Making a Magazine: Reflections on the Fifth Issue of Back Matter Magazine

Making a Magazine: Reflections on the Fifth Issue of Back Matter Magazine

Reflections by Matene Toure, Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA student, Research Matters student writer and Co-Executive Editor of the “Social Life of Ideas” section of Back Matter

This year, the Multimedia Publishing Lab course in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism (CPCJ) MA program at The New School for Social Research wanted to make a magazine for young people specifically students and future media industry workers that spoke to the feelings of alienation, isolation, and uncertainty brought on by The New School part-time faculty strike but also the very fraught media landscape. The strike was an anxiety-inducing time. Many students felt betrayed by an institution that promised to always promote social change and action. And many decided to organize against the institution’s lack of care for its workers. By the end of the strike, we came face to face with what was yet to come for us as we headed into our careers and adult lives. This semester, we wanted to ensure that our magazine was a reflection of what we all collectively faced and learned during this dispiriting time.

Each spring, Multimedia Publishing Lab students produce an issue of Back Matter magazine under the supervision and guidance of Jon Baskin, instructor and Associate Director of CPCJ, deputy editor at Harper’s Magazine and founding editor of The Point, and Kayla Romberger, CPCJ instructor, and a Philadelphia-based artist, designer, curator, and writer. Each issue of Back Matter looks at the world of journalism and publishing through a different lens. However, this year, we began working on this magazine as The New School returned from the longest part-time faculty strike in U.S. history, and amid increasingly prominent unionizing efforts across different industries, especially in media.

AJ Morris, CPCJ MA Student and Back Matter Digital Editor notes that the Multimedia Publishing Lab course “has a very specific legacy in the CPCJ program. It is talked about as a class that everybody absolutely should take because of the kind of hands-on experience it gives you in creating a publication and working with a team of writers and designers to see everything come together. This year for us, it was really important to hone in on certain themes that we felt were not being explored by media in general and within our school community. With the part-time faculty strike and then the students’ movement that followed, we thought it was really important for us to go in-depth about these events happening at The New School campus because not only did they represent our own struggles as students, but it was a reflection of what was happening around the world as workers participate in direct action to demand better for working conditions.”

Traditionally, Back Matter prints articles that CPCJ students draft during the fall semester and workshop during the spring. However, due to the strike, we did not have many pieces to work with. Fall classes came to a halt in solidarity. Progress on final projects slowed and then disappeared altogether. This was both advantageous and disadvantageous for the magazine. While articles usually cover a wide range of topics, we decided to curate content from our difficult life experiences. After the strike, we’ve all been asking: How do we move forward? How do we cope? How do we reckon with the shitty hand that’s been dealt to us? We decided to interrogate these questions in the magazine.

Many on both the design and editorial teams — headed by Marcus Hiljkop, Managing Editor of Back Matter, CPCJ MA Student, and Acquisitions Editor at OR Book — contributed content due to the fewer pieces. The editorial team, mainly associate editors, worked closely with writers to help them grapple with the guiding questions and highlight some of the ways they were coping or dealing with themes of alienation, rage, and frustration — not only in this particular moment but in recent years overall.

Editors-in-Chief Radhika Rajkumar, CPCJ MA student and Editorial Strategist at Perigon, and Shweta Nandakumar, CPCJ MA student, editor, and writer, were the masterminds behind this year’s theme. In preparation to lead this semester, Radhika and Shweta read their peers’ essays from last semester. They say, “We sensed this undercurrent of anxiety that seemed to spur an open-mindedness about alternative ways of life—even if just in small ways—like examining how mushrooms grow or experimenting with hallucinogens. Before we even brought it up, most of the Back Matter team noticed it too. With so many of us coming out of the wreckage of last year’s strike and heading towards life after graduation, this sensation of being squeezed, ignored, and generally adrift was palpable, both at The New School and generationally. We felt the strike dysfunction mirroring bigger crises around us—alienation during the pandemic, ongoing disenfranchisement of workers—and what young people specifically pay the highest costs for: the effects of climate change and the instability of late-stage capitalism. But in exploring other paths, we find ways of adapting—that’s where the idea of coping with alienation came from. Watching it develop across the magazine, especially through the design team’s deeply funny and thoughtful interpretation of it, was our favorite part of this experience!”

The design and digital team — led by Minu Si Ching, Creative Director, and Parsons student; Art Directors Jack Perkarsy, Parsons student, Maxine Richter, CPCJ MA student, and Nancy Wei, Digital Director — created a vision to meld content and design in a fresh and satirical way by leaning on inspirations from past organizing movements, political propaganda, and pop culture. They also organized Back Matter’s very first cover shoot, styled by Jack Perkarsy, to help intensify this year’s theme throughout the magazine.

The Social Life of Ideas (SLOI) section is led by Rachel Saywitz, Editor-in-Chief, CPCJ MA student, and freelance writer whose work has appeared in Pitchfork, Electric Literature, and Bitch. This year was the first time Back Matter had a separate masthead, says Saywitz. “Also this year, SLOI was represented differently as a section that weaves through the general magazine rather than as its own insert, so we were able to do some fun things visual and content-wise to create a disruption to Back Matter’s general themes of coping through alienation. I think our section comes out of this general angst and uncertainty we as students have felt over the past few years, and we wanted to try to answer the question of how one resists traditional means of coping, and actions we could take to bring us closer to the community.”

Rachel has a piece featured in the magazine called “The Publishing Merger Family Tree”, which came out of thinking about her upcoming graduation from the CPCJ program. “There are so few journalism and publishing jobs for students just getting out of school, and the tree is a way of visualizing why that is. It’s depressing to look at, I’ll admit. So much of what we consume is tied together through mergers and venture capital. But I hope the transparency of it can inspire other students to recognize the world they’re moving into and imagine ways to work against it if they so choose” states Saywitz.

The print magazine, complete with thought-provoking and insightful articles and essays, and poignant poems and photos is now out, and its digital counterpart is now live. It has been highly illuminating working on this magazine with a team I really admire and respect. For many of us, it really gave us a genuine idea of what it’s like to work for and/or create a publication from the ground up. It inspired us to further pursue careers in the media and publishing industry. However, working on this project opened our eyes to the very immediate disheartening realities of the media industry and our futures.

New Social Change Fellowship Launches at NSSR During Spring 2023

Mariam Matar, Krishna Boddapati, and Eduardo Mora Zuniga have received the NSSR Social Change Fellowship for the Spring 2023 semester.

In its first year, this selective fellowship program offers graduate students from The New School for Social Research paid internships at organizations committed to social justice. It provides fellows with “opportunities to use the skills acquired as a result of their degree but may be unaware of how to apply them in non-academic areas and settings,” says Jennifer MacDonald, Director of The New School’s Center for Graduate Career and Professional Development.

A collaborative effort, the fellowship was created by MacDonald; Jane McNamara, Associate Dean of Strategic Initiatives and Civic Partnerships at Lang College; and Ryan Gustafson, Director of Academic Affairs at NSSR to help NSSR students navigate a changing academic job market and fewer full-time faculty opportunities. The fellowship helps answer the question, “What does it mean to be a PhD student today?” and introduces students to non-academic job fields, helps them to recognize the skills they have acquired, and teaches them how to communicate their skills and expertise in different professional settings. For its pilot run, the fellowship is open only to students in the Philosophy, Politics, and Sociology departments.

“It is always a challenge when you go through a rigorous process like a doctoral or advanced Master’s study to articulate and communicate the ways those skills are valuable in a different setting,” says MacDonald. According to McNamara, “One of the things we heard while we were interviewing candidates for this position is how many of them are eager to understand how their skills have application in other settings beyond academia and how they can bring their expertise to other settings, whether or not they decide to pursue an academic career.”

For internship placement, the fellowship turned to organizations The New School has a strong institutional relationship with via another program, the Eugene Lang Social Science Fellowship, which pairs undergraduates with semester-long paid internships and NSSR graduate student mentors. The organizations chosen for the pilot program were sought based on their ability to provide fellows with substantive mentorship. The fellowship also includes training and support from the Center for Graduate Career & Professional Development about how to integrate public engagement into academic careers and/or pursue non-faculty careers.

The inaugural fellows are:

Mariam Matar, an Egyptian/British Philosophy PhD candidate who is paired with Mercury Public Affairs. Her research focuses are on critical theory, decolonial theory, feminist theory, social epistemology and abolitionism. Most recently, she has been working on the relationship between experiences of dehumanization and language/testimony. Beyond her academic work, she has been involved with community development through education and counselling via her time at El Nadeem (center for rehabilitation of victims of sexual violence in Cairo, Egypt), Legal Outreach (extra-curricular schooling system in Queens, NYC), and Art and Resistance Through Education.

Krishna Boddapati, a Philosophy PhD student who is paired with the 9/11 Memorial & Museum Collections & Curatorial Department. His work focuses on advancing a positive account of forgetting by tracing the roles that memory and forgetting have played in the history of philosophy, and considering how each force is mobilized and put to use in everyday life, especially in national and political narratives

Eduardo Mora Zuniga, a Politics MA student who is paired with International Crisis Group Latin American & Caribbean Group. Eduardo is a Central American activist and researcher and he studies the relationship between the gig economy and plantation work as forms of accumulation by dispossession.

TCDS Transregional Dialogues Fellowship Fosters Collaboration Between Ukrainian and NSSR Scholars

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) at The New School for Social Research (NSSR) conceived of a new collaborative fellowship program pairing New School doctoral students and candidates with Ukrainian graduate students and independent scholars. Entitled “Transregional Dialogues: Rethinking the Past – Re-imagining the Future”, the program took place throughout the Fall 2022 semester.

In February 2022, TCDS was completing preparations for its 30^th annual Democracy & Diversity Summer Graduate Summer Institute in Wroclaw, Poland, which has hosted many students from Ukraine. The war and the massive wave of refugees into Poland presented TCDS with a number of ethical questions: Should they follow through as planned with their 30^th year of bringing together New School graduate students and their peers from East and Central Europe? Should the housing for TCDS participants and faculty be used for refugees instead? What are the obligations of TCDS and NSSR, built by refugee scholars from Hitler’s Europe? Perhaps TCDS could best perform its mission by supporting isolated young scholars in Ukraine.

Their self-examination led to a new idea for a TCDS program that could be sustained during the war: a virtual site for a fellowship of minds, a space in which discussion and sharing of ideas could take place between doctoral students in Ukraine and their counterparts at NSSR. Given that many Ukrainians were either unwilling or unable to leave the country, the virtual Transregional Dialogues fellowship made sense.

TCDS worked with the NSSR student-led organization Hromada to identify Ukrainian junior scholars who could benefit from the fellowship. Together, they reached out to their connections in Ukraine to solicit nominations. Since many research and educational institutions were destroyed or inoperative due to the military conscription of faculty members, fellows were selected on the basis of their research commitments and academic contributions. As a result, the Ukrainian Transregional Dialogue fellows were a mix of MA, PhD, and independent scholars, all of whom experienced interruption or delay in their academic lives.

The fellows were led by Elzbieta Matynia, Professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies, and founding director of TCDS; Elisabeta (Lala) Pop, Politics PhD student and TCDS Program Manager; and a robust group of faculty advisors. Fellows were organized into informal teams made of one Ukrainian and one NSSR scholar, each under the umbrella of a larger group working on one of four themes: The Condition of Postcoloniality; The Politics of Belonging; Democracy and its Variants; and Citizenship: The Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion.

Over the course of the semester, fellows engaged in online working group meetings, work-in-progress seminars, guest lectures, faculty advising, and conversations with other New School organizations like the Memory Studies Group and the Democracy Seminar. Matynia explained that while the work of many fellows focused on Ukraine, the fellowship supported research more broadly concerned with “how to get out of the paradigm of colonial thinking, behavior, and regimes.”

The fellowship provided a unique opportunity to work not only across national borders, but across social science and humanities disciplines. As a result, the collaboration produced some of the timeliest research in academia. The real-time information from scholars with a deep understanding of Ukrainian culture and history is invaluable to the fellows, who are all working to articulate the mechanisms and effects of coloniality in different contexts. “This is the best initiative we’ve ever designed and launched. We were able to do something so out of the box because it came directly from the needs of scholars,” said Matynia.

While the Ukrainian fellows were beset with the realities of war, their research did not cease over the semester. “November [2022] present[ed] us with new challenges, as the electrical grid in Ukraine was massively damaged by the Russian air strikes. At one seminar, we missed one of the presenters from Kyiv, Kateryna Pesotska, who was unable to connect with us. Sadly, our efforts to pretend that things are normal — even if only for two hours at a time — became more and more difficult,” said Matynia.

Pop, who both facilitated the fellowship and took part in the Citizenship working group, explained that the fellows supported each other academically, psychologically, and socially. Because teaching is not possible in Ukraine, and many are unable to work with professors who have left the country or are part of the war effort, the Transregional Dialogues fellowship and other initiatives like it are essential for the survival of intellectuals in Ukraine.

Roksolana Makar, an independent scholar based in Ukraine whose work analyzes the global construct of Russian ballet and its status as a colonial export, spoke to Research Matters from the city of Chernihiv in northern Ukraine, where she was taking part in an expedition to assess the damage done to Ukrainian cultural heritage by the Russian Army. She described her participation in the fellowship as one aspect of a multifold resistance. “I am trying not to engage myself in any activities that are not making me stronger in dealing with this situation in Ukraine. Developing my research and participating in working groups helps me to understand the war a bit more, and it helps Ukraine because we are talking to lots of international fellows and faculty abroad. This gives Ukraine a voice,” said Makar.

Mariia (Masha) Shynkarenko, a NSSR Politics PhD student, is Makar’s partner within the fellowship. Her work focuses on how Crimean Tartars have instrumentalized collective identities in their struggle for self-determination. While she is from Ukraine, she has spent recent years abroad pursuing her doctorate. She explained what she described as a big accomplishment of this fellowship: “We [had] 10 Ukrainian scholars that provide[d] us with such a different lens of what those in the West are used to.” Shynkarenko continued, “For a long time, The New School was a champion of subaltern voices but, when it comes to Eastern Europe, it has never been a part of these discussions. The lack of inclusion of Eastern Europe in post-colonial studies has led to a dismissal and misunderstanding of the war, which is in fact anti-colonial. I have felt for a long time that my voice wasn’t heard at all. Through the work being produced from this fellowship, we want to communicate that Eastern European societies are going through an anti-colonial struggle, not just some conflict.”

Alongside the work of the fellows, Transregional Dialogues facilitated a series of guest lectures that correspond to the four working group themes, with speakers Arjun Appadurai, Krzysztof Czyżewski, and Nadia Urbinati. Watch the lectures on the NSSR YouTube channel.

Transregional Dialogues will conclude with a conference March 31-April 1 featuring work advanced by the fellows, and open to NSSR faculty and scholars in related fields. “Of course, we want to present our fellows and to highlight their work, but we also want to inquire into ‘how the academy works in the time of war,’ said Matynia.

Additionally, join the TCDS’s Open House on February 16 to learn more about the rescheduled 30^th Democracy & Diversity Institute this July in Wroclaw, Poland. Entitled “After Violence,” the Institute will feature the following classes and faculty members: Alice Crary and Alex Aleinikoff, “Climate Violence/Climate Justice;” Shireen Hassim, “Racecraft: Debates from Africa;” Jeffrey C. Isaac, “American Democracy on Knife’s Edge?”; and Elzbieta Matynia, “Romancing Violence.”

NSSR Welcomes Research Psychologist Shoshana Krohner as a Postdoctoral Fellow

The New School for Social Research is excited to welcome Shoshana Krohner as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Psychology Department.

Krohner is working within the Trauma and Affective Psychophysiology Lab headed by Wendy D’Andrea, Associate Professor of Psychology, and her work there focuses on emotion, cognition, and relational factors in complex trauma.

Krohner spoke with Research Matters about the connection between trauma and overall health, the importance of cultural-focused research, and her non-hierarchical approach to teaching.

RM: Could you say a bit about your academic journey? What was your path to becoming a Postdoctoral Fellow here at NSSR?

SK: I graduated with a major in Psychology from undergrad. I became interested in research, and ended up in a neuropsychology lab at a large rehabilitation institute in Detroit, doing research on traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The population there is mostly Black, mostly lower income so in the process of collecting all of this data, I saw how much social factors and social disadvantage, the lack of support systems, whether that’s family or more systematic, impacted people’s trajectory of recovery.

I was accepted to Wayne State University’s clinical psychology doctoral program, and worked in the Stress & Health lab [for a PhD in Clinical Psychology], working with Professor Mark Lumley….[M]y graduate training concentrated on developing and implementing emotion-focused and psychodynamic interventions for people who had [chronic pain and psychosomatic conditions]. In the course of graduate school, I became increasingly interested in the role of trauma in health, and I wound up developing an intervention for my dissertation study for individuals who have chronic pain and a significant history of childhood adversity. That work, along with my clinical training, fed my interest in complex trauma, and so when considering positions for postdoctoral fellowship, I was looking to join a team focused on trauma, which was a pivot away from my background in more traditional health psychology.

That’s how I wound up here with Wendy D’Andrea’s lab. Her research mostly focuses on complex trauma and dissociation, , studying psychophysiology and affect. I was excited about her work, as I had become interested in transitioning from applied interventions-based research to research that was more focused on mechanisms—to get atthe why and the how of things that underlie psychopathology and the relationship between earlier life experiences and adult mental health. The New School has a reputation for being progressive and oriented toward social justice in a way that was also compelling to me so I thought it would be a good fit in terms of my values as well.

RM: As you’ve explained, your doctoral research focused on how psychosocial influences, especially factors like trauma and social adversity, impact health. Can you say more about the link between our experiences in early childhood and overall health later in life?

SK: There was a landmark study conducted by V J Felliti about 30 years ago finding that experiencing childhood adversity…is predictive of a host of physical and also psychological difficulties in adulthood. My graduate research focused on how these experiences can contribute to physical problems or illness.

In the field of psychology now, the most commonly available treatments for people with chronic pain or psychosomatic conditions are based in cognitive-behavioral theory, and they focus primarily on accepting and managing pain. This approach views chronic pain as something that is lifelong and something to manage, and contrasts with the model that I have worked from, that views some types of chronic pain as being driven by the central nervous system and quite changeable. This approach is based on evidence that childhood experiences of attachment-disruption can lead to these chronic, repeated experiences of suppressing rather than experiencing one’s emotions and the evidence shows that emotional suppression is associated with symptoms. It’s a model that is more psychological or brain-based in terms of what produces and maintains pain, and so the course of treatment aims to increase insight for patients about the link between emotions and pain, and to experience rather than avoid emotions., including: The goal is to encourage recognition that the way that they’ve been managing emotions has a cost, and may not be the most adaptive strategy for their current context, and encourages them to adopt a different pattern where there is more openness to emotional experience.

RM: You’ve also done important work on stress and sexual victimization across different genders and cultural backgrounds. In what way should we approach traumatic experiences differently based on cultural and social context?

SK: The work that you’re referring to was conducted in a population of Arab American women.

In that study, we looked at whether a disclosure-based interview would have an effect on sexual health outcomes, such as sexual self-esteem and satisfaction.,. We found that it actually did have some benefits, and the women who participated reported that it wasa really important experience for them to feel like we could talk openly about sexual experiences, especially those that had never shared with anybody else.

We were also interested in how cultural factors impact Arab American women who had sexual victimization experiences. This was an exploratory study, which found that women who had more conflict between their identities as Arab and as American, or who felt like they couldn’t talk openly with the people in their life, were worse off in terms of psychological and physical health.

We were interested in studying this population because there are very few studies that have included Arab Americans in general, and even fewer focused on women. This is important because there can be a tension between having sort of broad generalizations about what is healthy for people, or how experiences impact people, and that doesn’t consider these cultural or social group differences which might affect those relationships. That’s where more cross-cultural and cultural-focused research can help to identify cases in which a theory or a model might not apply and what might be particularly beneficial for a subgroup or minority population.

RM: What does your current research within the Trauma and Affective Psychophysiology Lab focus on?

SK: I’m currently working on a large project for which the data has already been collected, and I’m working towards analysis and publication. The data set is from an NIH-funded project on what is called Blunted and Discordant Affect (BADA).

For some background, most treatments for trauma and characterizations of trauma…are characterized mostly by hyperarousal [and hypervigilance] in terms of affect and physiology.

But, for people who have complex trauma with repeated exposures, that are attachment-based or happened in childhood, they tend to show up in clinical settings with a different presentation, characterized by blunted or discordant emotional responses. That might look like people not reacting when they perhaps should be to situations where there’s threat and shut-down instead, or there’s discordant reactions -a mismatch between the situation and their emotional reaction.

So, the project aimed to validate that this is a distinct subtype of trauma reactions, and to characterize this subtype in terms of magnitude and neural and physiological mechanisms. My piece involves looking at various forms of discordance, for example, how is someone’s physiology—what their body is telling us about their response–different or mismatched to what they’re saying is going on with them, or to their brain activity? Or how do people with trauma histories handle conflicting feelings in relationships, and how does having these conflicts impact physiology? Or you might find verbal disfluencies, where someone is talking about an earlier relationship and switch into present tense or leave out key information as if you already know who you’re talking about, a sort of time discordance, as if the person is experiencing the situation now rather than relating to it as a coherent thing that happened in the past.

RM: You taught Research Methods in Fall 2022 for Psychology MA students. Could you tell us a bit about the class and your pedagogical approach?

SK: I’m working with Master’s students [and] this class is essentially their first experience developing and running a study from the ground up.

It’s a challenging class because you’re expected to be able to develop an idea for a study, collect data, and then have it analyzed and presented in a paper and a conference poster within the span of few months. At least half of the class is devoted to problem solving, strategizing about methodology and data collection, and talking about issues as they come up. The other side of it is lecture, where we’re talking about structure and organizing principles for experimental studies. It’s all quantitative.

I like for classes to feel very collaborative and non-hierarchical. I don’t want students to feel intimidated by the content or by it being their first experience. I want it to be all about learning, with the understanding that there’s going to be mistakes that happen, and that no questions are bad questions. I’m also trying to emphasize as much as possible peer-to-peer work where students are looking at one another’s work, developing the ability to critique one another’s work and get feedback in a way that’s professional and helpful. I’m hoping students come away feeling capable and excited about doing research.

Profiles

Oksana Kis Joins NSSR as 2022-2023 Visiting Professor in Anthropology

The New School for Social Research is excited to welcome Oksana Kis as Visiting Professor in the Anthropology Department for the 2022-23 academic year.

Professor Kis is a feminist historian and anthropologist from Ukraine, head of the Department of Social Anthropology at the Institute of Ethnology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Lviv. She is also a President of the Ukrainian Association for Research in Women’s History, and a Co-founder and Vice President of the Ukrainian Oral History Association.

Kis sat down with Research Matters to discuss her long-standing connection to NSSR, her perspective on Gulag studies, new meta-narratives emerging from the war in Ukraine, and much more.

What was your path to becoming a Visiting Professor here at NSSR?

When Professor Jessica Pisano first contacted me and asked if I would be interested to come for a temporary possession of Visiting Professor of Anthropology, I didn’t know anybody from The New School in a professional context.

On the other hand, it was very symbolic. I knew Professor Ann Snitow, Emeritus Professor and founder of the university’s Gender Studies program, long ago before she passed away in 2019. I really admired her not only as a scholar and professor, but as a role model in terms of feminist activism.

Snitow was a famous activist beginning the late 70s, and she was among the few who actually tried to establish a dialogue between the American feminists and the East European post-socialist feminists who were trying to rediscover feminism for themselves. She was the leader of Network of East-West Women, a transnational organization that advocated for women’s rights and promoted women’s studies in the region. In that role, she supported a publication of a book that was the first-ever reader in feminist and gender studies in Ukraine, a translation of the classic works. Later, she worked to give us a small grant for a library. From this, we were able to purchase about 40 books at a time when internet access was not that widespread and there was a serious shortage of knowledge in gender studies. We had to somehow to catch up the Western academia. When I came back with a full suitcase of 60 pounds of books, <laughs>, everybody was so happy. So now, when I teach the course Women & Post-Socialist Transformation in this same university, I consider it a tribute to her memory.

