Was Trump the nadir we needed? If he is not re-elected, what are the kinds of public things that could usefully provide conceptual and political offramps to (re)build democratic institutions after Trump? How should we conceive of the liberal-communiatiran debate of the 1980s in Political Theory as itself a prequel to calls for the commons that surfaced some years later in the American academy? How might the turn to the sensorial, after the affective, provide useful orientation after the shellshock (citing Naomi Klein) of the last 4 years?

Bonnie Honig, Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science at Brown University, works in feminist, legal, and democratic theory and cultural criticism. Her most recent books are Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge, 2014) and Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (Fordham 2017). In 2017-18, she served as the Inaugural Carl Cranor Phi Beta Kappa Scholar. Currently an affiliate of the Digital Democracy Group at Simon Fraser University and the American Bar Foundation, Chicago, her two newest books, forthcoming, are: Shellshocked: Feminist Criticism After Trump (Fordham) and A Feminist Theory of Refusal (Harvard).