“Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do.” — Graeber & Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, p.133 #Anthropology #HumanNature #Freedom #History #PoliticalTheory #Politics

“I used to think [at least they don’t suffer]. But then, I was suffering. And I’d rather be me than them. It’s like, there’s dignity in suffering. If you can’t suffer, you’re just a different type of monster.” — Logic, Ultra 85, 174 #Philosophy #HumanExperience #Suffering #Dignity #Ultra85

“…these robots don’t obey us, they reflect us. We build them, they build us right back.” — Logic, Ultra 85, p.143 #AI #Technology #PhilosophyOfTech #ContemporaryThought #SocietyAndTech #Culture #Reflections #CriticalThinking

“You walk, to go sit. You get up from sitting to walk to sit somewhere else. Walking is just something we do between seats…” — Logic, Ultra 85, p.78 #EverydayLife #PhilosophyOfLife #Movement #ModernLife #Reflection #ContemporaryThought #Culture #Quotes

“So novelty is imperious: it demands the remaking of the world according to its own standards.” — Claeys, Utopianism for a Dying Planet, 366 #Change #Innovation #FutureOfSociety #CultureAndSociety #ClimateConversation #TechAndSociety #HumanValues #SocialImagination #HistoryOfIdeas #CriticalThinking

“Late nineteenth-century literary utopianism was torn between appeals to simplicity and the ‘natural life’ and an increasingly dazzling vision of a new world of scientific and technological innovation.” — Claeys, Utopianism for a Dying Planet, 317 #UtopianStudies #CriticalTheory

“Being a modern meant pretending to be someone else, to make a stage of all the world.” — Claeys, Utopianism for a Dying Planet, p.270 #Modernity #UtopianStudies #CulturalTheory #PoliticalTheory #CriticalTheory #IntellectualHistory

“…our greatest challenge in the climate crisis today is our spirituality… our unwillingness to accept that we are moral and vulnerable creatures.” — Roslyn Fraser, “Utopia on Earth,” p.234 #Utopianism #ClimateCrisis #EnvironmentalHumanities #EcoTheory #PoliticalTheory #SustainableFutures

“The most important modern secular [intentional] communities have emerged from socialism, the chief utopian response to industrialisation and capitalism.” — Claeys, Utopianism for a Dying Planet, p.158 #UtopianStudies #IntentionalCommunities #PoliticalTheory #Socialism #History

“Rousseau presents an implicit utopian fantasy of what would be the case if a mythical lawmaker had created the perfect society…all follow the general will without any need for coercion.” — Andres Beck Holm, Utopianism in the Social Contract #UtopianStudies #PoliticalTheory #Philosophy #Utopia

“It’s impossible to know what the future will bring…What matters is that here and now, inequality is real, grotesque, and a cancer on society...” — Tom Malleson, conversation with Bryant Sculos, New Political Science 43.3 (2024) #Inequality #PoliticalTheory #NewPoliticalScience #SpeculativePolitics

“The relation of festivals to utopia thus rests not on celebration of excess…but on their pointed and often irreverent, anarchic egalitarianism.” — Claeys, Utopianism for a Dying Planet, p.135 #UtopianStudies #PoliticalTheory #Festivals #Literature #utopianism #CriticalTheory

Honored to give the Lindon Barrett Award in Black Studies talk. 📅 Dec 4, 3:00 PM 📍 HMNSS 1500, UCR I’ll share work from “Here and Now,” on how everyday Black life makes utopia a lived practice of imagining + living otherwise —hope to see you there #BlackUtopias #Otherwise #BlackLiterature #fiction

“…truth [is] a collage of competing perspectives.” — Robertson, The Black Utopians, p. 257 #BlackStudies #BlackUtopians #HistoryTwitter #Epistemology #CriticalTheory

New paper with Marina Bedny out in eLife (elifesciences.org/articles/101...). Main takeaway: Different kinds of causal knowledge are supported by different semantic brain networks - consistent with the "intuitive theories" framework from developmental psychology. 1/

Animacy semantic network supports causal inferences about illness

Making causal inferences about illness, compared to making causal inferences about mechanical breakdown and reading causally unconnected sentences, activates a semantic brain network implicated in the conceptual representation of animate entities (e.g. people, animals).

elifesciences.org

IN NEW ISSUE: Analysing protest participation - @danmercea.bsky.social, @feligsantos.bsky.social & Matthias Hoffmann argue it's a gradient, beyond the binary of participation and non-participation & suggest practical mobilisation pathways: buff.ly/XfEkdYm (OPEN ACCESS) @polstudiesassoc.bsky.social

How can something as small as a pronoun fuel identity politics? Hear UCR professor Jennifer Merolla introduces a recently published study on how Trump framed the in-group in the 2016 presidential election. youtube.com/shorts/-EUf3... #polisky

How can something as small as a pronoun fuel identity politics?

YouTube video by Political Science Research

youtube.com

In #FirstView by Donald H. Zárate, Jr: "From Exclusion to Utopia: A Comparative Study of Intentional Community Formation" journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

From Exclusion to Utopia: A Comparative Study of Intentional Community Formation - Donald H. Zárate, 2025

This paper develops a novel theory of intentional community formation grounded in systemic exclusion. Intentional communities—ranging from Amish settlements and...

journals.sagepub.com

Utopian thinking isn’t naive—it’s what drives people to build new institutions when old ones fail them. My latest article explores how exclusion becomes imagination. doi.org/10.1177/1065... #RadicalHope #Utopia #SocialChange #Community #Imagination #Hope #Politics #IntentionalCommunities #Society

From Exclusion to Utopia: A Comparative Study of Intentional Community Formation - Donald H. Zárate, 2025

This paper develops a novel theory of intentional community formation grounded in systemic exclusion. Intentional communities—ranging from Amish settlements and...

doi.org

That’s me ☺️

UCR Political Science@ucrpolisci.bsky.social · last yr.

Congrats to Donald Zarate (PhD student, Political Science) on winning UCR’s 2025 Lindon Barrett Award for his essay “Here and Now: Black Perspectives on Antiutopianism.” A powerful reflection on Black utopian traditions and their radical possibilities. 👏 #UCR