will be fundamental to the challenges humanity faces in the next 50 years, a continuation of the political and social problems of modernity but playing out in a range of political contexts and with a range of technological ‘tools’. Technicians of security will attempt to manage the disorder and insecurity that results from the potential weaponisation of everything, to use a phrase from Mark Galeotti, and the weaponisation of everywhere, a condition where the state will be seeking to control a range of emerging terrains and domains. But at the same time, while societies in 2074 might be confronting conditions that are an intensification of modern political problems, there is the possibility that the impact of climate emergencies and other ecological/technological dangers might produce global disorder unlike anything experienced in modernity, radically transforming (or mutilating) the ‘material’ foundations of international politics, presenting us with problems unlike anything encountered before. At this point, as Bruno Latour suggested, we might have to depart (for our own survival and the survival of others) from the ideas about politics and economy that we have ‘inherited’ from modernity.
Journal Article
Jericho’s Daughters: Feminist Historiography and Class Resistance in Pip Williams’ The Bookbinder of Jericho
This article examines the intersecting forces of gender, class, and education in early twentieth-century Britain through a feminist reading of Pip Williams’ historical novel The Bookbinder of Jericho. Centering on the fictional character Peggy Jones—a working-class young woman employed in the Oxford University Press bindery—the study explores how women’s intellectual ambitions were constrained by economic hardship, institutional gatekeeping, and patriarchal social norms. By integrating close literary analysis with historical research on women bookbinders, educational reform, and the impact of World War I, the paper reveals how the novel functions as both a narrative of personal development and a broader critique of systemic exclusion. Drawing on the genre of the female Bildungsroman, the article argues that Peggy’s journey—from bindery worker to aspiring scholar—mirrors the real struggles of working-class women who sought education and recognition in a male-dominated society. It also highlights the significance of female solidarity, especially among those who served as volunteers, caregivers, and community organizers during wartime. Through the symbolic geography of Oxford and its working-class district of Jericho, the novel foregrounds the spatial and social divides that shaped women’s lives and labor. Ultimately, this study shows how The Bookbinder of Jericho offers not only a fictional portrait of one woman’s aspirations but also a feminist intervention that recovers and reinterprets the overlooked histories of British women workers. The novel becomes a literary space for reclaiming agency, articulating resistance, and criticizing the gendered boundaries of knowledge, work, and belonging.
Journal Article