Approaching the Limit: Panel 2, Extremities

In two linked panels, the Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture explores the limits and limitations of our world—sensory, spatial, temporal, social, cultural, political. I their geographical and methodological variety, our papers collectively map out the terrain of this keyword, and seek to determine the bounds, so to speak, of studying, theorizing and making culture at the limit. This second panel questions the socio-spatial manifestations of the limit and its political and property avatars: the border the boundary, and the zone.

A People’s Guide to Capitalism

Marchers with banner, "Capitalism Isn't Working"

Summer introductory sessions on the political economy of capitalism: In ten weekly sessions starting June 8, we will read and discuss Hadas Thier’s A People’s Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics. This work offers a lively, accessible, and timely guide for those who want to understand, dismantle, and replace the world of the 1%.

Topics in Strategic Studies – Spring 2026 Series

We are currently reading ‘The Choice of Civil War’ by Pierre Dardot et al. Alberto Toscano calls this work “a trenchant and provocative study of the symbolic, legal and material violence that has been deployed over the past half-century to secure the rule of capital across the planet. The Choice of Civil War breaks with antiseptic images of neoliberalism as the production of docile subjects or the marketization of everyday life, revealing it as the theory and practice of class warfare.”

Animals and Capitalism: Metabolic Labor

A five-session study group on nonhuman animals’ relationship with capital as living, breathing, “commodified” beings. What differentiates nonhuman animals from non-living commodified objects is the way their metabolic and reproductive capacities are harnessed in production. In this study group, we will focus on how metabolic labor has been theorized in feminist studies and contemporary Marxist environmental and animal studies, with a specific focus on the particular function of nonhuman animals for capitalism.

Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary, with Mitchell Abidor

Join us for a conversation with Mitchell Abidor, author of the forthcoming book, “Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary.”
Today, thanks to his classic memoirs and novels, Victor Serge is highly esteemed by virtually all segments of the left. But who was this man, who led such a thrilling life on the frontlines of history?