Your work focus on the human element within political paradigms, which is often neglected in favor of the study of political infrastructure and systems. This is especially clear in your recent book, Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag (2021). Could you comment on your position within the field of Gulag studies?

When I first approached the topic of women’s experience, I expected that somebody would have already written something at least about the Ukrainian experiences in the Gulag because it is such a painful sore in the history of the 20th century. It turned out that despite there being a number of memoirs published and several oral historical projects, nobody actually had summarized that experience of Ukrainians in general.

There are a couple different reasons why I focused mainly on human, and particularly women’s, experience. On the one hand, there is a huge body of works written about the repressive institution of the Gulag. It emphasizes over and over again how important it was, overshadowing the lives of people who are the prisoners. The Gulag aimed to erase them, and the historiographies erase them over again. It’s absolutely unfair. To counterbalance that, it was important to look not only at the suffering of those people, but particularly their survival strategies.

The history of Gulag studies tends to analyze mainly the experiences of Russian-speaking prisoners, because those stories are readily available . Historians of Stalinism and the USSR usually learn the Russian language and that leaves testimonies in any other languages outside their inquiry. Moreover, major memoirs by Russian survivors of the Gulag are translated into English. For me, it was important to show what is special about Ukrainians and about women in terms of making the history of political imprisonment in the Gulag more comprehensive and accurate. It was also important to remember the impact this period had on society because those people who manage to survive brought these experiences back, including their ideas, habits, and attitudes, which had long-term effects over the generations of their descendants.

Your research practice engages with texts of memoirs and personal interviews of Ukrainians. Do you have a sense of the meta-narratives that are emerging from the war in Ukraine today? Perhaps particularly for women in Ukraine, which is your focus?

I believe that there are core ideas already forming in the midst of this total mess and distress. What is important is that there will be many narratives of this war. Nowadays, we are aware that the experiences of the war are so different for different parts of the population. We have to appreciate and admit all the stories, the stories of pain and suffering, and the stories of glory and survival, and the stories of military valor. Yet, if you try to understand what is the universal among all those stories, I would say that they all contain the sentiment, “We are the people.”

Many diverse groups came to an awareness that despite all the differences among Ukrainians, Russian-speaking, and Ukrainian-speaking, people of different ethnic origin, people affiliated with different church branches like Orthodox or Catholic, they are united with the same set of values for which we are going to fight, to defend to the very end. This togetherness, this feeling of belonging to one nation based on the same set of values, this is important thing to remember. I would call this solidarity. Among the shared values are, importantly, the right to human dignity, democracy in terms of universal equality, and appreciation and tolerance to all the citizens. Also, obviously the freedom to define our future.

In terms of women’s experiences, it is absolutely amazing how women who previously had no experience of public activism…now feel a personal responsibility for their country. There is also a real sense that citizens are doing the same job in different ways, and every contribution is appreciated.

Could you speak about your work with the Ukrainian Association of Oral History which you co-founded? And the Ukrainian Association for Research in Women’s History where you serve as President? What is the current focus of these institutions today?

That’s a very important part of my life. I committed to development of both associations because after 30 years of independence, there is still no Women’s History, no Oral History, no Gender Studies, no Anthropology for that matter, in the official roster of academic subjects in Ukraine. These subjects officially don’t exist. It doesn’t mean that there are no scholars or no scholarship. There is tremendous research in those areas, but they are not properly institutionalized.

Both of these associations serve to promote institutionalization and to create a community for scholars who are working in those areas and who feel lonely and isolated within their universities and receive no support. We also try to establish some basics to create a framework for those areas and reintroduce the discipline into the Ukrainian academy, lest it become falsified.

More specifically, the Association of Oral History was formed to draw attention to the human experiences of the history of Ukraine. And to some extent, question the official memory politics in Ukraine, offering counter narratives of the history of the 20th century.

With Ukrainian Association for Research in Women’s History, it’s a more complicated story because for quite a long time and still today, it’s not taken seriously within academia. It became part of our mission to speak about women’s past outside of the pattern of being as a victim, which is very typical for the Ukrainian historical representation of women’s experience. Women are always portrayed as the biggest losers of all the historical tragedies, even when they are valorized as martyrs who sacrifice it themselves for the Ukrainian cause. Our association is trying to show the variety of women’s experiences and to emphasize specifically women’s agency in different developments. This is helpful and not only for the society at large, but specifically for women themselves to feel entitled to voice their demands and claims and consider themselves equal.

I’d love to discuss your Women & Post-Socialist Transformation undergraduate course at Lang. What was the trajectory of the course? How did you find the NSSR student body received this material?

In the past, I’ve taught the course at the graduate level for students specializing in this region. It was quite a challenge this time around because at least half of my students were freshmen. We first had to establish what is the Soviet Union, what is the Bolshevik emancipation project for women and how it evolved over the course of 70 years, and how the gender policies have changed, how women responded, and how women contributed to the development of the Soviet Union and to its disintegration after all.

For these students, it’s a discovery of a different reality. But on the other hand, since we take three countries, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia, as case studies, we are not only dealing with the specific empirical material, but with broader theories and basic concepts that are relevant to their own lives, like gender segregation in the labor market.

I can see that students begin to reevaluate their own experience with their family, education, their gender-based socialization. We not only discuss scholarly texts but explore various materials, including feature movies, advertising, school textbooks, music videos, all of which tell the story of a people. Later in the semester, we focus on trafficking, prostitution, on drug abuse and alcohol abuse. Those are very difficult topics to deal with. But they are not only post-Soviet phenomena.

What can you tell us about the undergraduate Oral History course you are teaching in Spring 2023?

It will be a practice-oriented course for those who in their professional or scholarly career would be interested in using interview as a research method. This course will offer a view of best practices and necessary skills and tools. We will learn how to do an oral history project, how to properly design the project, how to conduct the interviews using different techniques dependent on the purpose, how to process the materials and make best use of those materials depending on the goal. Part of the course will be dedicated to theoretical debates in oral history, to issues related to the ethical and legal dimension of practicing oral history. We’ll speak about all kinds of challenges and shortcomings, but also the advantages of doing oral history to achieve different goals.

NSSR Welcomes Anthropologist Katharina Schramm as the 2022-2023 Heuss Professor

For the 2022-2023 academic year, The New School for Social Research is excited to welcome Prof. Dr. Katharina Schramm as the Distinguished Theodor Heuss Professor in the Anthropology department. She will give the annual Heuss Lecture on November 2; register here.

Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth and Member of the Anthropology of Global Inequalities Working Group, Schramm sees her current research agenda as situated at the interface of political anthropology and critical race studies, science and technology studies (STS), and critical heritage studies. She has worked on diasporic memory and pan-African identity politics (African Homecoming, Left Coast Press 2010); violence and memorial landscapes (“Landscapes of violence”, special issue of History & Memory 2011); race and technologies of belonging in the European border regime (“Technologies of Belonging”, special issue of Science, Technology and Human Values 2014); race and the sciences of human origins, especially population genomics and biological anthropology (special section “Face and Race”, American Anthropologist 2020; “Race, Genealogy, and the Genomic Archive in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Social Analysis 2021) as well as on the multiple articulations of political subjectivities (special issue “Political Subjectivity in Times of Transformation”, Critical African Studies 2018).

Schramm talked with Matene Toure, NSSR Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA student, about her research interests, the state of anthropology today, and her upcoming Nov. 2 Heuss lecture “Fire Is Good to Think With: Protest as a Mode of Theorizing.”

Research Matters:

How did you learn about the Heuss Professorship opportunity? What intrigued you about teaching at The New School for Social Research?

Prof. Schramm:

Oh, that’s an interesting question (laughs). I learned about the professorship through my predecessor in anthropology, Richard Rottenburg, who was here I believe seven years ago. I knew he was teaching at NSSR and then later I was nominated for the professorship. I feel very honored to be able to be here and to have this opportunity not only to engage with and teach at The New School, but also to have the time for my own projects. Of course, the history of The New School is an interesting one, the kind of specific connection that The New School has had with German scholars in exile.

So there is the ghost of the past that is fascinating. But I also like the reach out between different disciplines: design, social sciences, music, etc. And I think for anthropologists, this is particularly exciting, because we are also experimenting on methodologies in transdisciplinary fields.

Research Matters:

What are your areas of focus within anthropology at the University of Bayreuth? You are part of a working group called Anthropology of Global Inequities. Can you explain more about that?

Prof. Schramm:

My own research interests have always been around questions of race and racism in a very broad sense. For the past 10 years or so, I’ve also worked very much at the interface between anthropology and science and technology studies (STS).

The anthropology of global inequalities is a group of PhD students and postdocs that I relate to in various capacities. The title of the group aligns with our shared interests in matters of inequalities on a global scale. We are particularly interested in forms of classifications that underlie hierarchization in multiple ways. This is heavily informed by feminist and postcolonial approaches in STS that look at the material-semiotic practices through which categories come about, but then also at the effects of what they do and how they can be undone. And I think we also have a shared interest in public anthropology in the sense that we also want our work to be relevant and to speak to current issues and problems.

Research Matters:

Your upcoming Heuss lecture, “Fire Is Good to Think With: Protest as a Mode of Theorizing,” interrogates the protests prompted by colonial practices entangled in education specifically in humanities and social sciences. Can you discuss what brought you to this topic?

Prof. Schramm:

The lecture builds on my research in South Africa, where I’ve been working for almost 15 years. My research in post-apartheid South Africa focused on the ways in which the sciences of human origins were used to contest apartheid racism, while at the same time being haunted by race in many ways. This goes along with a theoretical interest in epistemic practices and in the university as a contested space of knowledge production. In my lecture, I want to explore how to think differently about the connection between activism and scholarship and how we can view protest as a form of knowledge production in its own right.

One of the important insights from STS has been an approach to knowledge not in a hierarchy, but in a symmetrical way, and post-colonial STS has put a heavy focus on that. STS has also helped us to think about messiness in new ways, for example through the notion of “fire objects” that engage us in multiple, and often contradictory, relations. In my lecture, I will extend this discussion to the realm of political protest within the university. During the protests, fire became literally a point of contestation about the modes of conduct and the means of critique. I want to think with fire because it takes us out of the comfort zone of purely academic knowledge production.

Research Matters:

At Eugene Lang this fall, you are teaching a course called Race in Science/Tech Studies. How has anthropology perpetuated white supremacist ideologies through race science? How can anthropology also work towards debunking racism?

Prof. Schramm:

Big question. I think anthropology is really an interesting field in that sense because anthropology is a colonial science, it grew with colonialism. It has contributed to the “making of the other” while at the same time voices within anthropology have always questioned these narratives. Your question also relates to the title of my lecture, which might make you think of Ryan Jobson’s recent demand to let anthropology burn which has caused a huge stir in U.S. anthropology.

He made an important point in demanding more from anthropology than to rely on its anti-racist, liberal self-understanding. I think this is a very interesting moment for the discipline that also plays out differently in different contexts in Germany, the U.S., Brazil or South Africa. But I do think that anthropology has interesting means through its methodologies and its openness to reinvent itself, to respond to these challenges.

In the class that I’m teaching this term, we look at some of the ways in which race has been conceptualized and discussed within STS and anthropology. We are specifically interested in the ways in which race is produced and relationally articulated in scientific practices and material assemblages, for example in the fields of genomics, forensics or biological anthropology. In these STS studies, race is understood as a troubling problem, a material semiotic object, and a matter of concern that demands our attention.

Research Matters:

This spring at NSSR, you will teach a course on the Methodologies of Care. Is there more you can share about that right now?

Prof. Schramm:

What I’m interested in is how we can rethink ethnography in this moment when anthropology is under fire? What are different forms of engagement in academia and activism, maybe in the arts as well, and how can we integrate these into our practice? How can we think about methodologies that go beyond the gaze and beyond discourse? I will consider discussions about the senses and around affect to illuminate this.

The care in the methodologies of care comes from discussions that we’ve had with colleagues on how to translate demands or discussions around decoloniality into very concrete empirical research practices. Like fire, care is good to think with, because it’s contradictory. Care also means to cultivate attentiveness. I look forward to exploring this together with the students who will hopefully bring in their own questions and concerns from their various projects.

News

New Arnhold Forum on Global Challenges Opens with Its First Event

On October 13, 2022, The New School will host the first inaugural event on behalf of the new Henry H. Arnhold Forum on Global Challenges, “American Democracy in Crisis: Perspectives from Tocqueville, Douglass, Wells, Dewey, and Arendt.”

REGISTER FOR THE EVENT HERE

Funded by $3 million gift from the Arnhold Foundation, the Henry H. Arnhold Forum on Global Challenges will give international visibility to New School activities on global issues. Under the lead of Will Milberg, NSSR Dean and Professor of Economics, the Forum will bring together scholars from different disciplines, and sponsor conferences and events on issues such as climate change, threats to democracy, and global inequality. The Forum will encourage an interdisciplinary approach to understanding global challenges and a cross-pollination of graduate student training. According to Dean Milberg, this year, the overarching theme for the forum is to interrogate and locate the relationship between democracy and ethnonationalism with in the U.S. as well as global perspectives.

This year, the forum will focus specifically on threats to democracy, and the “American Democracy in Crisis” event, organized in collaboration with The New School for Social Research, will be a debate and discussion focused on the meaning of democracy in the context of the United States today and the ways in which racism, immigration, and citizenship are entangled in these varying perspectives of democracy.

Watch the livestream here:

American Democracy in Crisis: Perspectives from Tocqueville, Douglass, Wells, Dewey and Arendt
The inaugural event of the new Henry H. Arnhold Forum on Global Challenges. PRESENTATIONS: “Alexis de Tocqueville on democracy and its culture” Jeffrey…

This debut event will consist of five presentations and a roundtable discussion to engage the audience and invite different perspectives. Each speaker is a leading expert and has been assigned an important figure in the conceptualization of American democracy based on their expertise and research interests.

Jeffrey Goldfarb will present “Alexis de Tocqueville, democracy and its culture.” Goldfarb is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at The New School for Social Research and Senior Fellow at the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies. His work primarily focuses on the sociology of media, culture, and politics.
Juliet Hooker will provide insights on “Frederick Douglass, abolition, civil war, and democracy.” Hooker is a Professor of Political Science at Brown University. She is a political theorist specializing in racial justice, Latin American political thought, Black political thought, and Afro-descendant and indigenous politics in Latin America.
Paula Giddings will join us from Smith College to talk about “Ida B. Wells, race, gender, and the struggle for voting rights.” Paula J. Giddings is Elizabeth A. Woodson 1922 Professor Emerita of Africana Studies.
Deva Woodly will give a presentation on “John Dewey, the prospects for democracy in war, peace, and Depression.” Professor Woodly is Associate Professor of Politics at The New School for Social Research, interested in investigating democratic politics in a non-traditional way.
James Miller will give a lecture on “Hannah Arendt, insurrection and constitutionalism.” Miller is a Professor of Politics and Liberal Studies, and Faculty Director of the MA in Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism at The New School for Social Research.

These presentations will be followed by a roundtable discussion with all the presenters interrogating the question “What does democracy mean today in the US?” Participants will be encouraged to ask questions and provide insights into the overarching question as well.

Athlete Mental Health and Well-being Symposium

Meet NSSR’s Fall 2021 MA Project Grant and Dean’s Conference Fund Award Recipients

As part of a commitment to socially engaged and meaningful research, the NSSR Dean’s Office supports a range of student-organized projects and conferences each year. Even amid a pandemic, NSSR students have envisioned incredibly creative, intellectually rigorous, and community-minded projects and conferences. Read on for more about the Fall 2021 recipients of our MA Project Grants and the Dean’s Conference Fund, who are launching their projects and conferences in 2022.

MA Project Grants

NSSR launched the MA Project Grant program in 2016 to improve the research environment and academic life for master’s students. Every semester, student join together to create and launch projects across disciplines that address pressing contemporary questions while also building lasting community at the school.

The Fall 2021 recipients of the MA Project Grants are:

UN:RESOLVED (by The En[…]Clothed Collective)

In an attempt to explore how clothing acts as a mediator between various “bodies,”
states and environments, En[…]Clothed collective hones in on the lived experience of embodiment at the intersections of design practice, material culture, philosophy, religion, anthropology, and sociology.

Organizers: Gabrielle Vazquez (Anthropology) and Fiona Dieffenbacher (Parsons)

The Faculty for Meditative Research and Learning (FMRL)

Drawing from the disciplines of Psychology, Anthropology, Political Science, and Philosophy, FMRL is a forum for scholars and practitioners who are engaging with meditation and contemplative practices as unique areas of scientific inquiry, areas that have been historically ignored by the Western academy but are now gaining widespread attention due to their implications in public health and consciousness studies.

Organizer: Jon Epstein (Psychology)

Dean’s Conference Fund

Often times trans- and interdisciplinary, NSSR student-run conferences blur and contest traditional lines inside and outside of academia and are one of the most productive sites for intellectual growth at the school. They are also where students begin to make their mark as active scholars in their field.

In Spring 2022, the Dean’s Conference Fund will support the following NSSR student-run conferences:

In response to the worldwide need to While athletes are celebrated for doing the impossible physically, there has been growing recognition that athlete mental health has been greatly overlooked. Must well-being come at the expense of competition? What would sports look like if wellbeing and mental health were seen as integral to training, competition, and injuries? Efforts to transform sports culture will require diverse perspectives and frameworks.

Date: January 28, 2022

Organizers: Nicole Ross and Chloe Sherrill (Psychology)

Political Concepts Graduate Student Conference

The second graduate Political Concepts conference will convene students from all fields of study at NYU, UC Riverside, Harvard, and Duke at NSSR, each focusing on a single concept – including abolition, statistics, and paradise – with the express intention of resituating its meaning in the field of political discourse.

Dates: March 25-27, 2022

Organizers: Helia Faezipour (Politics), Allan Hillani (Philosophy), Clover Reshad (Politics), Jochen Schmon (Politics), Paula Cucurella, Christina Chalmers

Decolonizing Eastern European Studies – Knowledge as an Object of Inquiry

Since the end of the Cold War, numerous attempts have been made to understand the nature of the transformation taking place in Eastern Europe and the ongoing legacy of socialism. Conceptualized through the lenses of postsocialism and more recently postcolonialism, the changing characterization of the region has marked the shifting politics of representation and politics of identity. The aim of this conference is to critically assess and challenge these dominant conceptual frameworks.

Tentative dates: April 6-8, 2022

Organizers: Karolina Koziura and Agnes Szanyi (Sociology)

With/In Environments: Reimagining Frameworks and Practices for Environmental Philosophy

The 20th Annual NSSR Graduate Student Philosophy Conference asks how we might reorient the language and practices of philosophy in a way that can enable us to adequately respond to ongoing environmental crises.

Dates: April 14-17, 2022

Organizers: Dante Apaestegui, Veronica Dakota Padilla, Eva Perez de Vega, Vidya Ravilochan, Sarah V. Schweig, James Trybendis (Philosophy)

Contradictions in Capitalism: Feminist Perspectives

This conference explores the deepening tensions inherent within capitalism that both shape and are shaped by dynamics of exploitation. While feminist movements have identified the contradiction between production and reproduction as a central contradiction in capitalism, the categories of class and race point to the contradictions of extractivist capital accumulation and exploitation of labor performed by racialized and expropriated populations. Far from being accidental or exceptions to an otherwise functional economic system, structural violence and asymmetries arising from these contradictions are persistent because they form the very foundation of capitalism. This conference seeks to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue, situating academic knowledge production within the social movements that inform its analyses.

Dates: April 23, 2022

Organizers: Altaira Caldarella (Gender and Sexuality Studies), Patrich Co (Politics), Charlie Ebert (Philosophy), Penelope Kyritsis (Economics), Mette Kierstein Nielsen (Gender and Sexuality Studies), Lena Nowak-Laird (Philosophy), Isaiah Turner-Wyatt (Philosophy), Cassandra Williams (Sociology)

Sex Workers Built the Internet

Porn built the internet. Erotic BBS groups built the internet. Camming built the internet. Craigslist Casual Encounters built the internet. Desire built the internet. “Sex Workers Built the Internet” addresses this deleted history, centering sex workers’ experiences, voices, and activism in an urgent retelling of the internet’s past, present, and possible futures.

Date: May 2022

Organizers: Sarah Epstein (Psychology) and Livia Foldes (Parsons)

NSSR Welcomes Melany Rivera Maldonado to the Psychology Department

“By listening as someone puts their story into language, you foster a space where recreating and transforming a narrative becomes possible,” Melany Rivera Maldonado, NSSR’s new Assistant Professor of Psychology and director of the Safran Center for Psychological Services, tells me. Before she was a therapist and a professor, Rivera Maldonado was a journalist, and the transformative power of stories and of narrative space has never been lost on her.

A Procession from Journalism to Psychology

Writing has been a large part of Rivera Maldonado’s life. It first came in the form of poetry, under the mentorship of Puerto Rican writers Mayra Santos Febres, Mairym Cruz Bernal, and Mayda Colón. Later, as a communication student, she researched social issues in journalism. That work taught her how to interview people — what to ask, and how to approach certain subjects.

After creating profiles for community and non-profit stakeholders for Puerto Rico Solidario, a section of El Nuevo Dia newspaper, Rivera Maldonado got more involved in psychological work and decided to pursue her PhD in clinical psychology at the University of Puerto Rico. There, as a first-generation doctoral student, she learned how to ask questions from multiple angles to access pieces of life that people may not know are affecting them. In the therapy room, her background in writing helps her find metaphors, create connections, and foster opportunities for those who often feel unheard to find their voice.

After, Rivera Maldonado moved to New Jersey to complete her internship year at the YCS Institute for Infant and Preschool Mental Health, then worked as an Assistant Professor at Felician University teaching both counseling and ethics courses. Since then, she has been involved in direct services, leadership, and advocacy efforts related to immigrant children and youth. As part of her program development experience, she created a program for Latin American immigrant youth to process the transition, stressors, and mourning experiences that come with their journey to the U.S. Another program under her leadership for children of immigrants and their parents fostered a space for connection and understanding between and within the families. Rivera Maldonado’s focus on migrant communities allows her to provide them a space to find their voices as they navigate a convoluted immigration process and heal at personal and communal levels. Rivera Maldonado calls this focusing on developing participatory interventions that come from the community and go to the community.

Rivera Maldonado also tries to bring the particularly Latin American psychology of liberation to her work. “Psychology as a practice, inside and outside the therapy room, is political,” she tells me, and requires looking at the interconnection of both social and individual factors. She described how the pandemic has brought to the surface inequalities already present — medical health services are usually harder to access overall for communities of color and disadvantaged communities, and therapy continues to be unaffordable for many, especially with high out-of-network prices.

Teaching with an Integrated View of Psychology

Now, Rivera Maldonado’s work has brought her to NSSR, where she tells me that her social justice-oriented sensibilities fit in seamlessly with the school’s ethos. She and her Psychology faculty colleagues study and teach their students how to transfer their academic knowledge to their one-on-one work with patients. “You have to understand the sociopolitical and historical climate that surrounds the communities we work with” to establish a critical lens for understanding patients, she emphasizes. At the same time, each doctoral student in their first year engages in a clinical experience, for which Rivera Maldonado shared that it’s important to “be able to also support students on the front line and promote their personal development.”

