Jeanne Theoharis

Faculty Fellow

Jeanne Theoharis is professor of political science and the first endowed chair (2007-2009) in women’s studies at Brooklyn College. She has authored or co-authored numerous books and articles including Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, co-edited with Dayo Gore and Komozi Woodard; Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America and Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside of the South, 1940-1980, co-edited with Komozi Woodard; Our Schools Suck: Students Talk Back to a Segregated Nation On the Failures of Urban Education, co-authored with Gaston Alonso, Noel Anderson, and Celina Su; and Not Working: Latina Immigrants, Low-Wage Jobs, and the Failure of Welfare Reform, co-authored with Alejandra Marchevsky. Her current project is a biography of Rosa Parks, under contract with Beacon Press, due out in January 2013. She is also co-founder of Educators for Civil Liberties and has published a number of articles on the abrogation of civil rights in the federal system post-9/11.

Participating Years

2011–2012

How to Fight: Transformational Politics and Culture

In response to contemporary crises of economics and politics one often sees polemics caught between reform and revolution but this division may be false from the position of radical politics and thought. As many have shown, reform has a more radical potential, one that takes social forms seriously enough to push their limits, to create new relations, to pose, as it were, non-reformist reform. Are there philosophical, literary, and aesthetic expressions of possibility that give us some purchase on rethinking how we do what we do?