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Alexander Livingston

@alivingston.bsky.social
494 followers 144 following 25 posts

Political theory @ Cornell. Fellow at Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures. Co-director of Democracy Scholars. Thinking about race, religion, and disobedience. Latest book: tinyurl.com/3fx7mu4b www.alexander-livingston.com

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Reposted by Alexander Livingston
Cornell AAUP @cornellaaup.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
The Cornell AAUP Chapter is outraged by the sexual violence that was committed at Chi Phi in 2024. We call for the community to come together on Monday, October 5 at 4:30pm in Ho Plaza, to stand in support of the survivors of sexual violence. Our full statement is here.
We are outraged by the continued culture of misogyny and by the continued pervasiveness of violence against women at Cornell and at universities and colleges across the country. We are outraged that so many women at Cornell have reported experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact. 

We are deeply disturbed by Cornell University administration’s response and communications to the community, initially in 2024 and now. Cornell administrators point community members to resources, but do not exercise leadership in creating space to process the harm, the outrage, and to change the culture of misogyny. In moments of crisis such as this, we need leaders, not administrators. 

The Cornell administration’s responses reveal its failure to understand and respond appropriately to actual harm and threats to safety on campus. It has used its internal communications to issue elaborate accusations, and it has imposed excessive discipline against students for political protests where there was no threat of harm or violence. And yet, when it comes to sexual violence, Cornell’s communications have been oblique or silent, leaving the community frustrated, fearful, or angry about the administration’s lack of transparency about how it will take effective responses.