In tandem with her teaching, Rivera Maldonado is the Director of the Safran Center for Psychological Services, which provides tailored foundational training in psychotherapy and psychodiagnostic assessment to NSSR Clinical Psychology PhD students through close supervision of practical application of learned skills. It also offers low-fee psychological services to New School students and the surrounding community, and collaborates with The New School’s Counseling Center to provide psychological assessments for New School students. With their sliding scale rates, the Center serves people who otherwise wouldn’t necessarily be able to access therapeutic services. The Center is a training clinic born out of past New School professor Jeremy Safran’s and other faculty members’ interest in pursuing their research while fostering student’s development as psychologists. It’s also a place where questions about the purpose of therapy, and whether it’s meeting its goals, can be addressed in real-time — a place where the therapeutic process can be monitored through a process of research, reflection, and program evaluation.

As part of her work leading the Center and admitting patients, Rivera Maldonado makes considerations about which communities are underserved, following principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion. Due to the increased need for services in the area, the Center is currently at capacity. Rivera Maldonado says she is looking forward to “the possibility of generating projects and identifying funding opportunities that will strengthen the Center’s infrastructure to continue to expand our services.”

If you or somebody you know would like to inquire about accessing services, you can contact the Safran Center by emailing safrancenter@newschool.edu or calling 212.229.570. The clinic is accepting patients for the spring 2022 semester.

Bessie Jane Rubinstein is a writer and a student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program. They live in Brooklyn, are rotating between 3+ books, and are always taking recommendations for more.

NSSR and Lang Students Explore Suppressed Histories in New York City

On a sunny October afternoon in 2021, Washington Square Park was filled with just about everyone in New York City. Among them were around 25 New School students, their professor, and their guide.

Nearly 400 years ago, the area looked very different. Twenty-eight different farmsteads filled that land, all owned by Black individuals — New York City’s first Black neighborhood. Yet the park today bears no record of this history, nor that of the people who lived there.

That erasure, said Kamau Ware, is not accidental. Ware is an artist, historian, and founder of Black Gotham Experience, an organization dedicated to making “the impact of the African Diaspora missing from collective consciousness as well as the public square.” After a brief introduction, Ware handed each New School student a card bearing the name of a Black person, then asked them to focus on one name: Manuel Trumpeter, a Black farmstead owner. What are the kinds of things that might have been on Trumpeter’s mind? What might he have been feeling, frightened of, excited about as a semi-free Black man in 17th-century New York City?

This empathy-based exercise and subsequent in-depth historical tour of Washington Square Park are integral parts of students’ work in either the “Capitalism and the Settler Colonial Present in New York City” graduate course or “Blind Spots of New York City: Capitalism and Exclusion” undergraduate course, both taught by Benoit Challand, Associate Professor of Sociology.

“This is all very practice-oriented,” says Challand. “The goal is to bring students outside of the classroom and academic, book-centered learning experiences.” In addition to tours with Ware of the park and of the Financial District, students have toured Inwood Hill Park with the Lenape Center and discussed the colonial-era fur trade from the perspective of the Mohawk Nation with the North American Indigenous Center of New York for Culture, Equity, and Economic Justice — all spaces of different kinds of exploitation and erasure.

Developing a Civically Engaged Class

“How can you explain what is capitalism from a historical and sociological perspective?”

During Challand’s first year as a Sociology faculty member at The New School in 2015, he developed a Lang first-year seminar that explored this question via two major commodities, cotton and sugar. As he taught the class, he found that issues around settler colonialism — the replacement of an indigenous population with an invasive settler population — in the U.S.; extraction; land dispossession; and racialization of the other continued to crop up, especially in relation to New York City.

“The big discovery [for me] was to find out how the history of the city is connected to those two commodities all the way to recent times without acknowledging its link with slavery until the 1850s,” he says. This led him to dig deeper into the erasure of past slave rebellions in the city, as well as that of the city’s current large Native American population, and to develop the course in new directions to confront the absence of Black and indigenous people’s memory in New York City landscape, architecture and monuments.

After meeting Ware during a tour in 2017, Challand asked him to lead a tour on erasure of the city’s Black history for the Lang seminar. Following positive reviews, Challand brought Ware into the course as a partner via a Lang Civic Liberal Arts grant, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. They taught together in 2018 and 2020, and now again in 2021.

New this year is a version of the course at the graduate level at NSSR. While both courses explore the same content and read the same texts, Challand says that undergraduate students are “more creative in terms of how they express knowledge” while graduate students have a “deeper, more robust engagement with literature” in class discussion and in written assignments. The courses are now supported by a Mellon Periclean Faculty Leader grant, which has allowed Challand to bring in the additional indigenous community partners.

Assisting with the graduate course is Emmanuel Guerisoli, a Sociology PhD student who studies settler colonialism in the U.S. from a legal point of view. His Teaching Assistant position is funded by NSSR’s Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, which supports research on New York City and its transformation over the centuries by migration.

Bridging Sociology and History

At both levels, the courses draw deeply upon both history and sociology. At the graduate level, it is one of several Sociology courses that focus on the struggles of peripheral peoples in countries both of the global core and the periphery (read more about the Critical Perspectives in Democratic Anticolonialism project).

Says Challand, “Both disciplines concur on locating capitalism in Atlantic trade, which includes the slave trade. Mercantilism is replaced by capitalism, a new economic and ideological system rooted in exploitation and destruction of native populations….History means an understanding of historical episodes, a past-dependent development. The landscape of New York City is a byproduct of what colonial New York City was in the 17th and 18th centuries. There is continuity and rupture. And from the sociological perspective, capitalism rebundles social relations.”

Although course material temporally ends in the mid-1800s, course discussions address contemporary topics. “We try to look at the legacies, and how racial capitalism and its hierarchies have evolved and developed with time,” says Guerisoli. “In the final sections of the course, it was impossible to ignore what happened last year [uprisings following the murder of George Floyd by police] and Black Lives Matter, and the effect that it had. This is completely influenced by what happened in colonial times.” Discussion topics include the complicity of academia in erasure, pushback against monuments to colonial leaders, reparations, and the establishment of Juneteenth as a national holiday in the U.S.

“I’m very happy to see the students very engaged both academically, theoretically, but also politically,” says Guerisoli, who has been a TA for a previous Sociology class taught by Challand, “and that we’re able to discuss what are very much provocative topics that are not easy to engage with and don’t have any easy answers or simple answers.” He cites a recent debate around the discourse of nativism; that indigenous people might use nativism to counter settler colonial practices, but that white supremacists use the same discourse against migrants.

Melisa Rousseau is a Sociology MA student who registered for the course without much prior academic knowledge of the topics it addresses. But with race as a primary area of focus for her studies, the course seemed like a great fit. “I really didn’t even know about what settler colonialism was,” she says. “I signed up because I had taken Benoit’s class before, and he and Emma together are a really good team, so I knew it would be a good course.”

The course has not only offered her new perspectives on slavery and the genocide of Native Americans; it’s also reframed how she thinks about race, space, and place, and New York City itself.

“The course has significantly changed the way I see New York City,” she says. “I’m not just walking through Washington Square Park anymore, right? It’s got a different meaning now. The same with Wall Street or City Hall. I never realized that interred a block away from City Hall are up to 20,000 skeletons [of Black individuals]. Now when I walk in Lower Manhattan, it has a different meaning.”

And she appreciates the multifaceted aspects of the course. “We’re able to integrate what we’ve learned on the tour with what we’re also learning in the readings,” she says. And on top of that, we’re keeping journals [which integrate] what we’re reading and our experience on the tours.”

Ware’s October tour ends outside a building just east of Washington Square Park where, in 1911, nearly 150 Jewish and Italian immigrant garment workers died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. A small plaque on the building commemorates the tragedy, one of the worst industrial disasters in U.S. history and a major turning point in labor history and occupational safety. He notes the differences between the site and the nearby park in terms of public memory and erasure. But one parallel remains: the extra work those “othered” must do — ideally with a wide base of support but often alone — to fight for visible change in a society built on their erasure.

Photo credit: Emmanuel Guerisoli

NSSR Welcomes Sociologist Nicola Marcucci as the Fall 2021 visiting Hans Speier Professor

The New School for Social Research is excited to welcome Nicola Marcucci as the Fall 2021 visiting Hans Speier Professor in the Sociology department.

Marcucci is a sociologist working in critical theory, intellectual history, the philosophy of social sciences, modern social and political thinking. He is member of the Laboratoire interdisciplinaire d’études sur les réflexivités – Fonds Yan Thomas at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, member of the board of the Teoria Critica della Società seminar at the University Milano-Bicocca in Italy, and associated with the Bauman Institute at the University of Leeds. As part of an ongoing project investigating the sociological redefinition of critical faculties—reason, will, and judgment, Marcucci is finalizing a first volume on Spinozism, Neo-Kantianism and the birth of classical sociological theory in France and Germany.

Named for Hans Speier, a German sociologist and one of 10 founding members of the University in Exile, the Speier Professorship is a distinguished visiting professorship that brings scholars to the NSSR Sociology department to conduct research and teach, continuing The New School’s tradition of welcoming academics from Europe. Speier’s wife lost her job as a doctor due to being Jewish, and the family found refuge at The New School in 1933, where Speier became a professor of sociology until 1942, returning in 1974 as a professor emeritus. Learn more about Speier here.

Prof. Marcucci talked with Research Matters about what he’s looking forward to this year, what needs to be interrogated about the status of critique between sociology and modern philosophy, the importance of intellectual history to reconstruct the relation between the two, the legacy of the French school of sociology, the NSSR archives and the role of French refugees.

RM: What was your path to becoming a Hans Speier Professor?

NM: Having spent some years as a visiting researcher at NSSR in the past, some colleagues knew my work in both the departments of Philosophy and Sociology. I received an offer to teach from the Sociology Department two years ago; I accepted with a lot of enthusiasm, but I had to refuse at the very last minute because I didn’t receive my visa in time. Since then, I’ve been in touch with the department of Sociology (to which I would like to express my gratitude) — and last year, this opportunity popped up. Long story short, it is very exciting to be here, because of what The New School represents, because I appreciate very much the possibility of teaching here, and because I got the opportunity of making up for the first, lost opportunity I got.

RM: As a visiting research fellow here in 2014-2016, what did NSSR offer to your scholarship? Who did you work with, and what did you develop here?

I was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie European fellow for three years at EHESS Paris, and during these years I was sponsored by this fellowship to spend two years at The New School. My research concerned Spinozism, Neo-Kantianism and their influence in French and German debates on sociological theory from the 70’s of the 19th century to the end of the First World War. Chiara Bottici [Associate Professor of Philosophy] invited me to NSSR (2014-2016), because of our common interests in Spinoza and critical theory. During my stay I also collaborated with Omri Boehm [Associate Professor of Philosophy], organizing an international conference titled: “Spinoza and Kant: Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics.” Meanwhile I continued developing the sociological side of my research and I organized an international conference titled: “Durkheim & Critique”. The contributions of this conference have been recently published in an edited volume.

RM: What made you want to return to teach further at NSSR? How does NSSR fit your ethos as an academic?

NM: I’ve been working as a researcher for many years. After obtaining my doctoral degree in history and sociology of modernity in Pisa, I taught and I researched in Berlin (Centre Marc Bloch and Humbodlt University) Paris (Sciences Po and EHESS) and Milan (Milano-Bicocca), and finally I arrived in New York. This, I think, says something about me and about why The New School is a desirable place for what I do; the international background of my research, and the interdisciplinary nature of it, are both reasons why I feel welcomed here. Moreover, I understand my work as a researcher as a way to critically engage with moral and political issues of the world I belong to, and The New School has supported intellectuals’ public engagement since its very origin.

During my stay as Hans Speier Professor, I’m working towards the publication of a “Durkheim Companion” that will be out next year, and I intend to finalize the research that I began in 2014 in the Philosophy department. As mentioned, this work consists of a reconstruction of the French and German classical sociological theory in the light of the fact that, since the late 18th century, an alternative emerged that opposed Spinozan to Kantian philosophies. This alternative, since the last decades of the 19th century, influenced the sociological debate and Durkheim’s search for an autonomous understanding of human reason, in part recovering the legacy of modern philosophy and in part breaking with it. My reconstruction ends with the way Durkheim and its school understood the sociological break with modern philosophy, offering an explanation of how it intended to overcome both Spinoza’s immanent rationalism and Kant’s transcendental idealism. This relation of continuity and rupture — the relation of philosophy and sociology — which my book intends to reconstruct, is something that can be fully granted only if we accept to move within an interdisciplinary dimension guaranteed and supported by intellectual history. Hopefully this research will be finalized by the end of the spring when I’m planning to present its results in Argentina, France, and Italy.

RM: In your writing, you flesh out the more nuanced political and methodological work of Émile Durkheim, regarded as the founder of sociology. What, broadly, do you think is misunderstood about Durkheim’s contributions to the discipline?

Durkheim intended to emancipate sociology from the legacy of philosophical Enlightenment (in the form that this took in Spinoza’s immanent rationalism and Kant’s transcendental idealism) by offering a sociological theory of the social constitution of the categories of the understanding. I think only another author had a similar ambition in the history of modern social theory: G. W. F. Hegel. To put it straightforwardly, I think that the contribution of Durkheim and its school — starting from completely different epistemological presuppositions and obtaining completely different results, but sharing a similar ambition to the one of Hegel’s social theory — should be taken seriously and considered as a different and somehow alternative paradigm in order to figure out what social critique is and could represent. In this last regard, I think the volume that I recently edited, Durkheim & Critique, contains a chorus of different voices intervening in this regard and the beginning of an answer to your question.

The relevance of Durkheim in regard to social critique is broad and requires some clarification though beyond the few things that I just said. What has been misunderstood, silenced or undeveloped in the past is the fact that there is something in Durkheim’s project that could be easily understood in the light of critical theory and not only for the reasons that I mentioned before. Since its beginning, critical theory concerned the attempt to think about the relation between philosophy and sociology, understanding their cooperation as a form of engagement which allowed theory to actively and reflexively participate in the quest for social justice immanent to modern societies. For this reason, a main polemical target of critical theory has been represented by positivism, a conception of social science shaped on the model of natural sciences, reclaiming an understanding of objectivity based on the frontal opposition of science and reality.

In my view, Durkheim has been misleadingly associated with this kind of positivism. Instead, we should focus on why he understood the rise of sociology as being historically and politically determined by the fact that philosophical critique appeared to run empty when confronted with the systemic injustice of modern societies. Sociology appeared to him as a viable solution to make sense of the same quest for social justice, immanent to modern societies, that years after, critical theory intended to follow, in the tradition of Hegel and Marx. The reasons that made Durkheim invisible in this respect have to do, I think, with the influence that Max Weber had in the project of critical theory and with the fact that his neo-Kantian epistemology consented to maintain a Marxian conception of history while the revolutionary expectations of the working class were declining. While Durkheim has been brought back by Jurgen Habermas, this, in part, happened in the light of a reception of his thought that reduced the critical and political ethos of the French sociologist’s theory by inserting it in a normative theory of justice that, de facto, was opposed to the main assumptions of his intellectual scholarship.

In the last decades though, a new reception of Durkheim has been developing, showing that, far from being the kind of conservative and positivist thinker that many had considered him to be, his epistemological project consisted in attempting to show how sociology represented a way to liberate social critique from the false alternative of liberalism and nationalism, resituating it in the field of democratic socialism. Many friends and colleagues in the LIER (my group of research at the EHESS) such as Bruno Karsenti, Cyril Lemieux and Francesco Callegaro, have made significant steps in this direction long before me. Durkheim’s epistemological project seems unintelligible without situating its critical ethos within those socialist ideals to which it intended to contribute by offering them a new form of reflexivity. Durkheim’s main ambition had consisted in enabling new possibilities for social and political action without pretending to define the political agenda of socialism. This relation of sociological critique and democratic socialism appears compelling to me today, because we live in an era characterized by public debates alternatively presenting liberalism and nationalism as inescapable ideological presuppositions, standing in the background and most often blocking our attempts to promote social change.

To escape this dramatic impasse of social critique, philosophy has lately appeared to be more and more seduced by the temptation of fully abdicating from its relation to social sciences in name of some radical social ontology that obliterates all the empirical and historical observations provided by sociology without which, in my view, no viable understanding of human institutions can be achieved. Today, to bring politics back — the message that an entire generation from Hannah Arendt to Claude Lefort defended — entails bringing back social sciences in the project of a critical theory of society It looks like the Durkheimian sociological school could help us in this regard.

RM: One of your projects here will be to do archival work around sociologist and jurist Georges Gurvitch. Why are you planning on returning to his work? How does Gurvitch stand out amongst the scholars of the University in Exile at The New School? How did the climate of The New School influence Gurvitch and his sociological work?

If, for the reasons that I briefly sketched out, the Durkheimian school has to be associated with the realm of democratic socialism and, I would like to add, with a reflection on the epistemic consequences of the “discovery” of social rights, this intent went in part lost in the generation following the first World War. (However, it survived in some fundamental but isolated intellectual trajectories such as the one of Marcel Mauss.) Georges Gurvitch participated in a second period bringing new energies and ideas in the debate. When he arrived in France in the late ‘20s he had already participated, before leaving his country, in the germinal experience of the Soviets during the Russian Revolution, and he became a specialist in German phenomenology. Once in Paris he found, in the Durkheimian tradition, an intellectual framework to think through the relation between social rights and legal pluralism. This legacy shaped his vision and represents the background of some of its most important works written in the ’30s. When Gurvitch arrived in New York and participated in establishing the Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes [a “university-in-exile” for French academics located at NSSR], this was his intellectual horizon.

Meanwhile in the ‘30s, a younger intellectual seemed confronted as well with the task of renewing the legacy of Durkheimism. His name was Claude Levi-Strauss. Around the beginning of the ‘40s, escaping Vichy France, both intellectuals came to NSSR. One of the things I’m doing in my actual research is trying to find some elements in the archives of The New School (I would like to thank Jenny Swadosh for her precious and generous help) and other archives (Yale and Rockefeller Foundation) concerning both Gurvitch and Levi-Strauss during their New York years, from ’40 to ‘45.

When Gurvitch arrived at NSSR, his work appears in full continuity with the political, critical, and socialist legacy of the Durkheimian school after the First World War. He originally elaborated this legacy and presented it to the American public, offering his defense of social rights and legal pluralism in different articles published in major journals. In the same years, Levi-Strauss was notably becoming familiar with the theories of Roman Jakobson, and his contribution to the debate on the French Sociological School seems to be already characterized by elements that, after the war, gave the tone to the structuralist turn in sociology and anthropology. In the same years, during his stay at NSSR, Gurvitch composed a sort of political manifesto, The Declaration of Social Right, hoping it would have contributed to the process of constitution-making of the French Fourth Republic.

Once back in France after the war, Gurvitch becomes professor of sociology at La Sorbonne, and Lévi-Strauss becomes the Lévi-Strauss we know: The Elementary Structures of Kinship is firstly published in 1949. Starting from the ‘50s, their intellectual collaboration ends and their relation is characterized by a growing disappointment and mutual criticism. Gurvitch did not succeed in renewing the Durkheim legacy in the way he probably had wished and the political expectations that nourished his ‘manifesto’ were not satisfied. His later works appear less interesting, mostly attempting to create an ambitious but very formal synthesis between his sociology and the Marxian tradition. There are no reasons to interrogate the success of Levi-Strauss’ intellectual project on the other hand, but the consequence of the transition to structuralism—as it already appears very clearly in Levi-Strauss’ introduction to Marcel Mauss, published in 1950 and prefaced by Georges Gurvitch himself—excluded some of the main political aspects that instead we have seen characterizing the intellectual and critical ethos of the Durkheimian school. The New School years of Gurvitch and Levi-Strauss represented the last appearance of the critical and political ethos of the French sociological school. NSSR represented the place where a reflection on the political legacy of the French Sociological School appeared before being interrupted and whose critical ambition appears today worth it to be re-explored.

RM: I have one more question I want to ask about teaching! It’s been about a month — how is your graduate Classical Sociology class going? How are you finding the students and discussions?

I’m having a great experience! It’s a great feeling to be physically back as a group of people sharing the same physical space, showing our faces — part of them at least — and discussing together after the full regime of isolation we have been exposed to for one year and a half. Secondly, I’m impressed by the attention and curiosity of many of my students. These two things are often separated. In some cases, students can be attentive but the respect for the authority of the teacher can somehow diminish their capability to perform and autonomously appropriate what is transmitted. In other cases, students’ eagerness to make sense, to intervene and to appropriate what they are learning can prevent them to fully acknowledge the autonomy of a text, its meaning and/or how to make sense of the intention of an author. Many of my students have shown both qualities at once, and for this reason they have taught me a lot.

Bessie Jane Rubinstein is a writer and a student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program. They live in Brooklyn, are rotating between 3+ books, and are always taking recommendations for more.

JHU Press · Social Research : In the time of Plague

A Look Back at 30+ Years of the Center for Public Scholarship

In 1988, Arien Mack had been editor of Social Research journal for almost 20 years when it occurred to her that organizing conferences would be one way to cultivate a wider audience, and a larger public voice, for the journal and The New School at large.

The topic of the first conference presented itself readily. Mack sets the scene for me in a Zoom discussion: In 1988, thousands of people were dying from AIDS, the U.S. government was not acting, and there was much public hysteria stoked by misinformation and prejudice. A conference situating the epidemic in social history seemed like “a calmer and more effective response to the problem,” says Mack. So Social Research presented a conference and attendant journal issue called “In Time of Plague: The History and Social Consequences of Lethal Epidemic Disease.”

Mack describes the conference as “very successful,” and it inaugurated a deeply involved series of conferences that then coalesced into the Center for Public Scholarship (CPS). Mack, Professor Emerita of Psychology and Director of the New University in Exile Consortium says this move followed the spirit of Alvin Johnson, co-founder and first president of The New School, who launched Social Research to provide the university with a public voice. CPS raised the money for the conference series with a mix of “work and luck,” as Mack tells it, and covered “a huge range of wonderful, fascinating subjects,” in her words. CPS also became one of several interdisciplinary centers and institutes at The New School for Social Research.

Now, after more than three decades of successful conferences and public lectures and events, CPS is wrapping up its programming.

Reflecting on standout conferences, Mack cited 2007’s “Punishment: The U.S. Record,” which invited professors of law, religion, and penal and social theory, as well as gathered writings from incarcerated individuals, to speak about the devastation wrought by mass incarceration in America.

In 2012, Mack established a branch of CPS called Public Voices, which sought to bring in singular, leading voices to discuss and think through the most urgent problems of the present. Mack fondly remembers a Public Voices event, one that “really mattered,” called “The Pros and Cons of US Universities Operating Campuses and Centers in Authoritarian Countries,” which discussed the extent to which universities with campuses in authoritarian countries are aiding and abetting, or complicit with, the oppressive regime.

CPS’s conference series attracted artists and academics alike. Mack says that the view of the Center was “very much to the outside, facing the world, trying to address these subjects” in “non technical, non academic,” but intellectual, terms. Poet John Hollander spoke at multiple conferences, including “Home, A Place in the World” in 1990, which approached the making and meaning of home amidst housing and migration crises, and one of Mack’s personal favorites, “In the Company of Animals” in 1995, which discussed animal rights and protections, our connection to them, their role in literature and religion, and more. A CPS conference on the artist’s necessary freedom of expression attracted artists such as Paul Chan, Ricardo Dominguez, Ai Weiwei, Shirin Neshat, and Chaw Ei Thein, and critics such as Holland Cotter. The 2019 conference, “Loyalty and Betrayal” coincided with The New School’s centennial celebration and featured a keynote address from Andrew McCabe, former Deputy Director of the FBI.

In 2020, CPS reissued the “In Time of Plague,” newly edited with analysis from experts on a wide range of subjects including, but not limited to, parallels between COVID-19 and the AIDS epidemic. Read a past Research Matters story on the issue, and listen to Mack discuss the issue below.

