Ruth D. Ewing Lecture Presents: Professor Alyssa Battistoni
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OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Freedom Beyond the Free Gift: The recognition that modern human life relies on vast inputs from the nonhuman world, and that these ostensibly free gifts come with serious material costs, has generated considerable anxiety about the future of human freedom, as articulated by thinkers like Dipesh Chakrabarty and Pierre Charbonnier. In emphasizing freedom’s material underpinnings, such accounts often echo classically Marxist and socialist conceptions of freedom as achieved only beyond the “realm of necessity.” Rather than accepting the tragic conclusions that these accounts often draw, however, I look to alternative conceptions of freedom: in particular, Marxist and republican accounts of non-domination, and materialist existentialism.
Professor Alyssa Battistoni is a political theorist with research interests in environmental and climate politics, feminism, Marxist thought, political economy, and the history of political thought. She is the co-author, with Kate Aronoff, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos, of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso 2019), and her work has appeared in Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, and Nature Sustainability. Battistoni also writes frequently for publications including the Nation, Dissent, Jacobin, n+1, and Boston Review, and is on the editorial boards of Jacobin and Dissent. She received her PhD from Yale (2019) and previously held the position of Environmental Fellow at Harvard University.
Photo credit: Dan Komoda, Institute for Advanced Study.
About the Ruth D. Ewing Lecture Series
Alumna Ruth Ewing '37 (1915-2014), whose studies concentrated on social sciences while at Bennington, was also a parent of an alumnus, as well as a distinguished trustee from 1979 to 1982. In 1997, the College's trustees named the Social Science Lecture Series for Mrs. Ewing in recognition of her unstinting generosity and esteemed service to Bennington. We are deeply grateful that Mrs. Ewing and her husband James Ewing went on to support the endowed Ruth D. Ewing '37 Social Science Lecture Series throughout the rest of their lives, bringing special guest lecturers in the social sciences to Bennington College today and in perpetuity.