We stand in solidarity with victims of sexual violence. We are outraged by the treatment of Jane Doe. We stand in solidarity with student organizations who have been demanding better, with faculty, staff, and students who have been organizing spaces to process and demand change. We do not yet know precisely how or why this case was so egregiously mishandled. What we do know is that it is the most recent example of the systemic failure of Cornell to protect its community — from patients at Cornell Weill to Cornell students — from sexual violence. This system must change.
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Kate Manne @katemanne.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I wrote for @thecut.com about the Cornell case and what it says that, at my institution and many others like it, protesters are often punished more harshly than sexual assailants www.thecut.com/article/what...
thecut.com
What It Feels Like at Cornell Right Now
As a professor at the Ivy League school, Kate Manne has known many, many victims. There’s a palpable feeling on campus, she writes, that this is big.
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Benjamin McKean @blmckean.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
“We find ourselves alienated from our basic capacities for cooperative self-rule and nonviolent conciliation. This alienation is due to the hegemonic understanding of politics as the practice of rule we inhabit no less than to the modern political forms and technologies that have remade society...”
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Alexander Livingston @alivingston.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
The @hannaharendtcenter.bsky.social just published a short essay I wrote for their spring conference, "Revisiting ‘On Violence’" Titled "Power without Violence" its a provocation to rethink Arendt's essay as if the history of nonviolence actually mattered. medium.com/quote-of-the...
medium.com
Power Without Violence
by Alexander Livingston
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Alexander Livingston @alivingston.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
The @hannaharendtcenter.bsky.social just published a short essay I wrote for their spring conference, "Revisiting ‘On Violence’" Titled "Power without Violence" its a provocation to rethink Arendt's essay as if the history of nonviolence actually mattered. medium.com/quote-of-the...
medium.com
Power Without Violence
by Alexander Livingston
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Alexander Livingston @alivingston.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
Getting notes together for next week's inaugural lecture at The School of Criticism and Theory, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. SCT is always one of the best parts of summer in Ithaca and am delighted to kick things off this year. sct.cornell.edu
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Reposted by Alexander Livingston
Alexander Livingston @alivingston.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
At Bard this week with Joy James, Uday Mehta, and Rose Owen debating Arendt's On Violence, fifty-five years later www.bard.edu/news/events/...
bard.edu
Revisiting “On Violence”: Political Power and Non-violent Struggle at Bard College
Events and Performances at Bard College.
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Alexander Livingston @alivingston.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
At Bard this week with Joy James, Uday Mehta, and Rose Owen debating Arendt's On Violence, fifty-five years later www.bard.edu/news/events/...
bard.edu
Revisiting “On Violence”: Political Power and Non-violent Struggle at Bard College
Events and Performances at Bard College.
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Reposted by Alexander Livingston
jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 13/04/2026
i will vote for any candidate who offers up this slogan
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Ned Resnikoff @resnikoff.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
Whenever someone says "there are no civilians in [country]," they are making an argument for genocide.
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Alexander Livingston @alivingston.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
Looking forward to this workshop at UCHV on Thursday uchv.princeton.edu/events/works...
uchv.princeton.edu
Workshop on Protest, Activism, and Resistance
Protest, activism, and resistance are ubiquitous features of social and political life, but they are especially salient in the current social and political moment. This workshop brings together politi...
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Eli Friedman @elifriedman.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
Our AAUP chapter's response to Trump's most recent attack
cornellsun.com
CORNELL AAUP | Cornell Must Not Fold to the EEOC
The Cornell Chapter of the AAUP criticizes the Cornell administration for its response to the EEOC's antisemitism investigation into Cornell University and urges it to act in conjunction with other un...
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Cornell AAUP @cornellaaup.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
Cornell AAUP has released a new statement on the Trump Administration's EEOC investigation and the Cornell Administration response. The full statement is here: aaup-cornell.org/2026/03/23/a...
aaup-cornell.org
AAUP statement on EEOC investigation
Over the past several days, many Cornell employees received emails from the EEOC asking that they take part in a survey to aid in an investigation of antisemitism on campus. No notice of this inves…
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Alexander Livingston @alivingston.bsky.social · 14/03/2025
“If Columbia or another university confronts the administration on its own, it will lose. If America’s nearly 6,000 universities and colleges launch a campaign in defense of higher education, odds are that Trump will lose.”
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Alexander Livingston @alivingston.bsky.social · 19/02/2025
A diary of year 1: “I have read several reactions by Germans to the rise of Nazism and I was struck by their difficulty to understand where the daily events they lived through could or would lead. In retrospect, we will know, analyze, and make sense.”
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Alexander Livingston @alivingston.bsky.social · 18/02/2025
“What does it mean to issue dire warnings about the death of democracy, only to go quiet when those warnings seem to be coming true?”
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Alexander Livingston @alivingston.bsky.social · 16/02/2025
As someone who works in King archives it’s safe to say the EO release will be almost entirely FBI dirt of questionable provenance and veracity, whose sole effect will be to continue the FBIs long legacy of slandering King www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
theguardian.com
MLK’s family fear new batch of assassination files will have FBI ‘smears’
Family of Martin Luther King Jr says Trump mandate could revive J Edgar Hoover’s efforts to discredit revered activist
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Alexander Livingston @alivingston.bsky.social · 02/02/2025
In 2003, an army of unqualified finance bros just out of college were sent to “reconstruct” the Iraqi state. Twenty years later, the imperial boomerang comes flying home to destroy the US state this time by way of Silicon Valley.
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Alexander Livingston @alivingston.bsky.social · 30/01/2025
Whereupon my brilliant colleague Begüm Adalet publishes TWO single-author articles in a single volume of the APSR
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American Political Science Review @apsrjournal.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
The February 2025 issue of the APSR is now available online! www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ame…
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American Political Science Review @apsrjournal.bsky.social · 27/01/2025
From our new issue: "An Incomplete Recognition: An Analysis of Political Science Department Statements after the Murder of George Floyd" by Nadia Brown, Fernando Tormos-Aponte, Janelle Wong. #ASPRNewIssue www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ame……
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Alexander Livingston @alivingston.bsky.social · 27/01/2025
Hey Boston friends: am in town all week doing archive research and talks on the MLK book project. Hit me up for a coffee if you’re around.
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Alexander Livingston @alivingston.bsky.social · 26/01/2025
www.bostonreview.net/articles/blo... “In our contemporary moment… the impulse to unsee the connections between the past and the present, health care and fentanyl, primacy and the border, could not be more tempting.” Essential reading from @morefius.bsky.social
bostonreview.net
Blood Ties - Boston Review
The real story of pain in America.
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eraldo.bsky.social @eraldo.bsky.social · 24/01/2025
read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-...
read.dukeupress.edu
Materials on Queer Civil Disobedience
When faced with questions about the history of civil disobedience, most political theorists today turn to the same threefold genealogy, to which besides Henry David Thoreau, civil disobedience's “foun...
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Alexander Livingston @alivingston.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
Last day of the American political thought class. From the new right to the new new right: Goldwater, Rothbard, Ellmers, Vermeule. The only vein of genuine radicalism on the American political scene today. Be careful what you ask for…..
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Alexander Livingston @alivingston.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
"I did not become someone different That I did not want to be But I'm new here Will you show me around?"
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