The penultimate CPS event, a panel on the future of higher education that was part of the investiture of New School President Dwight A. McBride, took place on October 6, 2021. While Mack planned the final CPS conference and latest Social Research issue well before the pandemic, “it couldn’t have been more timely,” says Mack. The subject? Loneliness. Read more about the event and register here.

As CPS wraps up, Mack will have more time to focus on the New University in Exile Consortium, an initiative she launched in 2018 to shelter, connect, and support scholars whose political views threaten their livelihoods, or their lives. She put it bluntly: The choice to close CPS was difficult because her heart was in it, “but all things being equal and life getting shorter and shorter,” raising money for the Consortium — they’re currently trying to bring at-risk Afghan artists to The New School — is an urgent priority.

Bessie Jane Rubinstein is a writer and a student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program. They live in Brooklyn, are rotating between 3+ books, and are always taking recommendations for more.

NSSR Welcomes Socioeconomist Till van Treeck as the 2021-2022 Heuss Professor

For the 2021-2022 academic year, The New School for Social Research is excited to welcome Till van Treeck as the Distinguished Heuss Professor in the Economics department.

Professor of Socioeconomics and head of the Institute for Socioeconomics at the University of Duisberg-Essen in Germany, Till van Treeck is a macroeconomist/political economist with an interdisciplinary orientation. His current research agenda is focused on the macroeconomic implications of income distribution, including the fields of sectoral imbalances (private households, corporate sector, government sector), external imbalances (export-led versus debt-led growth), personal saving and labor supply decisions (Veblen effects, Relative Income Hypothesis), and ecological issues. He also seeks to bring together macroeconomic and comparative political economy approaches to growth models.

The Heuss Professorship is a distinguished visiting professorship that brings a prominent German academic to NSSR each year to conduct research and teach, maintaining a decades-long bond between The New School and the German academic world. Learn more about the history of the Heuss Professorship in this Research Matters profile of Hubertus Buchstein, 2018-2019 Heuss Professor.

Prof. van Treeck responded to a Research Matters Q&A on what he’s looking forward to this year, and what social scientists need to know about income inequality, economics education, differences between the U.S. and Germany, and more.

RM: How did you learn about the Heuss Professorship opportunity? What interested you in it?

TVT: In the summer of 2019, I received a letter from Harald Hagemann, the chairman of the Heuss selection committee, asking whether I would be interested to be the next Heuss Professor. I was rather surprised, because I had never applied…But I was also immediately interested when I received that letter because I always regarded The New School as a unique academic institution whose tradition I admire and which was, in fact, an important source of inspiration for the establishment of my own, much younger professional home: the Institute for Socio-Economics (IFSO) at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, where I have served as a founding managing director since 2017 until the summer of 2021.

RM: What previous contact or relationship had you had with The New School or New School faculty members?

TVT: In a way, I feel that I know The New School quite well because many of its previous or current faculty members are important figures in the academic “bubble” that I am also a part of. I remember that, as a graduate student, there were two books by New School faculty members that made a huge impression on me: Reconstructing Macroeconomics by Lance Taylor [Professor Emeritus] and The Economics of Demand-Led Growth by Mark Setterfield [Professor and Chair of Economics]. At that time, I also read several inspiring articles by Anwar Shaikh [University in Exile Professor of Economics].

In recent years, Mark Setterfield’s research interests have been very close to my own, including economic inequality and varieties of capitalism, or the link between inequality and financial instability. We have discussed these issues at various conferences, including at the annual conference of the Forum for Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Policies (FMM) in Berlin which I co-organized a few times and where Mark has been a frequent contributor. I have also had fruitful exchanges with Willi Semmler [Arnhold Professor of International Cooperation and Development], who recently gave a talk at our IFSO research seminar in Duisburg. I also know quite a number of younger colleagues from German-speaking countries who did their PhD at the New School. They always report enthusiastically about this experience!

RM: What are you looking forward to in your time at NSSR as our 2021-2022 Heuss Professor?

TVT: Generally speaking, I look forward to learning more about NSSR in terms of both research and teaching activities. There are several New School faculty members whose works I have long found interesting and inspiring, but whom I have never met in person. So I am looking forward to getting to know them over the next year. And I am looking forward to engaging with NSSR students. At my home university, we recently created a new Master’s program in Socio-Economics as well as a PhD program on the Political Economy of Inequality, and I am sure that we can learn a lot from the established programs here at NSSR.

On a personal level, the Heuss Professorship opportunity comes very timely for me. In the past few years, I had many administrative duties surrounding the foundation of the IFSO. This, and entertaining and homeschooling three small children during the pandemic together with my wife, ate into both my research time and my leisure time. The perspective of spending an entire year in the unique intellectual environment which is The New School is something I really look forward to. And, of course, I do hope, not least for my family who is with me in New York City, that the pandemic will be gotten and remain under control throughout the next year and beyond.

RM: One of your research interests is income inequality, and in a recent paper, you write that inequality in Germany has been on the rise since the year 2000. How would you compare that to the levels of inequality seen in the U.S.?

TVT: Inequality has increased in Germany especially during the 2000s. But it is interesting to observe, and to try to explain why, different countries have experienced rather different patterns of income distribution (despite superficially similar trends in simple summary indicators such as the Gini coefficient* of household market income, which increased to a similar extent in Germany and the U.S. over the past decades). Interestingly, the share of household income going to households at the very top (top household income shares) has not increased nearly as much in Germany as it has in the U.S over the past decades. By contrast, the share of corporate income in the aggregate national income has increased, and the share of aggregate household income decreased, more strongly in Germany.

*The Gini coefficient is a measure of the distribution of income across a population often used as a gauge of income inequality.

RM: Another research interest is economics education. What is your general assessment of economics education — in Germany, in the U.S., globally — especially when it comes to heterodox perspectives? What work have you done in this area?

TVT: Among the guiding principles of citizenship education that any public school teacher has to abide by are the notions of prohibition of indoctrination and the imperative of controversial debate. It would go completely against the professional ethics of a social sciences teacher to tell their students that there is just one valid theory, or paradigm in the social sciences.

When I was a student, the teaching of economics, especially at the university level was clearly in crisis: most influential economics textbooks told students that there were certain key concepts and policy conclusions, based on Neoclassical economics, that essentially every economist agrees with. For example, more equality leads to less efficiency, or government debt in excess of x per cent of gross domestic products can only be bad for the economy. On top of that, Germany stands out as a country in which the economics discourse, including economics education, traditionally has been shaped by the so-called ordoliberal tradition which highlights the importance of (easy-to-teach and easy-to-learn) rules for economic policy making and which downplays, for example, Keynesian insights in the domains of fiscal or distribution policies. For a long time, even mainstream New Keynesian thinking, represented in the U.S. by such economists as Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz, was being marginalized in economics education in Germany in the same way as heterodox economics was marginalized in the U.S.

Today, it is my impression that controversial debate is gradually returning to lecture halls and class rooms both in Germany, the U.S., and globally. I find this highly encouraging and gratifying as I have tried to contribute to the opening up of economics education. For instance, during my time as managing director of a government-sponsored think tank in Germany, we were able to support the pluralism in economics student movement in Germany (one especially successful result is the Exploring Economics website, which we co-funded). I also co-authored a German-language online textbook on macroeconomic and economic policy issues designed for the high school level.

RM: At NSSR this fall, you’re teaching a course on political economy in the U.S. and Germany. What differences between the two countries do you think are critical for social scientists to be aware of?

TVT: In my current research, I look at the institutional factors that may explain why the German corporate sector has tended to retain a large fraction of their strongly rising profits, thereby restraining both aggregate household income (retained profits are not part of household income) and measured income inequality (retained profits accrue to mostly well-off owners of corporate wealth and if they were distributed to these individuals rather than retained by corporations, measured income inequality would be higher). I am also interested in the deeper societal and macroeconomic implications of the “German growth model,” especially in comparison with the “U.S. growth model”.

Put bluntly, the German corporate elite (unlike U.S. superstar managers, or the U.S. top income households more generally) so far have renounced ostentatious individual lifestyles but accumulated financial wealth for their (often family-owned) businesses. But the accumulation of corporate wealth within family firms is a driving force behind the very high wealth inequality in Germany as well as an important factor behind the structural weakness of domestic demand in Germany. This has resulted in an excessive dependence of the German economy on exports for the generation of aggregate demand and employment.

In the U.S., by contrast, a much larger chunk of the national income goes to top-income households. Combine this with the fact that such important positional, or status, goods as housing, education, health care etc. are allocated to a much larger extent via private markets in the U.S. compared to Germany and other “coordinated market economies.” You end up with a “growth model” which depends on (status-oriented and often credit-financed) private consumption as the main demand driver, and which produces persistent external deficits and financial instability. Not least, inequality and positional consumption can be an important obstacle to ecological sustainability to the extent that they hinder the transition to a low growth economy with shorter working hours.

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From Classrooms to Campaigns: Rebecca Bailin on Sociology and Organizing

When Rebecca Bailin took her first ever sociology class as an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia, she thought “Oh my god, this is the language I speak. This is how my brain works.” Enamored with the field, she pursued graduate study at The New School for Social Research, earning an MA in Sociology in 2012.

Most recently, Bailin has been the Campaign Manager with Invest in Our New York, a statewide coalition of 170 groups working to pass legislature that would end tax breaks for the richest New Yorkers. In Spring 2021, she spoke with Research Matters about her journey from classrooms to campaigns.

Moving from Academia into Organizing

As an MA student, “I was very interested in discourse analysis and cultural sociology,” Bailin says. “I really gravitated at the time towards the ways in which the discourses of leftist social movements tended to be exploited for explicitly capitalistic or neoliberal interests, not only by companies but also by institutions like governments and universities.”

She credits Terry Williams, Professor of Sociology; Rachel Sherman, Professor of Sociology; Robin Wagner-Pacifici, University Professor; and Miriam Ticktin, Associate Professor of Anthropology, for creating a supportive and engaging educational environment. Bailin loved the “rigorous thinking” that was expected of her and the opportunity to grapple with complex ideas.

After graduating, Bailin did not want to embark upon an intensive academic career. Instead, she became an organizer for the Riders Alliance, where she campaigned for more equitable and affordable public transit in New York City. Bailin says while her MA didn’t necessarily directly translate to her career, her background in sociology deeply informs the way she approaches the work.

“I didn’t learn how to be an organizer at school; I learned how to think. I was allowed to explore my intellectual thoughts and think creatively,” she asserts.

A large portion of her strategic organizing work comes down to navigating different spaces—understanding how they operate and what to say to ensure the message is heard.

“I think what The New School and my education in sociology set me up to do is to say ‘well, what if we think about it like this?’ It’s just set me up with a little more critical thinking about structures, nuance, and discourse.” Principles of discourse analysis equip Bailin to rethink the language she and other organizers use, and consider the impact that language has on the outcomes of their work. “I really pay a lot of attention to how we as organizers, and I mean ‘organizers’ broadly, think about or talk about our work. How does our way of thinking limit us compared to other ways of thinking?”

However, to run successful campaigns, Bailin also had to know when to step back from structural thinking and focus instead on the interpersonal nuances that underlie people’s decision-making. Focusing on the balance between structural and relational analysis sets her apart as a strategist. “I really distinguish myself from a policy person. I’m not policy. I am campaigns and strategy…The desire to think so much about accuracy and nuance is sometimes antithetical to winning,” she says. “It’s weird to be fond of both arenas and figuring out how to meld the two.”

Bailin’s balanced approach paid off immensely at the Riders Alliance. Her organizing was instrumental in big victories such as congestion pricing, discounted transit cards and the “Fair Fares” program for low-income New Yorkers — wins that have had a major impact on the daily lives of almost all city residents.

“Since the beginning of my career, my job has been to translate complicated policy and make it accessible for everyday New Yorkers in a way that could motivate them and inspire them to act. The goal is both to build power and to change the dynamics of power,” Bailin says.

Investing in New York

After eight year at the Riders Alliance and eight months in the New York City Mayor’s Office, Bailin got an opportunity to work for a campaign focused on a more just tax policy in New York State. In 2020, 170 organizations saw an opportunity to form a coalition and push for the change they need — six bills that will raise $50 billion in revenue — and “Invest in Our New York” was born. In order to win, the coalition needed a great strategist; that’s where Bailin came in.

“My job was difficult,” Bailin says. “It was both to guide the campaign strategically to help move it along, and to build consensus among our steering committee members to build a campaign.”

According to Bailin, it’s much easier to organize around specific “issues” like housing or healthcare than around a broader goal like tax redistribution. So Invest in Our New York had a hard decision to make. “Do we fight for the money to go to a specific thing or things, or do we say ‘no, we all need a bigger slice of the pie’ because all our issues are interconnected?” They chose the latter so that legislators would have a harder time breaking up the coalition by funding some issues at the expense of others.

As campaign manager, Bailin worked within the steering committee of 10 organizations as a facilitator and consensus builder. She also worked on campaign messaging, where her background in sociology proved crucial. “A lot of sociology is written in jargon. I love jargon, but you need to translate it, to talk about it in different ways to different audiences. And that’s at the core of organizing — being able to adjust to different audiences,” she says. “You have to find ways to talk about things that make them easy to understand and attractive enough to fight for.”

Understanding the right approach for every group of people ultimately comes down to strategic instinct. “I think a lot of that instinct and knowledge is informed by qualitative studies and qualitative work and discourse analysis — that’s really valuable in this work. It comes down to the ability to get a sense of what will motivate people, which I think I developed at The New School,” she says.

Building a winning strategy sometimes means navigating difficult disagreements over strategy. “When you’re identifying what is strategic, sometimes you’re engaging in and repeating discourses that are harmful,” Bailin says. During the campaign, this tension rose around the use of the term “fair” — some organizers asserted that they should avoid the word, because real “fairness” won’t rise out of legislative decisions. But the public understands what “fair” means. The “unfairness” of tax breaks for the rich and for investors, and not for the working or middle class, resonates.

“Saul Alinksy says that you need to organize the worlds that exist for the worlds you want, and that’s my approach. You need to figure out where to start so you can bring people along,” Bailin says.

After just three months of public campaigning, Invest In Our New York won $4 billion in this year’s budget — New York state’s biggest win for progressive taxation in the last decade. This spring, Bailin and Invest in Our New York planned for the next budget cycle with a focus on raising money for higher education, homelessness, overdose prevention, climate issues, and more. “What we were able to build in such a short time–it’s incredible. It’s historic,” she says.

After such a successful turn at Invest in Our New York, Bailin has her eyes set on a new opportunity. Soon, she’ll be leveraging her deep knowledge of New York State politics as Senior Advisor to New York State Senator Andrew Gounardes.

Cailin Potami is a writer, an editor, and a student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program. They live in Queens with their cats, Linguini and Tortellini.

Tatiana Llaguno Nieves Named Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellow

Tatiana Llaguno Nieves has been named a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellow by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars. The Newcombe Fellowship is the nation’s largest and most prestigious award for PhD candidates in the humanities and social sciences addressing questions of ethical and religious values. Each Fellow receives a 12-month award of $27,500 to support their final year of dissertation work.

Llaguno Nieves is a PhD candidate in political theory working under the supervision of Nancy Fraser, Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics. She is also pursuing the Graduate Certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her research areas include the history of political thought, social and political philosophy, critical theory, feminist theory, as well as critical approaches to capitalism.

“In my dissertation – provisionally titled ‘Paradoxes of Dependence: Towards a Political Theory of Our Dependent Condition’ – I propose to look at dependence as a generalized life experience and to systematize its study through an analysis of its subjective and objective dimension,” she explains. “I claim that we repudiate dependence not because it has an intrinsic connection to unfreedom, but because we experience it in an unsustainable manner in the context of alienated and asymmetrical social relations. I thus propose a normatively laden critique of the wrongness implied in our current organization of dependence and a reconceptualization of freedom, not opposed to but informed by our condition of dependence.”

Llaguno Nieves is spending a year as a visiting doctoral student at the Institut für Philosophie, Humboldt University of Berlin, under the supervision of Prof. Rahel Jaeggi and supported by a DAAD Long-term Doctoral Research Grant. Her research has also been supported by the Frank Altschul Dissertation Fellowship and a Fulbright Program doctoral fellowship.

She has developed and taught undergraduate courses at Pace University, the City University of New York, and The New School, from which she has received a 2019 Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award.

Liliana Gil and Sidra Kamran received Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowships

Liliana Gil, an Anthropology PhD candidate, will utilize the fellowship to complete her dissertation, “Beyond Make-Do Innovation: Practices and Politics of Technological Improvisation in Brazil”; apply for jobs; and, if conditions permit, conduct follow-up fieldwork with electronics industry workers in Manaus, Brazil.

Gil’s work is driven by a commitment to questioning hierarchies of knowledge. “Perhaps because I come from a working-class background, I’m drawn to the puzzle of how certain knowledges are recognized as skilled and expert vis-a-vis others that are just as demanding and vital to society,” she explains. “These rankings of value reflect structural forms of inequality – pertaining race, class, and gender – but also other historical and sociocultural factors. In my current project, I get to explore these issues by studying how historically and socially embedded forms of improvisation play a role in different spheres of tech production in Brazil.” Her main advisor is Hugh Raffles, Professor of Anthropology, and she also works with Miriam Ticktin, Associate Professor of Anthropology.

“I was truly honored,” says Gil of receiving the grant. “But I also took a moment to recall all the invisible work that went into this application. This was my second time applying and I was luckier this time around. Although it’s important to celebrate these achievements, I think we focus too much on accolades and don’t discuss ‘failure’ and ‘fortuity’ as part of our jobs. This can be very taxing, especially for first-generation college students. Fortunately, I have peers and mentors who are open about these issues.”

In addition to the Mellon/ACLS Fellowship, Gil has received a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant; a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, co-sponsored by the Science and Technology Studies and the Cultural Anthropology Programs; and the 2020 David Hakken Graduate Student Paper Prize, conferred by the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology & Computing of the American Anthropological Association, for an essay on innovation practices at a public fablab in the periphery of São Paulo in Brazil. She also received a 2020 New School’s Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award for her work creating and teaching an undergraduate “World Histories of Anthropology” course.

Sidra Kamran, a Sociology PhD candidate, will utilize the fellowship to complete her dissertation, “The (In)Visible Workers: Gender, Status, and Space in the New Service Economy in Pakistan,” as well as finish work on a journal article.

As Gil mentioned, much invisible labor and time go into applying for academic grants. When Kamran learned she had received the ACLS/Mellon Fellowship, she felt both happy and relieved. “I could stop applying for other fellowships and take some time off!” she says.

Kamran’s work broadly examines the interaction between changing gender and class norms. “In my dissertation, I use qualitative methods to understand how women beauty and retail workers navigate new types of status positions, work, intimacy, and urban life in Karachi, Pakistan,” she explains. Her advisor is Rachel Sherman, Professor of Sociology.

“I am involved in feminist and labor movements in Pakistan and the U.S., but as a researcher I explore how structural changes ostensibly unrelated to social movements shape gender and class equality,” Kamran continues. “I plan to examine how these supposedly ‘non-political’ processes interact with ‘political’ struggles.’” Her other research investigates how working-class women are active, if unlikely, participants in emerging forms of digital culture on TikTok in Pakistan. She is also interested in global flows of labor, social reproduction work, and the intersection between love, work, and money, and is inspired by Marxist-feminist approaches to these topics.

Kamran has also received a Junior Research Fellowship from the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, a Wenner Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, and a Graduate Fellowship from the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at The New School.

Follow Azeemah Kola on Twitter

Azeemah Kola Receives APA Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services Doctoral Fellowship

Azeemah Kola, a Clinical Psychology PhD candidate, has received a 2021-22 Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services Doctoral Fellowship, part of the Minority Fellowship Program of the American Psychological Association (APA). The fellowship will help support her as she completes her doctoral studies, and connect her to a broad network of other psychologists and psychologists-in-training who are specifically focused on working with racial and ethnic minorities.

Kola is broadly interested in how certain groups, particularly those that are marginalized, are perceived in society.

“Thus far, I have been interested in looking at this through the principle of magical contagion, which is the idea that the essence of a person or thing can be transferred through physical contact with an object,” she says. “In my MA thesis, I found that individuals were less likely to want to come into contact with objects that had been previously handled by obese individuals, suggesting that obesity is in fact wrongly viewed as communicable.”

Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Magical Contagion and Psychiatric Disorder,” uses magical contagion to look at the ways in which individuals treat those with psychiatric disorders. “Specifically, I am interested in understanding whether, and why, mental illness in particular may be seen as communicable, whether consciously or unconsciously, and whether this differs depending on the type of psychiatric disorder,” Kola shares. Her dissertation advisor is McWelling Todman, Professor of Clinical Practice.

Understanding exactly what conditions underlie stigma around mental health has a number of potential policy and practical applications, especially where attitudes toward mental health intersect with other issues, e.g. providing safe housing and support for unhoused populations, or dealing with mass trauma from catastrophic events like the COVID-19 pandemic. In many cases, mental health stigma and attitudes towards the individual may involve compounding prejudice, where biases and irrational beliefs about mental health collide with prejudices about race, ethnicity, legal status, chronic health conditions, or poverty.

Kola’s clinical interests center on the experiences of people of color. “I am interested in how established therapeutic models may apply (or not apply) cross-culturally, and how therapy that focuses on specific events or experiences may need to respond to or be aware of greater structural and systemic experiences of racism and inequality,” she says. This year, as an extern in the PTSD Clinic at the Brooklyn VA Medical Center, she is starting and co-facilitating a Race-Based Stress and Trauma psychotherapy group with her supervisor, also a woman of color. “We hope [this] will provide a space for veterans of color to acknowledge and process the often pervasive and repeated traumas of racism,” she shares.

“I felt incredibly fortunate [to receive this APA fellowship], not least because I felt empowered by the fellowship committee believing in my research, clinical focus, and its importance. I am also deeply grateful to the Psychology department at The New School and my mentors, in particular Dr. Todman, Dr. [Richelle] Allen, and Dr. [Daniel] Gaztambide, for their unwavering and beyond generous support of me and my application,” Kola says.

In addition to her studies, research, and externship, Kola writes a blog for Psychology Today and is a member of the APA’s Task Force on Climate Change, which she joined to help address the disproportionate impact of climate change on already vulnerable and marginalized groups.

Publications

Follow Fania Noel on Twitter

(Still) Making a Magazine in a Pandemic

Cailin Potami, Research Matters writer and Back Matter editor, reflects on the process of creating a magazine remotely with the Spring 2021 cohort of GPUB 6002:Multimedia Publishing Lab.

The Multimedia Publishing Lab course in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism (CPCJ) MA program at The New School for Social Research came highly recommended from fellow CPCJ MA student and former Research Matters writer Alexa Mauzy-Lewis, who wrote about the course last spring. But I had no intention of taking the course; it seemed like too much work during the last semester of graduate school.

But during the fall, it clicked for me. I couldn’t think of a more gratifying way to sew up my strange, Zoom-mediated graduate school experience than by building something new with a group of people equally hungry to create.

Each spring, Multimedia Publishing Lab students produce an issue of Back Matter magazine under the supervision and guidance of Jon Baskin, instructor and Associate Director of CPCJ, and founding editor of The Point, and Jesse Seegers, CPCJ and Parsons instructor, and overall design expert. Each issue of Back Matter looks at the worlds of journalism and publishing through a different lens. With the exception of that loose guideline, each class has complete creative freedom over the magazine’s vision.

Under typical circumstances, producing Back Matter is an intimidating endeavor. We had no idea how making a magazine from start to finish would go from our apartments, scattered across the country, as a pandemic raged around us.

The Multimedia Publishing Lab met over Zoom each week to create the third issue of *Back Matte*r.

Yet from the beginning, the process went surprisingly smoothly. We built out our editorial, digital, and design teams, as well as a wonderful one-person marketing and communications department, Hannah Hightman, Bachelor’s-Master’s (BA/MA) student in the BPATS self-designed liberal arts program. I became co-editor-in-chief along with CPCJ MA student Miko Yoshida, and we worked to facilitate a vision of a magazine without rigid hierarchy or perfectionism, where we would strive to create something original and representative of each person’s interests.

