Thursday, September 25, 2025
8:00 a.m. - 9:00 a.m. EDT
Location: Online Zoom Webinar
September 25, 2025
Confronting Powerlessness
Pankaj Mishra in Conversation with Verónica Gago and Kohei Saito
Event Series: Global Dialogues Webinars
The sense that things are spinning out of control—that democracy and solidarity are failing as wars proliferate while the climate crisis and the artificial intelligence revolution take over—has generated a widespread feeling of powerlessness. Writers and thinkers who insist on alternatives to our current path need to find new ways to work, think, and be together. How can communities that are both international and inclusive of younger generations be created and sustained?
Participants
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.
Kohei Saito
Kohei Saito is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Tokyo and a leading contemporary Marxist thinker. His most recent book, Capital in the Anthropocene (2020), has sold more than half a million copies in Japan and was published in English as Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto in January 2024. Saito’s previous book, Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (2017), which creatively explored the ecological dimension of Marx’s thought and its contemporary relevance, won the Deutscher Memorial Prize.
Pankaj Mishra
Pankaj Mishra (moderator) is a renowned Indian author, essayist, and literary critic with a global readership. Two of his prize-winning books, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals who Remade Asia (2012) and; Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017), explore the history of colonialism and its enduring legacies in our contemporary global era. Mishra is also the author of two critically acclaimed novels: The Romantics (1999) and Run and Hide (2022). His columns and essays have appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books, among other outlets. Mishra is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.