Tuesday, November 4, 2025
6:30 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. (GMT+01:00) Barcelona
Location: Online Livestream
The adoration of brute force and exercise of crude power have become hallmarks of governance in both democratic and autocratic settings. A hyper-masculine culture invested in spectacular displays of strength threatens social progress and peace everywhere. What are the insidious ways in which our tolerance for cruelty and Social-Darwinist thinking has increased, and what can we do to foster alternative values such as love and compassion?
Participants
Nesrine Malik
Nesrine Malik is an acclaimed British Sudanese author and journalist known for her wide-ranging commentary on race, identity, politics, and international affairs. Her book We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent (2019) critiques the narrative foundations of increasingly intolerant and authoritarian politics in Britain and the United States. Malik’s columns in outlets like the Guardian, New York Times, and Washington Post address topics ranging from Islamophobia and feminism to African politics, with deep insights into the ways colonial and postcolonial legacies shape our contemporary world. Malik received the 2021 Robert B. Silvers Prize for Journalism.
Verónica Gago
Verónica Gago, a professor of social sciences at the University of Buenos Aires and the National University of San Martín, is a prominent political theorist and activist working on issues of feminism and the global political economy. Her most recent books include A Feminist Reading of Debt (2021, with Luci Cavallero), Feminist International (2020), and Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (2017). She is also a leader in Argentina’s #NiUnaMenos (Not One Women Less) movement as both a theorist and an activist.
Edurne Portela
Edurne Portela is a writer whose work addresses violence, memory, and uprooting. She made her debut as a novelist in 2017 with Mejor la ausencia (Better the Absence), which won the 2018 Madrid Booksellers’ Guild Prize. This was followed in 2019 by Formas de estar lejos (Ways to Be Away) and in 2021 by Los ojos cerrados (Closed Eyes), which received the 2022 Basque Prize for Literature. Her most recent book, published in 2025, is Una belleza terrible (A Terrible Beauty), written with José Ovejero. Portela also writes regularly for prominent Spanish outlets, including El País. For many years she was a lecturer in Literature at the Lehigh University, Pennsylvania.
Joseba Elola
Joseba Elola has been the editor-in-chief of Ideas, the section on contemporary thought, trends, and debates of El País, since 2018. From 2015 to 2018, he contributed to Ideas and El País Semanal with interviews and feature stories on culture, philosophy, and the impact of new technologies on our way of life. From 2006 to 2015, he worked as a reporter for the newspaper’s Sunday edition, where he published a series of interviews, long reads and features, including coverage of the 15-M movement and the first WikiLeaks disclosures. He was instrumental in ensuring that the U.S. State Department Cables—WikiLeaks’ historic 2010 leak of 250,000 diplomatic documents—were published in El País.
Accessibility
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