“The Back Matter media lab was a great learning experience for a number of reasons. It introduced me to the world of publishing and gave me an inside look at the process. It also gave me exposure to students with a wide range of skill sets,” says Yoshida. “I enjoyed the collaborative aspect the most, which hinged on mutual trust and a common objective — to create something meaningful.”

Traditionally, Back Matter prints articles that CPCJ students draft during the fall semester and workshop during the spring. While articles cover a wide range of topics, clear themes emerged, such as identity and community. A year into the pandemic, we’ve all been asking: What does it mean to be who I am? Who am I in relation to my communities — online and offline?

“The element of virtual collaboration and community in the time of COVID became a pinnacle of the theme of this issue, so it’s only fitting that our collaborative efforts existed on platforms like Zoom, Slack, Miro, and Gmail,” says Maya Bouvier-Lyons, CPCJ MA student and Back Matter art director. “I think our thoughts on the identity of the magazine were inevitably formed by those venues and avenues for communication.”

CPCJ MA student Canon Crummey grounds the magazine in the journalism world with her piece “Remote Reporting Today: How Things are Changing (And Staying the Same).
Creative Director and CPCJ MA student Olivia Heller looks at artists using Instagram to reclaim the female form in “Window to Her Soul.”
In her piece “The Honey of the Fruit Bearers,” Eugene Lang literature student Daryn Coates asks challenging questions about the commodification of cultural and spiritual practices.
The design team commissioned the photo essay “This Is What Community Looks Like” from artist Isaiah Winters to show the often-overlooked aspects of mutual aid.

The editorial team worked with writers to help them grapple with these questions and highlight the themes already underlying their work. Jessie Mohkami, CPCJ MA student and executive editor alongside Nicole Collazo Santana, Eugene Lang Journalism + Design and CPCJ BA/MA student, reveled in this aspect of the work. “One of the best parts of being on Back Matter’s editorial team was getting to collaborate with writers on their pieces from the beginning until the end,” she says. “They brought their already strong pieces from last semester and we got to work together on how to cut down and shape the pieces. I’ve often been in classes where I’ve suggested edits or additions to a piece and I never get to find out what happens, but seeing the process through with the writers was so rewarding.”

The design team, led by Bouvier-Lyons and Olivia Heller, CPCJ MA student, represented questions of identity and community by incorporating collage as well as digital design cues into the print magazine, which Dalia Amellal, Back Matter print designer and Parsons Theories of Urban Design MA student, masterfully pieced together.

“I’m so grateful for the opportunity this class granted me to be on the design side of things for a change,” says Bouvier-Lyons. “I was able to use an entirely different skill set from what I’m used to—thinking more visually about the big picture of the publication, and the smaller details that make up that whole.”

Likewise, the digital team — digital editor Sophie Lee, Journalism + Design BA student, and web designers Greg Coleman, CPCJ MA student, and Kevin Martinez, Journalism + Design BA student — brought collage to life online, thoughtfully adding analog and print notes. Together, we created something thoughtful, cohesive, and daring.

The *Back Matter* digital design team incorporated elements of collage and print, like in the website header (above).

It sounds cliché, but communication, compassion, and trust really made the magazine’s production possible across Zoom, Slack, and Miro. As managing editor, Christina Santi, CPCJ MA student, did the impossible — she kept everyone on task and on schedule across various time zones, on top of communicating with the printer, managing the budget, and working on her own piece for the magazine, “Can Fashion Sew Up Its Racism Problem?”. At the same time, Santi and the whole team made space for each other, listening intently to ideas and challenges, and always acknowledging the tremendous difficulty of navigating school, life, a magazine, and a pandemic. Each week in class, Yoshida took care to remind us that the magazine is a great learning experience, an opportunity to take on ambitious ideas without fear of failure, but ultimately, everyone’s wellbeing must come first.

“It takes a lot of trust and collaboration to create a magazine, and though that can be difficult to build virtually, I think the whole class was invested in making that a reality,” says Mohkami. “While there were some challenges presented by the virtual nature of the class, I think the entire team rose to the occasion and put in the time, effort, and communication to compensate for that factor,” agrees Bouvier-Lyons. “In a lot of ways, I think this would be a very different issue had we all been working on it together in a classroom.”

The print magazine — complete with thoughtful articles, an interactive online-in-print adventure, fun games, striking photos, and more — is hot off the presses, and its digital counterpart is now live. It has been an extraordinary gift to work on this magazine, and an experience I’ll carry with me forever.

Please join us at the Back Matter launch party, which will take place over Zoom on Wednesday, May 5^th, at 7:00PM.

Cailin Potami is a writer, an editor, and a student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program. They live in Queens with their cats, Linguini and Tortellini.

Tomas Lima Pimenta Receives DAAD Research Grant

Tomas Lima Pimenta has received a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Long-term Research Grant Award for the 2021-2022 academic year.

A Philosophy PhD candidate, Pimenta will spend a year at Freie Universität Berlin working with faculty member Robin Celikates. In addition to finishing work on his dissertation, he plans to participate in Celikates’ seminars and research groups, as well as activities of the Center for Humanities and Social Change at Humboldt University, directed by Celikates and Rahel Jaeggi.

“I felt delighted and relieved with the award,” says Pimenta. “I am excited to work with Celikates closely, to live in Berlin, and I am also relieved with the financial support….I am looking forward to focusing solely on my research after October.”

Pimenta’s dissertation addresses the contemporary spread of conspiracy theories as a fundamental tool of right-wing extremism propaganda. It gives an account of the crisis of liberal democracy through the notion of trust and the increasing distrust in institutions. It also offers a political-psychological account of political paranoia as a mode of subjectivity.

“This research is essentially motivated by the genocidal politics promoted by the ultraliberal government in Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic,” explains Pimenta. “It ultimately attempts to understand the suicidal logic, beyond the necropolitical logic, that dominates Brazilian society and explores the fundamental role of the conspirational subject in that process.” His dissertation advisor is Jay Bernstein, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy.

Originally trained as an economist specializing in Marxist Economics and Dependency Theory, Pimenta is deeply interested in both German and Latin American thought. In addition to this upcoming DAAD fellowship, he has twice been a fellow of NSSR’s Janey Program in Latin American Studies. “All my research interests are guided by the relevant social, political, and philosophical problems of Brazil and Latin America,” he says.

Fania Noel Receives AAUW International Fellowship

Fania Noel has received an AAUW International Fellowship for the 2021-2022 academic year.

A Haitian-born French Afrofeminist organizer, thinker, and writer, Noel is a Sociology PhD student broadly interested in Africana studies, critical race theory, Black feminism, Haitian diaspora and capitalism studies. For her dissertation, she is studying Black feminism on a global scale, highlighting “tension/divergence and convergence in ideology, praxis and political agenda and organization between Black feminism movement in predominantly non-Black countries and the ones in Black countries regarding white supremacy, neo-liberalism, hetero-patriarchy, (neo)-colonialism and internationalism/panafricanism.” She is working closely on this research with Deva Woodly, Associate Professor of Politics, and Benoit Challand, Associate Professor of Sociology.

Receiving the news about the AAUW fellowship was a joyous moment for Noel amid a year of remote study; she felt “like Megan Thee Stallion feat. Beyoncé’s Savage Remix,” she shares. She plans to utilize the fellowship support to do archival research and carry out interviews across Europe in Summer 2021 and in Haïti in December 2021.

In addition to her academic work at NSSR, Noel organizes with grassroots movements such as Mwasi-Collectif Afrofeminist against anti-Blackness and Black feminism in France. She is also deeply involved in writing and publishing; in 2014, she founded Revue AssiégéEs (Besieged), a political publishing project led by women, queer and trans people of color, and in 2019, Syllepse Edition, a radical French publishing house, published her book Afro-communautaire: Appartenir à nous-mêmes (Afro-Community: To Belong to Ourselves). A manifesto, Afro-communautaire presents an Afro-revolutionary and anti-imperialist utopia for the political organization of Black people in France against racial politics and neoliberalism.

“I believe in radical Black feminist futures,” says Noel. “My commitment to Black Feminism politics, and Black liberation anchored the sense of accountability by not reinforcing the ‘carceralisation’ of knowledge in academia. My goal is to use the resources in my disposition to create political collective power where Black struggles are.”

Meet Our Postdocs: Niina Vuolajarvi Brings Activism-Informed Research to the Zolberg Institute

Before starting her PhD in Sociology at Rutgers University, Vuolajarvi organized around migrant rights, anti-racism, feminist movements and sexual rights in Nordic countries. Later, as a doctoral student in Finland, she became aware of the debate surrounding sex work, especially one curious characteristic of the discourse: “The way feminists have been one of the main groups promoting oppression of sex workers rights and sex workers’ self-expression,” she says.

Vuolajarvi began her doctoral field work among migrant sex workers in 2013, when discussions of the “Nordic model” of legislation—which criminalizes the purchasing of sex, but not the selling of it—were increasing in Finland. As part of her organizing work with feminist networks trying to halt the promotion of these laws, Vuolajarvi compiled a research report on the effect of client criminalization on sex workers for the Finnish National Gender Studies Association.

“I noticed there actually wasn’t much empirical research done involving sex workers themselves, interviewing them to see how [they] themselves experienced this law,” Vuolajarvi says. “There was especially no research that would have included migrant sex workers.”

Eager to address this disparity for organizing work and for her dissertation, Vuolajarvi interviewed over 200 people, most of whom were sex workers, in Finland, Sweden, and Norway. “I tried to talk with people from different residence permit categories, from different ethnic groups, and also different working locations to really make an intervention in the debate,” she explains. She published her results in her dissertation, Governing in the Name of Caring: Migration, Sex Work and the ‘Nordic Model’.

Her commitment to centering the voices of directly impacted individuals in academic debates is one way that Vuolajarvi’s background in activism informs her approach as a scholar. She has thoughtfully moved between those spheres, always considering the impact her research could have on the communities it focuses on.

From 2015 to 2017, Vuolajarvi worked as the main researcher on an interdisciplinary project called Deported, which raised public awareness of the criminalization of migration’s impact on communities. The project won the 2017 Visual Journalism of the Year Award.

“You have to make sure your research doesn’t just serve you and your academic career, but that it’s really available to communities to advocate for their rights.”
-Niina Vuolajarvi

“Especially doing research with populations that have been historically mistreated by researchers, where the research has often been mobilized to initiatives that work against these communities, I think it’s very important to think about the politics of your research and what your research does,” she cautions. “You have to make sure your research doesn’t just serve you and your academic career, but that it’s really available to communities to advocate for their rights.”

“I don’t want to speak for sex workers. I think they are very capable of speaking for themselves and can voice their concerns much better than I do,” she explains. “But I also think that producing knowledge and providing tools for the movements in this ‘expert’ role can have a different impact in the debates.”

Since January, Vuolajarvi has met weekly with the Zolberg Institute, where she is developing her dissertation research into a book. “I’m really happy to be at the Zolberg Institute. I took courses there as a graduate student at Rutgers,” she says. “They nurture a very open and warm environment, so it was really easy to land even in the time of Zoom.” Vuolajarvi also hopes to collaborate with The New School’s Gender and Sexualities Studies Institute.

“Niina will expand the focus of the Institute, through her important scholarship and new courses she will add to our curriculum,” says Alex Aleinikoff, University Professor and Director of the Zolberg Institute. “We are thrilled to have her join us.”

Vuolajarvi also hopes to begin research on “the technologies of governance and policing of sex work,” analyzing the ways that technologies like social media and money transfer companies use algorithms to police sex work. “I would like to look more into these new forms of governance, how they function and how they affect the way sex workers organize their everyday working lives,” she explains. “Also, I want to research how the communities organize to resist these new forms of control.” Vuolajarvi has already published more than 20 articles, book chapters, book reviews and research reports on the policies and politics of immigration, commercial sex, and healthcare.

Vuolajarvi hopes to move to in-person work at The New School in Fall 2021. “It’s been a very positive experience so far,” she says. “I’m looking forward to getting into the everyday life of the New School.”

Cailin Potami is a writer, an editor, and a student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program. They live in Queens with their cats, Linguini and Tortellini.

National Science Foundation Awards Jeremy Ginges for Research on Religion and Human Conflict

The National Science Foundation recently awarded Jeremy Ginges, Associate Professor of Psychology, a major grant to support a multiyear research project entitled “Religion and Human Conflict.”

The award, totaling $646,716, will support Ginges and the members of his Social and Political Psychology Lab — including New School for Social Research Psychology graduate students Anne Lehner and Starlett Hartley, and postdoctoral fellow Mikey Pasek — as they develop, according to their abstract, a “theoretical framework that will allow us to understand, predict and model how religious belief influences intergroup relations, sometimes encouraging cooperation and tolerance, and at other times promoting conflict.” A supplemental award of $47,700 will allow Ginges to involve six undergraduate students from underrepresented groups from Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts in the research project as well.

Throughout his career, Ginges has focused his research on two main questions: How do humans decide whether to cooperate across cultural boundaries, and why do people sacrifice everything (their own lives, the lives of loved ones) for an abstract cause like a nation or a god? He and his lab members have investigated these questions in places around the world that oscillate between “extreme conflict and surprising cooperation,” such as Israel-Palestine, Lebanon, Fiji, and Indonesia.

“The mainstream view was that beliefs in moralizing gods [gods that police behavior], and different divergent beliefs in gods….spread because they help groups become tightly knit cooperative entities that could outcompete other groups. It’s another way of saying they cause intergroup conflict,” explains Ginges. “We’ve been doing research showing that that’s actually not the case.”

In a recent article led by Julia Smith, an NSSR graduate and current doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan, Ginges and his co-investigators show that, contrary to those mainstream views, belief in moralizing gods actually discourages dehumanization of other ethnoreligious groups. His lab is currently preparing a paper on an experiment in which participants were given a set amount of money and encouraged to share it with strangers. Participants initially gave more money to members of their religious group, but when prompted to think about their god, they ended up giving more money overall, regardless of who they were interacting with.

The NSF grant will help Ginges and his lab members better understand exactly when and how belief in moralizing gods makes intergroup relationships better, and when and why it sometimes makes them worse. In the case of the money-giving experiment, if a norm is to share money, thinking about god will enhance that generosity. However, if a norm is to fight a different ethnoreligious group, then thinking about god might instead increase that aggression.

In addition to better understanding how religious beliefs may have shaped, and continue to shape, cooperation between people living in diverse, complex societies, Ginges hopes that his research may inform public policy on a range of issues.

“There are implications for this research in how we understand issues around multiculturalism, particularly religious diversity and immigration,” he explains. “And also, understanding more deeply when religious belief can be used, or is used, to promote prosociality can help organizations aimed at encouraging cooperation.”

Given improving pandemic conditions, Ginges is hopeful that he and his lab members can begin running filed experiments in this multiyear project in Fall 2021. Research and fieldwork will take place with participants in the U.S. as well as Israel-Palestine and Fiji.

Meet Our Postdocs: Romy Opperman Brings Black Feminist Ecologies to the Philosophy Department

As a student of continental philosophy, Opperman has always been interested in “questions of control and management of life.” Opperman began looking at the ways Africana philosophy engages with the continental tradition and, at times, repurposes it, posing questions about “humanism, its limits and its links to violence; animality and how it’s bound up in race; and hegemonic conceptions of nature,” and pointing to aspects that thinkers like Foucault had missed in his analysis of racism and biopower.

That interest took a new form when Opperman was in graduate school at Pennsylvania State University and considering her dissertation. “I was increasingly engaged in Africana philosophy and decolonial philosophy at the same time that a new public consciousness arose around environmental justice issues,” she explains. Opperman saw those philosophical questions come to life through mass political and social movements, from the organized opposition to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline through Standing Rock Reservation to increased public pressure to provide residents of Flint, Michigan with clean water. “I began thinking about what tools I found within continental philosophy and Africana philosophy for trying to understand these events in ways that I thought were useful and different from how one might typically approach them,” she says.

Opperman’s work challenges mainstream conceptions of racism and environmental issues as distinct, with only occasional overlap. “My use of the term racist environments aims to show how racism and the environment are in fact co-constitutive,” she explains. “This is different from the way that environmental racism is commonly understood, that is, where racism and the environment are only sometimes linked in exceptional circumstances.” She proposes a turn to radical Black ecology, which emphasizes the possibility and necessity of imagining a radically different way of being.

Opperman speaks on a panel on Climate Ethics and Environmental Justice at Princeton University, October 2, 2020.

Through her dissertation, “Race, Ecology, Freedom: Climate Justice and Environmental Racism,” Opperman “brought to the fore issues of power, domination, and normativity” by turning her philosophical attention to something discourses in philosophy often overlook: the communities that have already felt the impact of climate change and developed expertise to survive.

“I argued that the radical critique of liberal humanism common to the work of Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, and Saidiya Hartman shows us why it is necessary to break with liberal frames of environmental injustice and offers grounds for an alternative approach to understand the nature of the harm of environmental racism, the stakes of struggles against it, and to imagine its redress, which I term ecological freedom,” Opperman recalls.

Connecting at NSSR

At NSSR, Opperman raises many of the same questions in “Black Feminist Thought: Labor, Genealogy, Memory” a graduate philosophy course she’s taught during the spring 2021 semester. While it’s not explicitly about climate change, the course includes readings from Christina Sharpe and Sylvia Wynter on Black feminist ecologies, and, as Opperman explained, race and the environment are inextricable. “It’s been really important and special for me to be able to go into my first job in a philosophy department and teach a graduate course on Black feminist thought,” Opperman says. “It’s a dream situation!”

Opperman speaks on a panel on Black Feminist Ecologies at Wesleyan University, February 24, 2021

As she continues working within NSSR’s Philosophy department, Opperman hopes to recruit more women to the graduate program and to expand its curriculum. “Putting feminist philosophy — particularly, but not only, Black and decolonial [feminist] philosophy — as part of our core agenda is really important to me,” she says.

Opperman’s presence has already had a major impact. “We are tremendously happy to have Romy joining the department. Her graduate seminar is making a crucial contribution to our curriculum, as is her writing seminar, which she developed to provide graduate students with much-needed feedback on writing with an eye towards publication,” Zed Adams, Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy says. “It is quickly becoming hard to remember what our department was like without her.”

At its heart, Opperman’s work is deeply interdisciplinary; it incorporates critical theory, film criticism, and gender and sexualities studies. In that spirit, she’s also involved with The New School’s cross-divisional Collaborative on Climate Futures, led by faculty from NSSR and Parsons. Opperman is excited to collaborate with academics from a wide range of backgrounds working on the same questions of race, environment, and power.

Opperman has also worked in collaboration with the Gender and Sexualities Studies Institute (GSSI). She organized and presented at the March 22 GSSI event “Finding Ceremony: Honoring Black Feminist Elders,” which focused on the legacy of Black feminists like Sylvia Wynter and Alexis Pauline Gumbs and former New School professor M. Jacqui Alexander, who Opperman describes as “an amazing queer trans-national Black feminist thinker and spiritual practitioner.”

For the GSSI blog, she wrote “Haunting and Hosting,” which analyses the films Ghost and Twilight City, as well as Alexander’s account of her experience at NSSR, through the lens of Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing. Opperman hopes to continue collaborating with the GSSI, and to uplift the status of Gender and Sexualities Studies within NSSR.

In addition to working on articles that ask how established topics within climate justice such as debt, intergenerational ethics, and migration are transformed when approached from Black and decolonial feminist grounds, Opperman is working to turn her dissertation into a book, tentatively titled Africana Ecopolitics: Radical Philosophies of Ecological Freedom. The book will incorporate the perspectives of a wider range of Africana thinkers, and further develop its explanation of “ecological freedom” in relation to decolonization and abolition. “It’s been a really exciting time in terms of a kind of explosion of interdisciplinary work around race and ecology… I think philosophy does have some important tools to offer and ways of thinking that could be a really useful part of that,” she says. “I’m figuring out the best ways [philosophy] can complement people doing all kinds of this work.”

Cailin Potami is a writer, an editor, and a student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program. They live in Queens with their cats, Linguini and Tortellini.

News

The New School for Social Research Launches Three New Graduate Minors

This piece originally appeared in the New School News

Graduate students at The New School have a unique opportunity to enrich their academic experience through cross-disciplinary study in graduate minors. These programs give students an opportunity to immerse themselves in disciplines outside of their primary field of study, gain exposure to new ideas and research methods and practices, and develop new ways to think about the world. Recently The New School for Social Research (NSSR) announced three new minor programs launching in the fall 2021 semester: Global Mental Health, Anthropology and Design, and Critical Perspectives on Democratic Anti-Colonialism.

These new minors build on NSSR’s innovative academic approach, combining social theory, policy, and design. “These new graduate minors will enhance the experience of graduate students at The New School by giving them access to focused knowledge outside the boundaries of the standard learning pathways,” says Will Milberg, dean of The New School for Social Research.

Today mental health problems are among the leading causes of mortality and disability around the world. The Global Mental Health graduate minor explores some of the most pressing issues contributing to the ever-increasing number of people living with mental health disorders worldwide. Organized by Adam Brown, associate professor of psychology and vice provost for Research, the program is open to graduate students across the university and draws on a variety of disciplines and methodologies to give students a foundation from which to critically examine mental health treatment gaps and disparities in care. Brown was interested in creating a program that would address the many intersections that factor into this problem.

“There continue to be major gaps in access to care and stigmas that make it hard for people to gain access to mental health care throughout the world,” says Brown. “Some of the current challenges require the development of new mental health interventions. However, many of the challenges are related to policies, inequities, and other aspects of basic human rights. We need not only psychology graduates, but also students from across the university to think carefully and ethically about ways to work across sectors and contexts to re-imagine mental health delivery and care.”

The field is expected to experience tremendous growth in the next few years, as concern about mental health and well-being expands to new environments . “We are already seeing companies, schools, and governmental agencies investing more in mental health strategies to support their staff. I am hopeful that this minor can prepare our graduates to take on leadership and transformational roles in this space, whether they are coming from the perspective of psychology, strategic design, political science, economics, and so on.”

Blending social science with design, the Anthropology and Design minor prepares students to think more critically and creatively about anthropology and ethnography, the designed world, and their own research. Students have the opportunity to study design and technology through an established discipline that emphasizes reflective methodology, ethical frameworks of analysis, and awareness of the political stakes of both research and creative practice. It builds on the Anthropology + Design area of study, which was created two years ago and attracted students from various programs in NSSR, Parsons School of Design, the Schools of Public Engagement, and Eugene Lang College.

In organizing this program, Shannon Mattern, professor of anthropology, drew on the relationships she’s built from her numerous collaborations with faculty and students — everything from organizing events to curating exhibitions to serving as a guest critic in Parsons studios — in her 17 years at the university. “Every semester, I reach out to select faculty to make sure Anthropology students would be both welcome in and prepared for their classes. Students in those other programs — Data Visualization, Design and Technology, Design and Urban Ecologies, Environmental Policy, History of Design and Curatorial Studies, Media Studies, Public and Urban Policy, Theories of Urban Practice — also join us in NSSR. This intermixing makes for a dynamic, constructive space of collaboration and knowledge sharing,” says Mattern.

Also launching this fall is Critical Perspectives on Democratic Anti-Colonialism, which explores the theoretical foundations and political manifestations of radical democratic and anticolonial traditions. Organized by Carlos Forment, associate professor of sociology, and Andreas Kalyvas, associate professor of politics, the minor examines the changing meanings and practices of dissent, resistance, and self-rule that have emerged in the modern world. Currently available only to NSSR students, the minor will provide participants with a sophisticated understanding of alternative approaches for the study of power relations, regimes of knowledge, and the social movements that develop in response to them.

