“Beyond the Trauma Script”: Catherine Liu, Sarah Stein Lubrano and Lea Ypi on How the Left Can Start Winning Again

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Recorded live at the Volksbühne in Berlin, the first event in Berlin Review’s new talk series there. Tobias Haberkorn is joined by Catherine Liu, professor of film and media studies at UC Irvine and author of Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering; the writer and political theorist Sarah Stein Lubrano, author of Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds; and Lea Ypi, professor of political theory at the London School of Economics and author of Free and Indignity.

They discuss how Oprah, Yale’s trauma studies and social media turned personal suffering into a brand, and why Lea’s readers in former socialist countries wanted to talk about agency, not trauma. They also get into why social movements run on people asking each other for things, what Zohran Mamdani’s campaign got right, and the role of intellectuals on the left.

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Airlift is hosted by Lauren Oyler and Tobias Haberkorn.