Sign in

Rafael Khachaturian

@rafkhach.bsky.social
4K followers 1.5K following 374 posts

Political theorist, educator, translator. Teaching at Penn and BISR. www.rafaelkhachaturian.com

PostsRepliesMedia
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Want to study Poulantzas but don't know where to begin? My next course with @brooklyninstitute.bsky.social starts this Tuesday, 9/15! thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/course...
080
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
Syllabus writing for my upcoming @brooklyninstitute.bsky.social course on the theory and practice of dictatorship. A few spots are still available—we start on March 3! (Link below)
181
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 04/02/2026
Feel pretty hopeful that Gen A countercultural and underground forms of life are going to be organized around analog tech, small scale farming, and the primacy of face to face interaction.
030
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 01/02/2026
My toddler has picked up all the gesticulations of an intensely speaking adult without almost any of the vocabulary, leading to some hilarious gibberish monologues when upset. This is what happens when both of your parents come from hand talker cultures.
0150
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
Toddlers are innately anti-capitalist because they have no conception of abstract time or private property.
150
Reposted by Rafael Khachaturian
Samuel Bagg @samuel-bagg.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
This may be the best interview I've done about my book. Many thanks to @rafkhach.bsky.social for sharp, insightful questions pressing me to relate normative theory to our big-picture historical situation. (Recorded in February, but no less relevant today.) mitchellcenter.libsyn.com/episode-710-...
mitchellcenter.libsyn.com
The Andrea Mitchell Center Podcast: Episode 7.10: Democracy as Dispersion of Power: A Conversation with Samuel Bagg
Interviewer: RAFAEL KHACHATURIAN. Over the past decade we have witnessed an unfolding global crisis of democracy, in its liberal-democratic, representative, capitalist form. As elite power has continu...
071
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 26/06/2025
Curtis Sliwa looks like he is ready to negotiate the transition to democracy in a southern European country after the generalissimo has died.
050
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 25/06/2025
Barack hitting the phones between now and November
171
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 06/06/2025
Whenever my extended family asks me about @laurabucci.bsky.social
170
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 07/05/2025
A New Deal for Higher Ed where you and all your academic friends go to work at community colleges.
030
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 07/05/2025
A year ago, I'd have guessed that widespread AI adoption into white collar work is going to bifurcate the labor force, with only the most prestigious layers still getting meaningful training in reading and writing. Now, looking at the Ivies, I was probably way too optimistic.
140
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 26/04/2025
It's weird when adults say hi to your baby but not to you. What are you supposed to do? Say hi for them? Say hi for yourself? Smile and keep walking??
150
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 19/04/2025
One of the lasting insights from postwar scholarship on authoritarian regimes where the rule of law no longer holds up is that they encourage internal radicalization, as mid-tier operatives scramble to outdo each other to impress the leader.
1317
Reposted by Rafael Khachaturian
Nathan Goldwag @goldwagnathan.bsky.social · 19/04/2025
Basically everyone who talks about 🇮🇱/🇵🇸 regularly ends up going insane because it is considered completely unacceptable to acknowledge things like "A country where some people are denied the right to vote based on their ethnicity is not a democracy" that are objectively true statements.
551780
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 16/04/2025
If interwar fascism was a modernist phenomenon, turning to myth as a response to the uprooting of metaphysical foundations, its American cousin is thoroughly postmodernist, playfully and consciously embracing the lack of any meaning apart from that measured by capital.
3132
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 09/04/2025
Pulling up to the Capital reading group with this
050
Reposted by Rafael Khachaturian
wint @dril.bsky.social · 08/04/2025
my hope is that AI can empower the Dumbest, Least talented slobs i know to replace everything i ever loved with One Million Years of Content
73200014887
Reposted by Rafael Khachaturian
Laura Bucci @laurabucci.bsky.social · 06/04/2025
Can you please think for a second how this data is about to be used by people without great intentions? You’re playing with fire.
0101
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 27/03/2025
I am once again asking you to join @aaup.bsky.social
2247
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 01/03/2025
I never knew Michelle Trachtenberg, but she went to junior high in my neighborhood (Bay Academy) and we literally had common acquaintances/friends of friends. This, plus growing up a Nickelodeon kid, really does feel like hearing a former classmate died.
030
Reposted by Rafael Khachaturian
Laura Bucci @laurabucci.bsky.social · 20/02/2025
750 political scientists in support of democracy* *unless there’s a networking event and you “have to” cross a picket line
2182
Reposted by Rafael Khachaturian
AAUP–Penn @aaup-penn.bsky.social · 19/02/2025
Philly, come out to 2000 Market right now and say it loud: hands off our healthcare, hands off our research, hands off our jobs!
16720