“The minors allow participants to engage more deeply with faculty and students from different disciplines who share their intellectual interests,” adds Milberg. “This represents an important innovation in our graduate curriculum, and I look forward to seeing how students take advantage of this opportunity.”

National Science Foundation Awards NSSR Student Santiago Mandirola for Research on Latin American Socio-Economic Life

Mandirola’s research explores the role of consumer credit scoring systems and Financial Technology (FinTech) in the socio-economic lives of people living in South America’s Southern Cone.

While credit scores have become cornerstones of socio-economic life in the U.S., determining who can afford to buy a house or go back to school, large-scale credit scoring systems have not been able to take hold in Latin America in the same way. The most obvious reason for the disparity, Mandirola says, is that far fewer people there engage with formal banking systems — only about half of the population has access to a bank account, and they generally have enough resources to meet their needs without credit.

Mandirola is particularly interested in the methods FinTech companies have adopted to fill that gap since moving into Latin America’s credit industry in the 2010s. “I’m trying to look at what programmers, engineers, and risk analysts do in order to take information that is traditionally non-economic, like a certain person’s browsing patterns…and how they refine that information so they can make economic predictions about whether or not that particular buyer is credit-worthy,” he explains.

“I’m always concerned about trying to get as close to the subject as I can, and to try to use that information in a way that is as faithful as possible to the source.”

With the NSF grant, Mandirola hopes to travel to agencies developing new methods for credit scoring to observe their processes and conduct interviews with staff. He also plans to attend FinTech conferences and seminars to learn about innovations in the field. While COVID-19 may change his methods, Mandirola says his research style will remain the same. “I’m always concerned about trying to get as close to the subject as I can, and to try to use that information in a way that is as faithful as possible to the source.” he says. “There’s time later to analytically interpret the data collected.”

The topic is a personal one. As a sociology undergraduate in his home country of Argentina, Mandirola became “interested in the processes that try to impose a certain order to that uncertainty, and reliance on that order to make plans, calculations and estimations of how things will go in the future.” When he moved to New York for graduate school at The New School for Social Research (NSSR), he found that every lease he applied for required a credit score — something he did not have — and his interest in that magical three-digit number ignited.

In the 2018-2019 academic year, Mandirola developed and presented the first iteration of his research as part of his fellowship at NSSR’s Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies. Mandirola says the Integrative PhD program, where he was a fellow from 2018-2020, helped him expand his research into the field of Science and Technology studies, broadening his scope to include FinTech. He also has workshopped this project and others at the Janey Program in Latin American Studies, where he is a 2020-2021 fellow. In addition to the fellowship, Mandirola helped operate the Janey Program as a student assistant to the director, Federico Finchelstein, Professor of History.

Mandirola says two NSSR faculty members in particular, have played an integral role in this research. Carlos Forment, Associate Professor of Sociology and Mandirola’s doctoral advisor, has provided important guidance that has helped the project evolve. Forment is the Principal Investigator for Mandirola’s project, and has had a pivotal role in supporting his application and in crafting and improving the project itself.

“Working with Santiago over the years has been immensely rewarding. He taught me what I know about the current debates on FinTech,” Forment says. “Once I had a basic understanding of them, I encouraged him to break with the standard accounts that, not surprisingly, remain focused on the ‘Anglo-European’ world. In studying the particularities of FinTech in Argentina, Santiago is in uncharted territory and joining a small group of scholars who are seeking to rethink the terms of the debate. Santiago is eminently qualified for the task he has set himself.”

Emma Park, Assistant Professor of History and a 2020-2021 Heilbroner Center Faculty Fellow, has supported Mandirola by closely and thoughtfully reading his proposal, and helping him perfect his writing.

“Working and thinking with Santiago over the past couple years has been tremendously gratifying,” Park says. “I have no doubt that his research will not only contribute to our understandings of how the market for credit has been assembled by FinTech firms in the Southern Cone, but is poised to make important contributions to the growing scholarship within Science and Technology Studies that takes sites outside of Euro-America as their point of departure. The research is timely and politically consequential. I couldn’t be more thrilled!”

Ultimately, Mandirola aims to de-mystify credit scoring tools and determine what influence they have on people’s lives.

“I think this is a moment in which we have to focus more on the impact that these elements can have on our economic lives, our social lives, and especially the lives of more vulnerable populations, who are the ones usually resorting to alternative financial services,” Mandirola proposes. “Is it an impact that’s improving the lives of the people affected by it or not? Just as simple and complex as that.”

Read about how The New School’s Office of Research Support worked with Santiago Mandirola on his dissertation here.

Cailin Potami is a writer, an editor, and a student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program. They live in Queens with their cats, Linguini and Tortellini.

NSSR Student Karolina Koziura Wins Józef Tischner Junior Visiting Fellowship

Karolina Koziura has won a Józef Tischner Junior Visiting Fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna to work on her dissertation, tentatively titled “Erasing Disaster: The Global Production of Silence and the Great Ukrainian Famine.” From June through October 2021, Koziura will focus on her research, which explores “the production of silence and denial of disasters as shaped by political, media, and scientific narratives.”

Koziura is a PhD candidate in Sociology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research. The roles of political memory and constructed narratives in Central and Eastern Europe play a central role in her work, which has also included a project on the Great Ukrainian Famine. Her work has appeared in many publications, including East European Politics and Societies, Culture, and Ukraina Moderna. Her advisor is Virag Molnar, Associate Professor of Sociology. Koziura is also part of the Decolonizing Eastern European Studies group at NSSR, organized by Jessica Pisano, Associate Professor of Politics.

Koziura has received an NSSR Prize Fellowship (2014-2017) and the Integrative PhD Fellowship (2018-2020). Her research has also been supported by an American Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies Association Dissertation Research Grant and the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium.

Cailin Potami is a writer, an editor, and a student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program. They live in Queens with their cats, Linguini and Tortellini.

Bachelor’s-Master’s Program Helps Students Reach New Heights

The Bachelor’s-Master’s (BAMA) Program makes that opportunity even more accessible, helping current New School undergrads from Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts and the Bachelor’s Program for Adults and Transfer Students start graduate work sooner. BAMA students can earn two degrees in as little as five years, saving both time and money. Bachelor’s programs are mapped on pathways to Master’s programs at The New School for Social Research, the Schools of Public Engagement, and Parsons School of Design.

What is that experience like? To find out, Research Matters spoke with two current BAMA students and a BAMA alum about why they chose the program, how it’s helped them, and what they advise undergraduates considering this special program.

Anya Isabel Andrews

BA Sociology 2021 from Lang, MA Liberal Studies 2022 from NSSR

“The BAMA program is such a good opportunity for students to challenge themselves and get the most out of their school.”

Anya Isabel Andrews began her academic career as a neuroscience student at another college. But after an opportunity to tutor students in a juvenile detention center, she decided to transfer to The New School, study sociology, and pursue her longtime dream of becoming a teacher.

The BAMA program gives Andrews the opportunity to broaden the scope of her education in support of her professional ambitions.

“I want to be a teacher, but I have a lot of work to do to become the teacher I want to be, Andrews says. “I’m really interested in trying to expand the classroom into something that it hasn’t looked like for the last 150 years, to see and serve the whole student.”

Together with her advisor, Andrews built her own interdisciplinary curriculum by asking herself, “how is it that I would want to learn?” She added two undergraduate minors, in Politics and in Ethnicity & Race. Classes like “Other Worlds: Exploring the Critical Realms of Science Fiction” with Ricardo Montez, Professor of Performance Studies; “Blind Spots of NYC,” co-taught by Benoit Challand, Professor of Sociology, and Kamau Ware, artist, storyteller, and creator of The Black Gotham Experience; and “Fugitive Planning” with Mia White, Professor of Environmental Studies at Milano School of Management, expanded Andrews’ ideas of education and the world.

The class that has most influenced Andrews’ BA thesis work centered was an art history course, a discipline she had never previously studied. Race, Empire and Archive with Iliana Cepero, Professor of Modern/Contemporary Art History and Visual Studies, examines imperial artists’ representations of colonized peoples. Cepero’s use of art as a means to “engage with the complexity of colonization and socio-racial relations in Latin America” inspired Andrews to create a research project.

“I examined racism and the erasure of African culture from Puerto Rico’s history as it appears in, inspires and is reinforced by, art in social, educational, and institutional realms,” Andrews says. She hopes to show how art “changes the way that we see each other in social life, but also see how it can rearrange inherently racist, colonial thoughts.” Andrews presented this research at the Spring 2020 Dean’s Honors Symposium, and she plans to develop it into her MA thesis.

Andrews recently began taking graduate-level courses and has felt a palpable shift in the energy in graduate classrooms. While being the youngest person in the room can be difficult, “other people in my class never fail to be able to push the bar a little higher for me,” she says.

The BAMA program encourages an attitude of growth, a quality Andrews values. She’s a student activist and was a member of the Black Student Union’s board for two years. “An institution should grow just as much as we should,” she says. “The BAMA program is such a good opportunity for students to challenge themselves and get the most out of their school. An institution has its limitations. If you can use it to further your education, you can turn around and say to that institution ‘Hey, do you want to come along, too? Do you want to grow as well?’ That’s what I want to do coming out of this school.”

Andrews plans to go abroad in pursuit of a Master’s degree in Education after graduation, so she can apply the skills she’s learned to rebuild the United States’ education system.

Oscar Fossum

BA Global Studies 2020 from Lang, MA Anthropology 2021 from NSSR

“The BAMA program helped me get two degrees done in five years. As a non-traditional student, that was a big plus for me.”

Oscar Fossum had an unconventional path to The New School. In 2014, he began a BA in Political Science at another university, but took leave to work for a start-up nonprofit called WeCount. There, he designed a web-based tool that connected unhoused people with services and resources, working under the guidance of an anthropologist who showed him the critical human element of design.

“We were able to use his research to better understand one of our big user groups,” Fossum explains. “If you really understand the population of the people you’re trying to serve, you know how to reach them, how to connect with them, how to engage with them, how to build something for them.”

WeCount was a “genesis point” for Fossum’s interest in anthropology and design. The New School’s BAMA program provided a direct path for Fossum to continue the research he had become passionate about. He entered the Global Studies program at Lang with a Chinese Studies minor.

“The BAMA program helped me get two degrees done in five years. As a non-traditional student, that was a big plus for me,” Fossum says. “As a person with a background in making a technology for a marginalized group of people that actually understands this population, The New School seems like a good place to get a design research background, not from a corporate money-making angle, but as a generative way to make better experiences for people.”

Fossum’s undergraduate classes gave him room to explore different disciplines while remaining oriented toward his goal. “I was taking classes that critically examined infrastructures, but I was also taking design classes with an emphasis on community engagement,” he says. One of his favorite classes was “Technopolitics” with Antina von Schnitzler, Professor of Anthropology, which helped lay the groundwork for his research on infrastructures as social artifacts, and the social formations built around them.

“I feel really glad that I was able to assemble my curriculum to meet the goals that I have for anthropology and design,” Fossum says.

Shannon Mattern, Professor of Anthropology and head of the Anthropology and Design subject area for MA students, has worked with Fossum since 2018. She guided him from his undergraduate research on zoning laws in New York City to shift his focus to the topography of the internet, specifically mesh networks.

For the last year, Fossum has researched mesh internet networks in New York City, and created a podcast chronicling his interviews with people like Greta Byrum from the Digital Equity Laboratory. “This technology was an immediate case of internet infrastructures being deployed in a non-mainstream, anti-corporate way…it’s a great project for The New School, where we think about subverting dominant narratives,” Fossum says.

Since completing his BA, Fossum has worked to create a more formal space for anthropological design research within The New School. “I’m glad to say that, since coming here, I’ve seen the focus on anthropology and design become more sophisticated,” he says. In April 2021, he and a small group of other MA students, working closely with Mattern, will lead the university’s first Anthropology and Design Exposition.

“I’ve been really glad to be met with open arms,” Fossum says. “There is space for students to come in here and make things happen.”

After he graduates in May, Fossum hopes to work with a technology company or doing city-planning. “If I can get a job where I’m creating systems better for people or making them cause less harm to the people interacting with them, then that’s a win.”

Grace Song

BA History 2018 from Lang, MA History 2019 from NSSR

“[Due to] the fact that the professors at The New School treated me with respect as a budding academic, I have gained the confidence to reach out and talk to scholars that I admire at various conferences and lecture events.”

Grace Song pinpoints the beginning of her academic journey to a 2013 encounter with the College Board handbook.

“I always knew I wanted to do U.S. history,” Song says. The handbook put The New School on her radar, and even before she applied, she began researching historians at Lang and NSSR she might want to work with.

Enrolling as a History BA student, Song remembers that Neil Gordon, her faculty advisor and a Literary Studies professor and former Lang dean, was incredibly influential in her academic path. Gordon recognized her drive and recommended that she apply to the BAMA program. He also encouraged her to hone her interests by declaring minors in Museum and Curatorial Studies and Politics.

Song began taking MA-level classes as a junior, taking two graduate classes and four undergraduate classes at once. She completed two theses — one for her BA and one for her MA — all while applying for PhD programs. Additionally, she studied abroad in Florence, Italy; interned at a small art gallery; coached the Debate Club; worked in the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies and in the Provost’s Office, and did research with faculty.

While Song says her schedule sometimes felt stressful, she credits the entire History faculty with supporting her and reminding her constantly of her abilities.

“I had no confidence coming in; I didn’t realize my intellectual capacity and what I was capable of doing,” Song says. “The faculty at Lang and NSSR really opened that up for me…They’re so accessible and they really treat you like you’re their colleague. They really treat you with respect.”

As an undergraduate, Song became interested in the ways objects facilitate historic memory. “I wanted to ask questions about the ways we remember, and how and why people are preserved,” Song says. “What do we do with too much memory? How do we use a physical object to do history? Whose history?” Her BA thesis examined these ideas through the Christopher Columbus monument in Columbus Circle. Her MA thesis looked at President William McKinley and the storage of his monuments.

Now a PhD student in History at the University of Notre Dame, Song finds the same questions guiding her new research on diplomatic history and the history of U.S. imperialism in Korea. And, she finds that the skills she developed as a BAMA student are helping her thrive. “The historical training and intellectual community that I had the honor of being a part of have prepared me to bring new and fresh ideas to the table,” Song says. “[Due to] the fact that the professors at The New School treated me with respect as a budding academic, I have gained the confidence to reach out and talk to scholars that I admire at various conferences and lecture events.”

Song has two pieces of advice for students interested in the BAMA program: “Manage your time well; don’t push yourself too much. And get to know your cohort. These peers will be your colleagues.”

If you’re interested in applying for the Bachelor’s-Master’s program, speak with your advisor and complete this form before February 10 for Fall 2021 admission.

Cailin Potami is a writer, an editor, and a student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program. They live in Queens with their cats, Linguini and Tortellini.

Student Projects Explore Publishing Through Design

Research Matters writer Cailin Potami reflects on the work they and their classmates completed in a course that helps make the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program unique.

What would a gossip magazine by houseplants, for houseplants look like? How can people bridge gaps with their families that span generations, nations, and languages? How do we create communal music spaces when we can’t be in the same space? These are just a few questions that guided students’ final projects in the Fall 2020 Design and the Future of Publishing class at The New School for Social Research.

Design and the Future of Publishing

The class was born in 2014, two years after Jim Miller, Professor of Liberal Studies and Politics first approached Juliette Cezzar, Associate Professor of Communication Design, with an idea for a course that would bring together MA students from Liberal Studies at NSSR and from Communication Design at Parsons School of Design.

“It was like a dream come true for me,” Cezzar recounts, “because I really felt like communication design students needed to work with non-designers and know more about what it was that they were doing beyond aesthetic concerns.” Students spent half the semester on theory, and the other half working in pairs to design prototypes of design projects.

In 2016, Design and the Future of Publishing became a core course in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program, which Miller directs. With more CPCJ students requesting more time to study design, Cezzar now offers two variations on the course: one in the fall, tailored to non-design students, and one in the spring for both non-design and Parsons students.

“I have a real love for designing classes and for thinking about how different kinds of students can come together,” Cezzar says. “Who’s in the class makes the difference.”

The course still begins with a focus on theory, with lectures and texts on design principles and history, as well as the idea of publishing and the state of the industry. After seven weeks, students are asked to come up with at least six ideas for creative projects that center design, creativity, and iteration, not marketability, presenting students with a rare opportunity for full creative freedom.

Creating a Music Scene in Quarantine

Since COVID-19 lockdowns began, Maya Bouvier-Lyons, a CPCJ student, has been missing live music. Livestreamed shows lack the ephemera that helps foster human connection. “I initially wanted to make a zine version of the playlist experience,” Bouvier-Lyons says. Cezzar challenged her to think about why that idea matters in this particular moment. “That’s when I started thinking about how to incorporate a live music experience into this publication,” Bouvier-Lyons says.

*Setlist* zine gives New York-based bands a space to connect with listeners on a personal level, even as live music remains impossible.

Setlist, a New York City-based zine, will feature new artists in each issue. Artists will “write in their own handwriting and their own words about their songs, which they choose to feature, and the role that place has played in the creation and life of each song.” Digital elements, like screengrabs of text messages, bring the zine style into the current moment. After the release of each issue, featured bands will perform via livestream on the Setlist Instagram account.

The design of *Setlist* incorporates photos from shows, the artists’ handwriting, and screenshots of actual text messages.

Bouvier-Lyons hopes that the performances, alongside the zine, can evoke some of the real-life concert butterflies. “[My project] asks questions about how we can use design and publishing to recreate and emulate a real-life experience of community,” Bouvier-Lyons reflects. She hopes to continue publishing the zine. “I had fun putting it together and seeing what it can be. I’m excited about the zine changing with each artist in a way that’s personal to them.”

Exploring Home, Language, and Loss

When her grandmother passed away, Simran Narwani felt a distinct loss of not only of her relative, but of the world that she carried; her homeland, pre-partition Pakistan. “All my poetry grew around this theme, because I will never have a chance to go back to my ancestral home,” she shares. “One of my great-aunts went back, and she said there were only pieces of rock left—there’s nothing of what we left behind. There’s no shadow of it. That hit me hard, and I wanted to get that experience shared.”

*Stories from Somewhere* is a powerful meditation on language and lineage, combining the languages spoken by its contributors with the languages spoken by their grandparents.

A Media Studies MA student, Narwani saw this project as an opportunity to honor the stories of her family and families like hers. Course feedback helped Narwani expand the project — a book entitled Stories of Somewhere — to young people from across India with similar experiences, and to consider new kinds of forms. She wanted to incorporate letters because their tangibility feels more permanent and more personal than digital formats. Plus, the human texture of letters appealed to her from a design perspective: “I want to see bad handwriting and good handwriting. I want to see your personality!” But when people felt uncomfortable writing letters, she turned to Instagram, asking instead for photographs and stories that “connect you to your childhood…your grandparents…your people.”

Handwritten notes link the past to the present in *Stories from Somewhere*.

The stories that emerged were complex, exposing grandparents’ flaws and their strengths. “Maybe I don’t know my people from way back when, maybe I don’t understand them,” Narwani says. “But I do know that the fact that we were able to pick up and adapt and make our own element of home everywhere, I think is a vital takeaway.”

The Secret Lives of Plants

CPCJ MA student Jessie Mokhami began thinking about her prototype while comparing gossip magazines for an earlier assignment. Initially, she pitched a houseplant gossip magazine as a throwaway idea for the final project, but Cezzar encouraged her to push the concept further, and ask: What could it really look like for a gossip magazine to be about the social life of something we don’t perceive to have a social life?

*The Dirt* is a loving exploration of the “celebrity gossip magazine” form.

Mohkami developed The Dirt, a 20-page gossip magazine complete with a letter from the editor, horoscopes, and a “who wore it better” section.

“I’m really looking to explore the format and design layout of a gossip magazine, but really play with it.” The iteration process involved adding lots of color, layering images, and playing with loud fonts. While the prototype is mainly just pictures of plants and lorem ipsum filler text, “I’m trying to emulate a gossip magazine and make readers really feel that it’s exactly that,” Mohkami says.

Bright colors, flashy fonts, and photos of plants adorn the pages of gossip mag staples like “Who wore it better?”

The Opposite of Productivity

Under the best of circumstances, the pressure to lead a productive life stokes my anxiety. Amid a global pandemic, that pressure feels downright absurd — yet it has not wavered. For the course, I, also a CPCJ MA student, channeled that anxiety into a 2021 “Anti-Planner,” designed to minimize productivity and maximize stress.

The Anti-Planner subverts the qualities people most value about planners by scrambling layouts and minimizing the space to write.

I developed my design by polling people on Instagram about their ideal planners and subverting all their responses. Instead of ample space to write, the Anti-Planner incorporates tiny spaces, black pages, and a second-person narrator taking up some spaces. Instead of a clear, consistent depiction of time, the Anti-Planner tries to reflect the subjective experience of time, with days and weeks bleeding into each other, seven Tuesdays sometimes strung together, and to-do lists with tasks longer than the days themselves. I used QR codes to incorporate digital elements in some pages and designed accompanying sticker sheets for others. With an entire year’s worth of space to work with, I could indulge my quirkiest ideas as long as I could find a way to get them on the page.

The Anti-Planner’s design plays with the subjective experience of time–some weeks collapse into themselves, some repeat, and some fall apart.

Like Mohkami’s The Dirt, the Anti-Planner was not my initial choice; the task of creating 52 spreads seemed too intimidating. However, Cezzar and my classmates encouraged me, seeing potential in the project. The class’s collaborative environment, where everyone had investment in everyone else’s work, made an enormous difference. The final design incorporated ideas from almost everyone in the class.

Learning by Design

Design as a discipline, Cezzar contends, offers a wealth of opportunities for education and growth, even for non-designers. Every creative process “from making music to fitting a pipe” depends on the same steps: developing an idea, doing research, iterating on that idea, developing a prototype, and integrating feedback. The class offers a space to practice those steps and, importantly, to practice failure and patience.

“Learning design is a way for people to indirectly confront hesitation about learning technology, about learning about ideas, about learning how to read and write. People don’t study design because they’re great at these things. A significant number of students come into the classroom really hesitant about it, Cezzar says. “I think it’s really good for some students to understand that new skills are not closed forever. You can actually learn anything you want, as long as you are able to kind of get past feeling so embarrassed about not knowing something that you can’t continue learning.”

Cailin Potami is a writer, an editor, and a student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program. They live in Queens with their cats, Linguini and Tortellini.

Student-Led Symposium Explores Psychology and the Pandemic

On December 4, near the end of a year defined by COVID-19, MA and PhD students from the Psychology department at The New School for Social Research gathered on Zoom to present their research on the global mental health landscape amidst the global pandemic.

The symposium was organized by Julia Superka, a PhD candidate in Clinical Psychology, and Olivia Cadwell a PhD candidate in Cognitive, Social, and Developmental Psychology. As members of the Trauma & Global Mental Health Lab, both have been working on pandemic-related mental health issues for months. But they didn’t realize that so many of their peers were as well.

NSSR’s Psychology department is a collaborative space. “I have always thought of this department as a community who uses tools, theories, and methods from psychological science as a way to inform and respond to our most critical challenges,” says Adam Brown, director of the Trauma & Global Mental Health Lab and Associate Professor of Psychology. Students conducting research throughout the department’s 16 labs have opportunities to discuss their work and its implications for broad-scale problems. Amid a shift to remote learning, those interactions have changed. “The chats that happen before class and collaboration that sparks in the hallways are much harder to organically build,” Superka says. Brown approached Superka and Cadwell with the idea for a student-led symposium to bring those students together.

In November, Cadwell and Superka circulated flyers inviting Psychology students with research at any stage related to COVID-19 to present their work. They received 12 abstracts with extraordinary breadth, and then coordinated across different labs, countries, and time zones to make the virtual symposium a reality. Topics included “data about clinical symptom severity and possible predictive markers for developing psychopathology during the pandemic…different ways technology was impacting the therapeutic process and being developed to reach as many people having difficulty coping as possible,” and “the implications of COVID from a global lens, including international research specifically in Turkey, India and China,” Superka recounts.

