Power And
Power is a prism through which we can view an array of social issues, be it power and politics, power and gender, power and youth, power and privacy, power and abuse, or power and privilege.
When we examine power — internal or interpersonal — we must first look at the conditions that allowed it to exist in the first place, so that we may better understand the narrative arc that brought it to rest on that particular person, nation, company, or concept. Whether it’s our constant struggle to reassert agency over our digital lives or youth around the globe taking action when adults have not, power is an ever-shifting, always pulsating life force that informs how we exist in the world. Power shifts. It is imbalance; the imagination of fear stacked against a perception of hope. Power is a prism through which we can view an array of social issues, be it power and politics, power and gender, power and youth, power and privacy, power and abuse, or power and privilege.
For this issue, we’re interested in the application of power. The kind of power that dominates conversation even when it is not named outright. Political, electric, or interpersonal, we invite you to dissect the vortex of power, and the conditions we create as well as criticize. Who holds power in our spheres of influence and why? Can we control power, both in others and within ourselves? What are the implications of a shift in the power structures we have grown accustomed to? How do we learn from the abuse of power? When we lose power, can we regain it? And is there a power that is ever responsible?
The featured image is “Current” by Tom Mrazek.
- All Post
- 8: Power And
I was ten years old. We were against the wall, all twelve of us, like a criminal lineup outside the…
Hers is a country of dead people. All those graves scattered over the hill, the white crosses, the angels with…
I was looking for Samuel Bernstein’s novel, Lulu, at The Strand, a giant stack of books teetering in the crook…
My parents gave up a comfortable life in China so that their children could have better opportunities.
My interdisciplinary art practice evolved from drawings I made while sharing open and public spaces with others.
Give me that handkerchief someone dropped on the corner next to the stand / where those suits are trying to…
I have spent the last couple of weeks surveying online discussion forums populated by self-identified “incels,” a community of categorically…
Behind some airport some quiet organ -ization ignites a portable flare stack. Cindy, whose depression is tropical, is not yet…
Long after mother had said / “goodbye” to her piano, / Dad — dead drunk, / broke her mandolin.
I should study knife skills / or fish deboning. Have you / ever held fresh, dead chicken?
You will be twenty or twenty-one or twenty-two, no younger than nineteen, no older than twenty-four.
We found our home driving through the neighborhood adjacent to where I used to live when I was single.
So #MeToo cuts her ponytail off, walks into a bar and takes a seat next to #MeToo and the bartender…
The river / splinters / its many / tributaries, / veins feeding / new shores / The cutting stone /…
“How quickly this life does go by.” Tonight / I wrote the last letters / to my poetry students.
I fall into the mountain side; I burn in / to the twisting serpent of chambers / hidden there. I…
On the phone, you tell me you were frozen, then brought back to life. The freezing shrunk you and stretched…