Our events bring thought-provoking conversations about democracy to the Penn State community and beyond. We also partner with organizations across Penn State and throughout the State College community to co-sponsor programming. All events are free and open to anyone.
The Public Sphere of First Drafts
John Durham Peters
2025 Center for Democratic Deliberation Kenneth Burke Lecture
Friday, April 4, 4:00 p.m. EDT
202 Susan Welch Liberal Arts Building
Reception to Follow Lecture
The shift of the basis of public life from slow and centralized print and audiovisual media to faster, ubiquitous, distributed, user-generated short-form word and video material has been widely noted. I want to ask what the new mode of incessant documentation of raw behavior means for the possibility of both forgiveness and the collective learning process essential to public deliberation. If every word or deed is frozen in its first draft, what then? Some consequences are the preeminence of the “statement” as a genre or apparently trustworthy speech, the recoding of common knowledge as corrosive secrets whose exposure is worried to have damaging effects, and an obsessive public hermeneutics of small nonverbal gestures at the expense of speech. Is a reformist or redemptive rethink of this communication infrastructure possible or are we stuck? This talk might not answer that question, but it will tease it in many ways.
John Durham Peters is María Rosa Menocal of English and Professor of Film and Media Studies at Yale. He is the author of Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999), Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and Liberal Tradition (2005), The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (2015), and, most recently, Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History (2020), co-authored with the late Kenneth Cmiel, as well as numerous essays and articles.
Jeff Sharlet
The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War
Tuesday, April 15, 5:00 p.m. EDT
114 Susan Welch Liberal Arts Building
Jeff Sharlet is the Frederick Sessions Beebe ’35 Professor in the Art of Writing and Director of Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and author of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War.
An instant New York Times bestseller, The Undertow is an unmatched guide to the religious dimensions of American politics, and shows how the task of binding our nation together is a daunting one, but the fate of American democracy depends on it. Exploring a geography of grief and uncertainty in the midst of plague and rising fascism, The Undertow is a necessary reckoning with our precarious present that brings to light a decade of American failures as well as a vision for American possibility.
Sharlet is also the author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, which was adapted into a Netflix documentary series, and This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers.
His reporting on LGBTIQ+ rights around the world has received the National Magazine Award, the Molly Ivins Prize, and Outright International’s Outspoken Award. His writing and photography have appeared in many publications, including Vanity Fair, for which he is a contributing editor; the New York Times Magazine; GQ; Esquire; Harper’s; and VQR, for which he is an editor at large.