Research in Action at The Safran Center

Brown opened the virtual space by celebrating the adaptability of the students, so many of whom made changes in their research to address the urgent mental health needs the pandemic caused or exacerbated.

“One of the most remarkable things about being at NSSR is being surrounded by peers who have pivoted and adapted their research so quickly to this crisis,” Superka echoed in her opening remarks.

Olivia Cadwell, Safran Center for Psychological Services director Richelle Allen, and Julia Superka discuss overlaps across different research projects.

While national studies have looked at the impact of the pandemic on mental health generally, they have not closely analyzed symptoms for people already receiving treatment when the stay-at-home order began. The first project, presented by Clinical Psychology PhD student Hally Wolhander from the Psychotherapy work group from Safran Center for Psychological Services (directed by Richelle Allen, Assistant Professor of Psychology), focused on this often-overlooked demographic and measured patients’ symptom-severity during the pandemic. The group’s research showed that Safran Center patients with strong therapeutic alliance — the cooperative, working relationship — with their providers seemed to remain on track for reducing the severity of their mental health symptoms. Wolhander added that the group was still curious about the impact of teletherapy (versus in-person therapy) itself.

The Safran Center gave students the opportunity to observe the effects of COVID-19 and teletherapy on mental health services.

A group led by Psychology MA student Leslie O’Brien took up that very question in their presentation on “The Effect of the Transition to Teletherapy on Therapeutic Alliance during COVID-19.” O’Brien began, “Previous literature has indicated that psychologists have raised concerns about the impact of virtual conferencing on the psychotherapy process and therapeutic alliance.” To this group’s surprise, the patients and therapists they surveyed developed a high degree of therapeutic alliance, equal to previous years. The Center did increase the number of appointments patients receive in response to the pandemic, so the research might imply that the additional appointments had some success in preventing symptom deterioration–additional research could show whether that’s the case.

Another Safran Center work group focused on how the shift to teletherapy affected PhD students completing their training at the Center. Many student therapists initially opposed the switch to telehealth, Wolhander explained, because they were concerned that they would receive less broadly applicable training. But by June, students largely reported a neutral or positive experience, and most reported that they felt they had developed new skills.

The Psychological Life of the Pandemic

NSSR’s Psychology labs have also turned their attention to the relationship between mental states, emotions, and navigating these famously unprecedented times.

Clinical Psychology PhD student Emily Weiss from the Psychopathology Lab (directed by McWelling Todman, Professor of Clinical Practice) presented on the implications of a familiar emotional state during the pandemic — boredom. Different people, she explained, have different propensities toward boredom generally. But people who have felt increased boredom since stay-at-home orders began don’t necessarily have a higher boredom propensity. The differences, while subtle, could have a significant impact on distress. While boredom proneness and state boredom both are associated with higher rates of depression, for example, people with lower boredom proneness and higher state-boredom seem to have higher rates of hope and optimism for the future. Likewise, higher boredom-proneness is associated with higher COVID-19 infection, but not higher concern about the virus.

Heleen E. Raes, an MA student, presented research, also housed in the Psychopathology Lab, on the impact of pandemic boredom on substance use, hypothesizing that people more susceptible to boredom may be more likely to use alcohol and drugs.

MA student Ali Revill’s group within the Safran Center found that extraverted patients and patients with lower emotional dysregulation — inability of a person to control or regulate their emotional responses — have experienced higher mental illness symptom severity.

A group based in the Trauma & Global Mental Health Lab developed a self-efficacy app and presented their findings.

MA student Olivia Friedman presented on an app designed in the Trauma & Global Mental Health Lab to build self-efficacy, a critical tool in a moment where feelings of helplessness run rampant, and Cadwell presented research on the influx of politically-fueled COVID-19 conspiracy theories.

Superka presented on behalf of her research group of NSSR and Suffolk University students, which looked at the risk of moral injury — an injury to an individual’s moral conscience and values resulting from an act of perceived moral transgression — for people navigating social distancing and other transmission-related guidelines. Actions that feel like moral failures, like forgetting to wear a mask, can lead to feelings of moral injury, which has long-term negative mental health outcomes. “The pain experienced by individuals who suffer from moral injuries confronts us with the fact that we are, at the core, empathic and moral beings, for whom living in a just world may be just important as living in a safe world,” Superka concluded.

International Research

NSSR Psychology students come from dozens of countries around the world, and many have taken an international approach to their research. Cognitive, Social, and Development Psychology PhD student Meymuna Topcu, presenting research conducted within the Cognitive Psychology Lab (directed by William Hirst, Malcolm B. Smith Professor of Psychology), compared perceptions and projections of COVID-19 between the United States and China, including individuals’ perceptions of personal and governmental efficacy, and their estimated death and infection numbers.

Busra Yaman researched stress and resilience among Turkish and American graduate students during the pandemic.

MA student Busra Yaman, from the Trauma & Global Mental Health Lab, focused on “Perceived Stress, Achievement Motivation, and Resilience Among Domestic and International Graduate Students,” comparing Turkish international students to American students. While she found no significant differences in stress levels between the groups, she did find that international students did not lose motivation despite their high stress levels, while domestic students did. Likewise, international students with higher motivation had higher levels of resilience, while domestic students did not.

A group within the Center for Attachment Research looked at loneliness and mental health among women in rural India.

MA student Zishan Jiwani turned the symposium’s attention to India, which has had the second highest COVID-19 infection rates and an extremely strict lockdown. Little research has looked at the virus and lockdowns’ impacts on rural parts of the country. Jiwani presented on behalf of a group within the Center for Attachment Research (co-directed by Howard Steele, Professor and Co-Chair of Psychology and Miriam Steele, Professor of Psychology), on “Understanding the Mental Health Impact of Fear of the Coronavirus amongst Low-Income Women in Rural India,” where women have been cut off from their communal spaces. The group analyzed data from surveys given to women in their homes in the Bahraich District in Northeast India, asking questions about fear of the virus and perceived loneliness. Research found that increased loneliness, increased fear, and increased mental health challenges are all highly associated with each other. Jiwani suggested that these results could influence public health decisions — the epidemic of loneliness requires care and attention, too.

Fostering a Collaborative Space

Around 50 people attended the event, including faculty and students from across the psychology department and throughout the university. By the time presentations came to a close, the collaborative spirit that characterizes NSSR was palpable — students with overlapping research swapped information in the chat, and some of the presenters had already begun answering questions before the formal Q&A began.

The Q&A included many suggestions for furthering research, like including job-loss data in boredom analysis. Adam Brown also proposed a question about the surprising results of the research on telehealth and therapeutic alliance, and Howard Steele sparked a conversation about therapeutic alliance and cultural crises.

Cadwell and Superka hope to recreate this digital community space in the form of future symposiums that highlight ongoing research from within the Psychology department and beyond.

“We saw this [symposium] as a great opportunity for people to come together and talk about the research that we’re doing. It’s really incredible how much everyone has adapted. There is other research being done throughout NSSR broadly…so we are really interested in organizing a recap symposium of the ongoing crisis points we experienced in 2020, including the economy, protests and police brutality, the election cycle, and other global catastrophes,” Cadwell says.

“After we moved to remote learning, I was proud to see how quickly our students stepped up and adapted their research to study the complex psychological impacts of COVID-19. The symposium underscored the breadth of research being carried out across our labs and the sophistication in which our students are doing this work,” Adam Brown reflects. “This end-of the-semester student-led event was a wonderful opportunity for them to share their cutting-edge findings with one another and to create that much needed sense of community that we all miss.”

Cailin Potami is a writer, an editor, and a student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program. They live in Queens with their cats, Linguini and Tortellini.

Meet NSSR’s Fall 2020 MA Project Grants and Dean’s Conference Fund Award Recipients

As part of a commitment to socially engaged and meaningful research, the NSSR Dean’s Office supports a range of student-organized projects and conferences each year. Even amid a pandemic, NSSR students have envisioned incredibly creative, intellectually rigorous, and community-minded projects and conferences. Read on for more about the Fall 2020 recipients of our MA Project Grants and the Dean’s Conference Fund.

MA Project Grants

The Fall 2020 recipients of the MA Project Grants are:

Disaster Magazine

An NSSR-Parsons collaboration, Disaster Mag will focus on unemployment in its second issue through 15 essays and various artwork.

Alexa Mauzy-Lewis (Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism)

Future Subject Matter: Selected Texts of Kato K Trieu

The recent passing of Kato K Trieu (MA Liberal Studies ’20) left his peers with a body of work to study, publish and disseminate. Future Subject Matter will collect Kato’s work in a book-bound copy, and cover the themes of gender and sexuality, trans theory, mind and embodiment, science and technology studies, and comparative literature.

Leo Zausen (Liberal Studies)

Critical Race Theory Group

This reading group will help Sociology students link their research and knowledge into critical perspectives on race, discuss elements of race at different times and locations in history, and analyze how theorists and scholars comment on issues of race.

Melisa Rousseau (Sociology)

Anthropology & Design Exhibition (ADX) Student Working Group

This group of Anthropology students — who have either a background in design and/or an interest in exploring the
fertile intersection of anthropology and design both theoretically and methodologically — meets weekly to develop programming around an inaugural conference in April 2021 (see more below).

Oscar Fossum, Lilah Doris, Leila Lin, Elif Geçyatan, Clemente de Althaus (Anthropology)

Gestalt-themed Mini Speaker Series and Events

Max Wertheimer brought Gestalt psychology to The New School, and the university became a center of Gestalt theory within the US. This project will host interdisciplinary events with speakers working in the Gestalt tradition.

Hong B. Nguyen and Mariah Woodruff (Psychology), Leonhard Victor Sedlmayer (Philosophy)

Unbound Podcast

This podcast series will highlight the voices and work of people with underrepresented identities in philosophy and academia —
specifically New School PhD students and faculty whose research focuses on diversity, feminism, gender studies, and fields of study that are often not categorized as belonging to the traditional Western canon.

Giuseppe Vicinanza, K. Eskins, Madison Gamba, Emre Turkolmez (Philosophy);
Olivea Frischer (Parsons School of Design); Andres Volkov (College of Performing Arts)

LGBT COVID-19 Ethnography & Mental Health Impacts

An ethnographic and psychological survey investigating the social behavior, community resilience, and mental health of the LGBT community in New York City in comparison with cishet residents. With the effects of the COVID-19 in mind, such a project will demonstrate the impact of removing physical community spaces on risk behavior and loneliness.

Julien Lenaz (Psychology)

Dean’s Conference Fund

In 2021, the Dean’s Conference Fund will support the following NSSR student-run conferences:

Future Ontologies: Afrofuturism and Indigenous TEK

In response to the worldwide need to elevate discourses that contribute to a decolonial turn in academia and culture in general, the Liberal Studies Student Association is planning a conference that
centers the voices of marginalized communities, specifically BIPOC. Taking Afrofuturism as a starting point, this conference will explore its history and contemporary manifestations in order to start a conversation with indigenous traditional ecological knowledge (TEK).

Tentative date:
First week of April 2021

Silvana Alvarez Basto, Nicholas Travaglini, José Luna, Katrina Schonheyder, Walter Argueta Ramírez (Liberal Studies)

Animalhouse: Animals and Their Environs

The relationship between animals and their environs has become one of the paramount political concerns of our time. While a particular urgency motivates current discussions of animate life and its
habitat, examining this relationship has yielded significant philosophical development throughout the
20th century. This conference will question if and how philosophy’s treatment of animals and their environs can help us make sense of our current situation.

Tentative date:
April 1-2, 2021

Aaron Neber, Weiouqing Chen, Kyle O’Dowd (Philosophy)

Anthropology & Design Exhibition (ADX)

ADX presents NSSR and Parsons grad student works at the intersection of Anthropology and Design.
Topics may include applied anthropology, community-oriented design, design research, material studies, critical design and creative
technologies. ADX will include three parts: workshops; a VR exhibition with live discussions; and a website portfolio with recordings of the main event.

Tentative dates:
April 2021: Virtual exhibition of student works

May 2021: An edited recording of the exhibition, and an analysis of Anthropology and Design based on data from attendees and their projects

Oscar Fossum, Lilah Doris, Leila Lin, Elif Geçyatan, Clemente de Althaus (Anthropology)

Decolonizing Birth and Mental Health

This conference focuses on the enduring impact of colonization on birth practices in the United States. Topics include the medicalization of pregnancy and birth; erasure of indigenous practices and
tribal health care practices, ethnoracial disparities in maternal mental health and mortality, anti-racist
psychological and medical models of care, the importance of amplifying BIPOC birth practitioners as
doula activists,
LGBTQ + inclusive reproductive healthcare, and more.

Tentative date:
October 2021

Koret Munguldar, Hillary Litwin, Deniz Kocas, Ellen Yom, Lindsey Myers (Psychology)

Human Considerations: rethinking space habitats

Address approaches to thinking and designing space habitats, and sketch founding ideals for a more just and equitable approach to exploring outer space. From the architectural and engineering questions of livability and survivability, to the artistic and sociological considerations of enjoyability, the conference will host a series of speakers and two panels in an attempt to re-
imagine the scope of what is at stake when we think about leaving earth.

Tentative date:
April 24-25, 2021

Weston Finfer (Liberal Studies)

New NSSR Student Group Radically Rethinks Space Exploration

In February 2020, during “those gray days before the pandemic struck,” a new interdisciplinary student group emerged at The New School for Social Research (NSSR). Affectionately nicknamed “Space Squad” or sometimes “that weird space thing,” New School Policy and Design for Outer Space (NS-PDOS) examines the dynamics and distribution of egalitarian models of governance and design in all aspects of space exploration, areas that are frequently overlooked and under-researched in space studies at large. Specific areas of focus include space habitat governance, economy, existential risk, communications & information theory, and bioastronautics.

Asking the Right Questions

The founders of NS-PDOS — Weston Finfer, Rae Rosenthal Boehm, and James Boyd, all NSSR Liberal Studies MA students; Collin McClain, a student in the Bachelor’s Program for Adults and Transfer Students at the Schools for Public Engagement; and Dalia Amellal, from Parsons’ Theories of Urban Practice MA program — met in Post-Planetary Design, an interdisciplinary course at Parsons School of Design taught by Ed Keller, a former Associate Professor. “So many of the questions placed in that class spilled over into everything else we wanted to keep doing,” Finfer says, “so we were like, ‘Let’s keep doing it.’”

One of the fundamental questions that NS-PDOS inherited from Post-Planetary Design is that of scale. How do we think on a microscopic level? Conversely, how do we think on a planetary level? Keller’s September 2020 lecture for NS-PDOS’s launch event, “The Cosmopolitical Gesture — Coordination, Recursivity, and Universal Models,” (embedded below) built on this: “How might we design across a range of different scales and link those design moves and analytical moves back to universalist models?”

NS-PDOS has adopted the strategy from the class of subverting questions to reframe problems of development on Earth and beyond. McClain explains, “One of the things I took from Ed’s class and try to bring to NS-PDOS is using space, using science fiction, and cosmopolitics, to think about geopolitics and think about very earthly issues with a new perspective, but also to consider how we get [beyond Earth], because if we don’t handle issues here on Earth, we can’t get to these eventual futures that we dream of and work towards.” Recalling a class in which Keller coupled footage of burning oil fields with the question “What does oil want?,” Rosenthal Boehm adds that this question, “what does a thing want?” has become her go-to in exploratory conversions, because it ”puts us face-to-face with the limits of our ontological frames and invites us to push beyond them.”

A Social Perspective on Space Exploration

Much of the existing scholarship on space exploration contains thorough design and engineering plans, but doesn’t leave room for error or for the texture of human experience. McClain gives two examples: the assumption that agriculture will thrive as long as we bring the right crops and select out pests, and proposals about governance that do little to address the skewed power dynamic of a governing body controlling the most basic elements of survival —food, water, and even air. Part of NS-PDOS’ work is calling those assumptions into question and seeking radical solutions.

NS-PDOS is a chapter of the international organization “Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS).” SEDS has historically focused on engineering, technology, and space design, but NS-PDOS brings a different perspective to space exploration by taking social research as their primary mode.

Nick Travaglini, also a Liberal Studies MA student and a core member of the group, says “one of the interesting ways that we try to differentiate ourselves and distinguish ourselves is through making sure that we are very explicitly focused on aspects of the social — coming out of NSSR, we want to make sure social research plays a key role.” In fact, NS-PDOS is at the cutting edge of SEDS’ movement toward incorporating the humanities. The theme of SpaceVision, SEDS’ 2020 international conference, was “Beyond Earth: Humans as an Interplanetary Species.” As part of the conference, Travaglini led a panel discussion called “STEM to STEAM,” about incorporating the arts into space studies.

The conversation brought Travaglini back to questions Keller raised in his NS-PDOS opening lecture: “Suppose we find life in space. How do we think about the dynamics that may play out between humanity and/or other species that we bring into space, away from earth, when we interact with whatever other forms of life may be out there?”

One way to approach these questions, the group proposes, is to take seriously not only hard research, but also speculative writings and films about space, like the 2016 film Arrival. “We need to look at these works and ask, ‘What does this tell us about society now? What does this tell us about changes we can make if we don’t like the speculative futures that may come out of this?’” Travaglini says.

Building a Group in a Pandemic

NS-PDOS’s inaugural meeting — the only time they’ve met in person — was March 10, 2020. Students built NS-PDOS amid a lockdown, working to create relationships and develop a routine. “I know that when I see something coming up in the [NS-PDOS] group chat, it’s going to be something good to discuss this week,” Finfer said. “When we all sign in on Wednesday at 6 PM, we’re going to have a lot to talk about, and that becomes an exciting thing to look forward to.” Over the summer, NS-PDOS members created two working groups, and core membership has grown to 25 students.

The Future Ontologies working group challenges the colonialist and white supremacist thinking that underlies much of the scholarship on space exploration. Rosenthal Boehm, a core member of the group, explains: “In Future Ontologies, we…try to imagine what could we possibly think if we were outside of the moment that we are in, with all known data about failed utopian projects or settlements or outsider projects.”

The group turns to critical theory to unravel a legacy within space studies that includes colonialism, capitalism, and even Nazism. Rosenthal Boehm poses the questions: “If we are living in a community where all of our biometrics are collected by the operating system that runs the community, are we still human? But also, is that fascism? What is the relationship between the technological, the material, the individual and the ideological that plays out in a space habitat that has such radically different terms for existence?”

The Cybernetics and Systems Theory working group looks at the concept of systems broadly, and what it means to think in systems. This overlaps with Finfer’s Liberal Studies MA thesis work on cybernetics, algorithmic information theory, and geoengineering. He has particular interest in the concept of Algorithmic Randomness, a limit in computation that makes absolute certainty impossible.

Graphic from the NS-PDOS Instagram promoting Valerie Olson’s lecture for the Transceiver series

In addition to the working groups, NS-PDOS also runs the Transceiver Speaker Series, which has, to date, featured Keller, Valerie Olson, and Allison Duettmann. The group is also planning two major events for the Spring 2021 semester:

A conference on Space Habitats, which will bring together designers, architects, artists, social theorists, and web designers, and which will also include an interactive web-design element that weaves together several space habitats, with attention to detail and consideration for the human experience.
A conference on Space Laws and Policy. Finfer moderated a panel on the subject at SpaceVision, and hopes this NSSR conference will create a space for more in-depth thought. “ What are the global accords that can help us address planetary scale issues? Our entry into space is such a closed system. It has to be so technically perfect that it doesn’t have room for leaks, errors, entropy, randomness in the same sense that we do on this planet.”

Calling All Space Enthusiasts

NS-PDOS welcomes members from all academic backgrounds and disciplines. Current members includes designers, software engineers, students of Western esotericism and alternative religions, media and culture theorists, and philosophy students. Those interested or curious need not have any background at all in space studies, only need a desire to learn together and an investment in the group’s overall goals.

“We’re interested in bursting open the door to radically new futures,” Rosenthal Boehm says. “Yeah,” adds Finfer. “Basically, we want to change the world.”

For more information or to join NS-PDOS, please visit their website, and follow them on Instagram @newschoolspace and Twitter @nspdos to keep up with upcoming events, like the next installment in the Transceiver Speaker Series.

Cailin Potami is a writer, an editor, and a student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program. They live in Queens with their cats, Linguini and Tortellini.

Deva Woodly on Power, Organizing, and the Future of the Polity

Deva Woodly, Associate Professor of Politics at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College and 2019-2020 Fellow in Residence at Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University, has organized a new home at The New School for interdisciplinary research on politics in action. The Initiative for the Study of Power, Politics, and Organizing in the United States will hold talks, host a conference, and produce a publication on its 2020-2021 theme: The Politics of Care.

“Power and the Politics of Care” Panel, the ISPPO’s first event, took place on November 13, 2020 with panelists Monica Atkins, Christopher Paul Harris, and Miriam Ticktin.

Research Matters talked with Woodly over Zoom to discuss the Initiative’s purpose, its theoretical foundations, and the role of organizing in our communities and universities. The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity.

Organizing and Political Power

Research Matters: Congratulations on launching the Initiative for the Study of Power, Politics, and Organizing in the U.S.! Can you talk a little bit about what the inspiration for that was, and what the vision for it is?

Deva Woodly: The reason for the Initiative for the Study of Power, Politics and Organizing in the U.S. is that The New School actually has relatively little in terms of research on American politics, and American politics is one of my specialties. I wanted to bring something to us that would be interdisciplinary in nature, and yet focus on the U.S. as a case.

I also wanted to highlight the intersection between power, politics and what I think is a lesser-studied, and yet very politically important phenomenon, which is political organizing… In political science, we often talk about mobilization. In sociology, they talk about activism in social movements. But mobilization and activism are both distinct from organizing.

Mobilization is when you assemble people who already have the requisite knowledge and skill to do a thing—you get people who are already registered to turn up to vote, for example—and you remind them to get out and do what they know how to do.

Activism is when people turn up outside the regular institutionalized boundaries of the state to make their voices heard. This is the thing that we normally associate with protest and direct action …But activism doesn’t necessarily involve sustained social analysis or the idea that you’re trying to achieve particular goals, or that you’re necessarily working with other people over time.

Organizing, on the other hand, is the long-term process of relationship-building and the changes in our subjectivity that make us understand that we are agents who can act to make change, and that we are, furthermore, agents-in-context, agents in a collectivity—that it is the power of the people acting together, over time that makes change. Organizing teaches us not only that we can act in a particular instance, but that we’re the kind of person who can act to make political change. So, it creates a fund of knowledge and a disposition toward civic action that’s good for the long-term….Organizing changes who we think we are in the polity. It creates us as an active citizenry.

There’s a ton of organizing that takes place all over the United States, and indeed it’s accelerated in this moment, but we as scholars know very little about it, and the fact is that organizers very rarely write down what they know, so we have very limited texts to teach us about organizing …I think it’s a fertile ground for scholarship to explore the nature, impacts, and efficacies of organizing.

RM: I think the word “organizing” and “get organized” are things we see and hear a lot right now, and it’s possible to feel a sense of embarrassment at not knowing what that means. You can have a toe in it without knowing what it means.

DW: Yeah, but the nice thing about organizing — both the thing that makes it so powerful but also the thing that has caused people to overlook it — is that it’s an extremely long-term process. It’s something that takes place over years. So, what political campaigns have typically done and called “organizing” is not organizing; it’s mobilizing.

But we see now that particularly Black women, Black feminists, are revolutionizing organizing in political campaigns, and we see the results of that led out by folks in Georgia, like Stacey Abrams, LaTosha Brown, and Nse Ufot. We see that happening in other communities, as well, particularly among indigenous folks in Arizona and New Mexico. These are long projects, they’re about engaging with people about the political problems that they identify for themselves in their communities, and trying to work with people and enable them to fight for themselves—resource them and give them the type of knowledge that they need to make changes locally. And as people get a taste of making changes locally, their political imaginations begin to expand and their political efficacy begins to increase.