Reposted by Rafael Khachaturian
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 19/02/2025
another Thing I Will Keep Saying: there is of course an important moral case for internationalism. but the practical case for it can start by simply noticing how internationalist the people robbing you are (however nationalist their rhetoric might be)
5412115
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 15/02/2025
Maybe it was a bad idea to combine presidentialism with a FPTP duopoly in which one party, against conventional wisdom, has been colonized by its extreme wing.
010
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 12/02/2025
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm a snake oil man
31375
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 04/02/2025
Brainstorming poli sci course proposals at a university under the right wing microscope 🫠
150
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 02/02/2025
At last RFK Jr can reboot the real family business: rum running from Canada
633049
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 28/01/2025
It is 2027. "The cruelty is the point!!" I sob, as I am herded into an AI-run Kyle Rittenhouse Reeducation Center at Hillsdale College-Philadelphia.
040
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 25/01/2025
My kid is finally realizing they are a sentient human being and is not having it.
1791
Reposted by Rafael Khachaturian
sanjukta paul @sanjukta.bsky.social · 23/01/2025
Something that's central to (orthodox) economics' claim to be a science in its core domain is its ability to generate predictions based on systematic relationships (laws) of some kind. Yet what it actually has been very good at is translating non-systematic common-sense intuitions into its own terms
194
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 23/01/2025
There's a historical dialectic where, while US racial politics anticipated European fascism, its course of development insulated from the interwar crisis, only for it to then facilitate the global right during the Cold War, whose neo-fascist descendants are now in turn influencing the US right.
110
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 23/01/2025
Snyder and Shore have taken jobs in Canada, skipping ahead to the "government in exile" stage of the Resistance.
160
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 21/01/2025
"USSR attacks leading German political rights group over its defense of Lebensraum"
010
Reposted by Rafael Khachaturian
Protean Magazine @proteanmag.com · 20/01/2025
As Biden is swept into the dustbin, Charlotte E. Rosen wonders: what was the Resistance “Twitterstorian”? Well-paid liberal “attack dogs” of democracy like Heather Cox Richardson proved to be all too willing to turn to Democratic Party apologia—especially on Gaza. proteanmag.com/2025/01/20/t...
proteanmag.com
The End of Resistance History
As the Biden administration is swept into the dustbin, Charlotte Rosen wonders: what was the liberal Hashtag-Resistance "Twitterstorian"? And, as a product of the first Trump term, what did commentato...
1311745
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 20/01/2025
MAGAs whole schtick is drug-addled grown ass men getting off on "transgressive" acts that boys find passé by 6th grade.
1111
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 16/01/2025
It would only be fitting if Biden's political career, which began the same year as the Yom Kippur War cemented America's special relationship with Israel, will end by also marking its disintegration.
030
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 13/01/2025
Harbingers of the end of an empire.
040
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 06/01/2025
This closeness to tech and finance capital is why I think dismissal of the fascism claim on the grounds of weakness, incoherence, minoritarianism, etc is too premature.
060
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 02/01/2025
The mirror stage
040
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 30/12/2024
I replied:
0161
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 30/12/2024
Absolutely insane policy.
3212
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 27/12/2024
Once again, I am asking you to donate to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund before the end of the year: www.pcrf.net
pcrf.net
PCRF
The Palestine Children's Relief Fund was established in 1992 by concerned humanitarians in the USA to bring injured and sick children for free medical care they could not get locally
031
Reposted by Rafael Khachaturian
Peter Gleick @petergleick.bsky.social · 25/12/2024
If you've never donated to Wikipedia, now's the time. Elon Musk is attacking it because it's one of the only sources of honest, curated information that he can't control. www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-ta...
newsweek.com
Elon Musk takes aim at Wikipedia
The billionaire has become one of the most prominent supporters of President-elect Donald Trump.
421122196347
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 24/12/2024
Playing with no rhythm or melody whatsoever to introduce my child to atonal music.
1141
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 24/12/2024
The Irishman is a Christmas film.
3333
Rafael Khachaturian @rafkhach.bsky.social · 22/12/2024
Everyone should read this detailed report on New College, two years after the "takeover." It's been far more successful at gutting what existed than reconstructing a new, right-wing hegemony. Maybe a microcosm of higher ed, and our national landscape as a whole. inthesetimes.com/article/new-...
inthesetimes.com
The New College Gambit
The right-wing takeover of Florida’s public honors college blurs the line between tragedy and farce, but attacks on universities are about to get worse.
0187