Professor Dean Caivano will deliver a keynote address titled “The Authority of Outrage” on October 23, 2026, in Sousse, Tunisia. The address is part of The Politics of Outrage: Media, Protest and Power in Contemporary America, an international study day organized by the Tunisian Association for American Cultural Studies in collaboration with the Laboratory of Approaches to Discourse (LAD) and École et Littératures.
The talk examines the role of outrage in contemporary American politics, arguing that outrage is not simply a response to political power, but can itself become a means of exercising it. The address also develops questions explored in Caivano’s forthcoming book, Hollow Sovereignty: Political Order Without Legitimacy (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2027), which examines how political institutions continue to exercise power even as their claims to legitimacy weaken.