RM: I love to hear you bring up Arizona—that’s where I moved from before coming to The New School, and that’s where I learned about organizing. The different groups that are at work in Arizona are doing such good work. I’ve loved to hear them get a small portion of the recognition they deserve in the last week [following the 2020 election].

DW: Oh, absolutely. I so agree. So, another goal for this initiative is to have a space to bring together political practitioners and scholars where they can inform each other and think through the common problems and contours of this political time; a place to jointly imagine the political possibilities for the 21st century.

The way that I do work is inductive. That means that the way that I work is kind of opposite the Western tradition, which is deductive. If you take a deductive approach you start with a big concept and then you go down to the particular, or try to fit instances of the particular under the big concepts. I work from an inductive approach. I start with the particular, people’s lived experiences, and try to relate those to overarching concepts that we have or create new ones. Whatever I do, I always start with people, and one of the things that has led me to understand is that we, as scholars, need to be always in contact with practitioners in the world. We have a lot of knowledge to offer each other!

I also think that universities need to have institutional pathways that allow them to have regular contact with people doing political work on the ground, particularly with organizers. So what I always try to do in any kind of educational initiative. Whether it’s creating a class I’ve taught called “Becoming a Generation Citizen,” which put [Lang] students in high school classrooms so they were interacting the world. Or with bringing in an Activist-in-Residence, which brought someone doing the work of political change to our community and providing them a space in the university to think, reflect, write, and teach which they usually don’t have time to do. And it also to informs the academic community about how our theories actually play out in the world and the questions that people who are actually doing the work would love to have answers to. This is the way to create an ongoing and fruitful interchange between theory and practice. My opinion is that the only way to achieve praxis is to actually have scholars and political practitioners in contact and helping each other think through the problems that we are witnessing and experiencing in common.

RM: I’m also curious about where “the politics of care” come into this. What makes that a research interest for you, and what made you decide to make it the organizing principle of the Initiative?

DW: Well, the politics of care is something that I became interested in as I was working on my forthcoming book, Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements (Oxford University Press, 2021). As I was researching that book, doing interviews with people in the Movement for Black Lives, there was a series of principles and values that people kept espousing. I ended up codifying those ideas under the term “Radical Black Feminist Pragmatism.”

One of the key aspects of Radical Black Feminist Pragmatism is the politics of care…[which] says that we need to think about politics in a completely different way. The primary subject of politics is not “rights,” the subject of politics is not “institutions,” but is instead the fact that people matter and deserve care. So, if that is the basis of our political thought, if that is the way that we think about how to design systems and to collect and aggregate resources, then it changes the whole way that we talk and think about what is necessary for the governance of the world that we share.

Organizing and Activism on Campus

RM: What do you see as the role of campus organizing and activism, something we’ve had a lot of at The New School over the last few years?

DW: Campus organizing is critical. It’s part of political organizing writ large. A campus is a community. A campus is a locality. People who are members of that community, who are members at the campus as a polity, should absolutely be in connection with each other and organizing. They should be creating relationships of political friendship and reciprocity and it is an aspect of organizing in the polity.

RM: I think one of the challenges of campus organizing could be that, as you mentioned before, the thing about organizing is that it takes a long time.

DW: Right, and the university is full of a transient population: students. That is the nature of organizing at the university, but that’s also why students have to build institutions that can handle succession…Because of the nature of the population, the wins that you have are less likely to be driven only or solely by students. They often have to be in collaboration with people who have long-term stake at the university, like unionized staff and faculty. That’s also a lesson to learn, in terms of organizing: it’s coalitions that have the biggest bang, because everybody is structurally positioned in a different way…That’s why it’s not just organizing; it’s also power and politics. You have to understand power in the place that you’re trying to make change, and that’s really where the full expression and magnitude of influence will be realized.

Journalism and Democracy

RM: I have personal stake in this question, because I’m in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program—what do you see as the role of media and journalism in the way the average person understands their political environment and role?

DW: I think that media, in terms of political journalism, needs to focus a lot more than they often do on accuracy over trying to be unbiased. The “both sides” norm is actually really detrimental to the rendering of reality, so I think that the idea of objectivity insofar as it means “both sides” needs to be put to bed. Instead, we should be interested in facts, authenticity, accuracy, and nuance. These are things that are much more descriptive of reality than objectivity, which is a thing that just doesn’t exist.

I think that media, particularly journalism and political journalism, helps us when it gives us context, and hurts us when it deprives us of contexts and reproduces stereotypical narratives that are easy to digest but don’t expand our understanding.

In the actually existing world, there’s more than two sides to almost every story, and the power that those sides wield is very rarely balanced. Their intentions, their imaginations, and their impact will not necessarily be equal, so we shouldn’t pretend that that’s the case. We have to accurately render the world as it is, or journalism ceases to be useful and that’s bad for journalism and bad for democracy.

Movements, Crises, and the Political Future

RM: How do you see the pandemic impacting political participation moving forward?

DW: The pandemic, combined with the movements and the contentious cycle that we’ve been in, the #MeToo movement, the Movement for Black Lives, the Sunrise Movement, the March for Our Lives—this is just in the US, not to mention global movements—I honestly think that this confluence of circumstances has re-politicized public life in a really beneficial way.

Not that it’s smooth; it’s not all a happy story. Like, right now we’re in a moment in which autocracy is a real possibility, in which the current administration is trying to overturn the results of an election in which more than 150 million people voted. It’s a time of danger, but also one of opportunity. Democracy is always dangerous…You’re leaving everything up to people, and people can disappoint you and make catastrophic choices. However, people can also impress you and make revelatory choices. It’s a moment in which the contingency of everything is clear to us but it’s also a moment filled with possibility.

Organizations and practices among people are huge: the way that people have remembered that they can take to the streets to make demands; the way that people have started to actually educate themselves about civics, about the way that the American government works. This past week [of the election] was insanely stressful, but do you know how many Americans learned geography? Do you know how many Americans learned what the Electoral College is, and how many electors each state has, and what kinds of officials are in charge of making what kinds of decisions? All of that is amazing and really good for democracy, to have a politically educated and engaged populace that is capable of acting on its own, capable not only of pressuring the state, but also acting autonomously. This is one of the reasons the rapid increase in the scope and coordination of mutual aid that has happened since the pandemic began is so interesting. These are the kinds of things that democracy needs.

What I’m saying to you now is basically the legacy of American pragmatism — this is straight John Dewey — which is to say that democracy requires democratic citizens, and for a long time, we haven’t had a democratic citizenry; we’ve had consumers. I think that, if we survive this time as a democracy, if the democracy stays intact, we will be really strong going forward and have the possibility to make really good changes in the future, just because so many more people will understand what can be done. So many people will have had their subjectivity reformed, having been organized in this moment. So many more people will understand that they are capable of being authors of the world that they want.

RM: That’s incredibly encouraging to hear.

DW: Well, we have to survive it. I don’t make any guarantees on that score!

The first event from the Initiative for the Study of Power, Politics, and Organizing in the United States is a panel on The Politics of Care on Friday, November 13, at 4PM ET. You can register here.

Review: First Lecture Series from Institute for Philosophy and the New Humanities

In Fall 2020, NSSR welcomed a new interdisciplinary institute: The Institute for Philosophy and the New Humanities (IPNH), led by Zed Adams, Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy; Paul Kottman, Professor of Comparative Literature and Chair of Liberal Studies; and Markus Gabriel, chair of epistemology and modern and contemporary philosophy and director of the International Centre for Philosophy at the University of Bonn. IPNH aims to extend humanistic inquiry in new directions to foster work that critically engages the current moment. Read more about INPH here.

In late October, IPNH hosted its first lecture series focused on artificial intelligence. Robert Mass, an NSSR Philosophy PhD student, reviews the series below.

In 2008, I took my children to see WALL-E, a Pixar movie that takes place amid an environmental and human apocalypse. In WALL-E, humans have been essentially made redundant; they live their lives reclining, staring into computer screens, all their basic needs satisfied by technology supplied by the State.

Over the past 12 years, technology has done amazing things. It has revealed the secrets of the genome, allowing scientists to develop astounding biotech solutions to disease, and brought the world’s accumulated knowledge within reach via mobile phone. However, it has also brought the world of WALL-E closer to reality. We spend more times staring at our screens than interacting with other people, especially now during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, technology has now enabled governments and Big Tech to reach deep into our lives to both record and reshape our acts, our words and potentially even our thoughts. We are more dependent on technology, and more subject to manipulation and monitoring.

These concerns drew me to Artificial Intelligence and the Human, the inaugural discussion series from the new Institute for Philosophy and the New Humanities (IPNH) at The New School for Social Research. For four hours each day from October 19-23, I joined an international group of students and scholars from various disciplines trying to work through the issues that technology poses for living a fulfilling human life.

The broad program included many topics, from the history of automata and computing, to the extent to which computers are able to mimic various forms of human thinking, to whether computers can be called ‘creative,’ to what kind of regulatory framework we might want to set up to limit some of the excesses of super-intelligent Artificial Intelligence (AI 2.0). Speakers included Jens Schröter (University of Bonn) on machine creativity, Nell Watson (QuantaCorp) on AI and social trust, Brian Cantwell Smith (University of Toronto) on AI and the human, and Jessica Riskin (Stanford University) on the influence of machines on our conception of mind. Watch the talks here.

For me, the two most powerful sessions focused not so much on the future of AI, but on the future of human beings in the face of improving AI.

In one session, Stuart Russell (University of California, Berkeley), argued that to understand AI, we need to realize that it deliberates only about means and not ends, which must be programmed into it by humans. AI optimizes results based on whatever those ends are; thus, the key to AI being beneficial to humanity is ensuring that its objectives are appropriately specified. Research to date has failed to properly theorize about how to do that and as a result, too often AI optimizes for an outcome that is detrimental. Russell argued that we need to develop new approaches to how best to specify beneficial goals, taking into consideration human preferences, e.g., recognizing the difficulties of identifying human preferences and then capturing them computationally, the uncertainty and plasticity of our desires, our weaknesses in identifying those preferences that are beneficial to us, the difficulties of interpersonal comparison of preferences, and the like. He believes that with appropriate focus, super-intelligent AI that benefits humanity can be developed.

After setting before us this fundamentally optimistic picture of what we need to do to guide the development of AI in the future, he left us with two problems. The first he labelled the Dr. Evil problem — namely that evil actors, both private and state, can cause tremendous havoc in human life. The second was my great fear, which he, too, called the WALL-E problem — that the overuse of AI will produces human enfeeblement. He had no vaccine for that, either.

As frightening as that vision of the future is, a more dystopian one was presented by Susan Schneider (Florida Atlantic University). She discussed trans-humanism, a philosophy that advocates improving the human condition through “mind design” — the implantation of chips in the brain or uploading or merging of mental functions into the cloud to improve mood, attentiveness, memory, musical skill, or calculation abilities.

While generally positive about these possibilities, Schneider discussed the philosophical challenges those types of brain augmentations pose. At some point, augmentation may become so complete that self-consciousness — our felt quality of having inner experience — would be compromised or disappear altogether, and what we have heretofore thought of as distinctive to the human “mind” would no longer exist. The changes wrote by brain augmentation could also be so great that we could no longer call ourselves the same person we were before the augmentation. If either of these stages of mind design are reached, humanity as we have known it for millennia will no longer exist, as we will have merged into super-intelligent machines.

The growth of AI is changing our conceptions of human mindedness as well as human flourishing. The program demonstrated the value the humanities can bring to understanding and perhaps guiding those changes for the better. In that regard, the program amply met the goal of IPNH to demonstrate the continued relevance of humanities in the academy and beyond.

It was quite a week, and I am looking forward to the IPNH Fall 2021 program on Objectivity in the Humanities.

Robert Mass is a Philosophy PhD student at The New School for Social Research

Aaron Jakes on Egypt, Capitalism, and the Development of Economism

Via his debut book, Jakes offers a new perspective on Egypt under British occupation — and on the United States today

A history book can reflect the peoples and worlds researched as much as of the world unfolding around its author. As Aaron Jakes, Assistant Professor of History at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College, wrote his first book, archival research brought him through worlds of bureaucrats, peasants, journalists, and spies, as financial crises, civil unrest, revolt, and populism electrified the world around him.

Research Matters sat down (virtually) with Jakes to discuss that book, Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2020), and how looking at Egypt more than 100 years ago can help us understand not only modern Egypt but also political and economic thought today.

Jakes started working on the book in its first form — his doctoral thesis — in 2007. As he looked at ways that cotton farmers borrowed money in the early 20th century, he couldn’t help but notice parallels with the Great Recession of 2007-2009. In both periods, the growing influence of financial institutions — financialization —characterized political life. “In a moment in which everyone was thinking about finance, it became possible to start thinking about a contemporary moment in which we had parallel discourses of financial and ecological crisis that were treated as though these were completely separate phenomena,” Jakes says. “And so the first cut at the project in light of that present moment was to begin thinking about what it would mean to write an environmental history of a prior moment of financialization.”

Information Access and Control

Digging back more than a century meant Jakes spent years doing research in archives around the world, including Egypt’s National Archives, the United States Library of Congress, and financial archives across England. But gaining access to those materials wasn’t easy.

Egyptian intelligence agencies maintain strict surveillance over the country’s National Archives. Amid a time of water-related conflict with Egypt’s neighbors to the south, Jakes’ application was left in limbo for his use of the word “irrigation”. Jakes enlisted the support of his doctoral supervisor, who then enlisted Egyptian political novelist and journalist Gamal al-Ghitani to pressure the archive director, culminating in a “scathing” op-ed in Akhbar al-Adab, the Egyptian equivalent of the New York Review of Books. The strategy was effective, but Jakes still spent the following three years navigating bureaucratic and technological barriers to information.

“Computerized control actually makes it possible for [the intelligence agencies] to monitor and restrict who can see what, so the cataloging process itself made it possible to just cause huge swaths of documents to ‘disappear’,” Jakes explains. While he was ultimately able to access the resources he needed, he laments that his Egyptian colleagues, without the same degree of foreign institutional support, don’t have the same access — another lasting effect of colonialism.

As his research progressed, a narrative emerged that contradicted the widely-accepted understanding of the British occupation of Egypt, which is rooted in the notion that colonial rule simply consolidated an earlier set of economic arrangements and that ideas about economic life played no significant role in the major movements and struggles of that era. Through his detailed research in both government and banking archives, Jakes pieced together a far more dynamic story about Egypt’s role as a major investment frontier for global finance and about the multiple crises that this process of financialization induced. This new history of capitalism under British rule, in turn, shed new light on the commentaries that Egyptians at the time, from government officials in Cairo to poor peasants in the countryside, offered about the problems they faced. The pages of Egypt’s burgeoning Arabic press likewise became a site for rich and sustained debate about the consequences of the British occupation. And because colonial officials were so emphatic and consistent in their claims about how economic improvement would translate into political legitimacy, developing a rigorous, alternative account of the relationship between economics and politics soon became central concern of Egypt’s growing nationalist movement.

Economism and Trump

Jakes earned his PhD in 2015 and joined The New School’s Historical Studies department shortly after. As he worked on turning his dissertation into his first book, a new event influenced his writing: the election of Donald Trump.

“It was striking that explanations both for the [Bernie] Sanders phenomenon and for Trump’s election often entailed some suggestion that there was a kind of base motive of economic grievance that really explained what was going on,” Jakes says. This is called economism, the attribution of political effects to underlying economic causes.

To this day, economism is often treated as a unique and even defining problem of the left, which, Jakes argues, obscures other important forms. Whereas various thinkers on the left have seen ideas about economic determination as the grounds for a universalist politics, Jakes shows that such claims can just as easily assume a particularistic and exclusionary character. Often entailed in this latter variant of economism is an implicit, racialized judgment about the “kinds of people” who can’t engage in sophisticated politics beyond “base economic motives” — precisely the same rhetoric the British employed to justify their continued occupation of Egypt.

While Egypt’s Occupation never explicitly makes this connection, the parallels are there. Chapter two, for example, highlights the way the British used economism to justify abolishing the system of local elections that Egyptians had long practiced on a village level by arguing that they were not qualified to participate in even the most local politics because of a supposed inability to overcome their economic self-interest.

“If there’s one thing that I really want people to understand,” says Jakes, “it’s that making claims about a kind of strong underlying economic motivation in politics is…often a way of making claims about political disqualification, and actually means that in this country, as in Egypt a hundred years ago, when people are talking about the economy, they often are really talking about race.”

Bringing Research Questions into the Classroom

The day after NSSR spoke with Jakes, he taught a chapter of Egypt’s Occupation in his Lang survey course on Middle Eastern history, marking the first time he’s brought his work directly into the classroom. But teaching has long given him new ways to think about the problems at the center of his research.

“There are moments in which I have actually taught about a topic that I am sort of starting to get my head around,” Jakes said. He often designs courses not necessarily around the research he’s done, but rather based on problems that appear in his work, such as “A World of Disasters: Famine, Plague, and Crisis in Global History,” which he calls “an attempt to…chart a history of concepts and ideas about disasters and the way that meaning had attached to them in different social settings.”

Jakes credits students — especially his NSSR research assistants — as well as faculty across The New School in helping this first book project come to fruition. The university has, he says ”a really special kind of ecology to make serious critical research both possible and fun.” Grants from NSSR, Lang, and NSSR’s Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies helped him complete this work.

It’s fitting, then, that the November 9 launch event for Egypt’s Occupation is a full NSSR affair, with faculty members from Historical Studies as well as Anthropology, Politics, and Sociology joining Jakes to discuss the book as well as the fallout from colonialism and financial occupation. Register for the book launch here.

Photo credit: Nina Subin

Cailin Potami is a writer, an editor, and a student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program. They live in Queens with their cats, Linguini and Tortellini.

Saving Democracy from the Plague

Transregional Center for Democratic Studies responds to COVID-19 and explores a path for political recovery

In 2019, The New School began its fall semester like most other years. Students excitedly returned to campus, some walking through its doors for the first time. There was an added layer of exhilaration in the air as the academic year marked The New School’s centennial. The university looked back to its beginnings in 1919 with the founding of its University in Exile — the predecessor to The New School for Social Research — as a safe haven for scholars fleeing Nazi Germany, and a century’s worth of scholarship and community activism. It also began to map its next century amid a current time of unprecedented global turmoil.

Building on this spirit, the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) launched its Democracy Seminar amid the October Festival of New. This “worldwide network of democratic correspondence” met to celebrate the centennial as well as to navigate the rise of authoritarianism around the globe and chart a path forward for the preservation and advancement of liberal democracy.

TCDS was founded at The New School for Social Research in the 1990s, inspired by the dismantling of communist governments in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989. Since then, TCDS has been dedicated to an interdisciplinary and international examination of democratic theory and practice.

Now, almost a year after that October meeting, the fall 2020 semester looks and feels much different, as does most of daily life in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. In response, TCDS has transitioned much of its global programming online, including holding virtual conferences to address pressing issues of the current moment.

Democracy and the Pandemic

Democracy Seminar is a revival and reimagining of the Democracy Seminar of the late 1980s and early 1990s, conceived of by Polish dissident Adam Michnik and brought to life by Michnik; Jeffrey Goldfarb, Gellert Professor of Sociology and Democracy Seminar chair; and Elzbieta Matynia, Professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies and TCDS director. The original Democracy Seminars were semi-clandestine cross-border meetings of pro-democracy intellectual dissidents in East and Central Europe.

Democracy Seminar — also organized by Goldfarb, Matynia, and Jeffrey Isaac, Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington — now fosters worldwide and open discussion among pro-democracy academics, journalists, activists, and more. Originally the group was supposed to reconvene in person this summer for an update on global democracy. Instead, they met over Zoom. On May 20, TCDS held its conference “Democracy & the Pandemic.” In July, they held a public panel: Democracy in a Time of Plague: Challenges & Opportunities in the Struggles Against Authoritarianism, COVID-19 and Racism.

“The Democracy Seminar, our worldwide committee of democratic correspondence, moved to Zoom in May,” says Goldfarb. “We met to urgently consider how the COVID-19 pandemic and the pandemic of authoritarianism are related. There was bad and good news reported from Brazil, China, Georgia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, South Africa, Turkey and the United States. While the virus is being used by authoritarians to strengthen their positions in innovative ways, their opponents are also innovatively working to strengthen their opposition, and we used our conference to compare notes. I think there was a general consensus that the situation is bleak, but not hopeless.”

“The alarming worldwide trend of abandoning democratic rule began at least five years ago, but the pandemic has sharpened its visibility,” says Matynia. “We discussed how the pandemic has provided opportunities for authoritarian regimes everywhere to expand their emergency powers in order to consolidate their peculiar autocratic legalism; but we also asked whether it might — under certain conditions — serve to topple them? The issue that was of particular interest to me was whether the very experience of this borderless occurrence, the pandemic, might provide an opportunity for the rebuilding of cross-national bonds of social solidarity.”

Student Collaboration

Students across NSSR participated in the discussions. “The Democracy Seminar is a great and meaningful event for me to hear the voices of the international scholars and activists from all over the world and their insightful reflections on the current global pandemic and democratic crisis,” says Sociology MA student Chang Liu, who contributed an article on China and the pandemic.

“The virtual Democracy Seminar was a truly inspiring event for me,” said Malkhaz Toria, a Sociology MA student and coordinator of the Memory Studies Group at The New School. Toria is also an associate professor of history and head of the Memory Studies Center at the Ilia State University in Tbilisi, Georgia. “The distinguishing participants — scholars, journalists, activists, and graduate students from the Americas, Eastern Europe, South Africa, and China — addressed backsliding from democracy exposed by COVID-19. In many countries, we witnessed rising authoritarian rule and right-wing populism before the coronavirus outbreak. However, the already existent pressing issues re-appeared in new lights during the ongoing pandemic. Insightful discussions and debates at the seminar covered an array of topics on how the pandemic is employed by authoritarian governments elsewhere. The Coronavirus revealed disturbing practices of using and abusing power to further impose governmental rules and restrict civil rights while failing to deal with the public health crisis caused by the COVID-19. But panelists also observed democratic ‘innovation’ and ‘awakenings’ to protest and resist these troubling signs of undermining democracy. Fortunately, we also hear strong critical voices from observed countries, and the Democracy Seminar exemplified these sincere hopes for the global defense of democracy.”

In the Same Boat

After a summer of rigorous online programming and intellectual discussion, Goldfarb published an update on the Democracy Seminar, titled “We’re All in the Same Boat.”

“As I wrote over two years ago, when our current group first began to take shape, this is the second iteration of the Democracy Seminar,” wrote Goldfarb “Back then, our immediate situations were strikingly different on each side of the “iron curtain.” Now, we are all in the same boat. The papers prepared for the conference, and our discussions on Zoom all attest to this.” Reflections on TCDS work done this past summer and more ongoing writing can be viewed on Democracy Seminar at Public Seminar.

TCDS is preparing for an online fall 2020 semester and another season of programming via Zoom. They are re-launching the Memory Studies Group at The New School and are looking at summer 2021 for holding their next graduate Democracy & Diversity Institute in Wroclaw, Poland. Among the first events of the semester, TCDS will host Toria and Mykola Balaban, two former Open Society Foundations (OSF) Global Dialogue Fellows at TCDS (2016). They will talk in an online public panel about their collaborative research on “Narrating Conflicts in Post-Truth Era, Facing Revisionist Russia: Ukraine and Georgia in Comparative Perspective,” supported by a ‘Global Dialogs’ Collaborative Research Grant, funded by OSF (2019-2020).

TCDS plans to continue to grow and adapt, standing up to the ever-evolving threats to liberal democracy.

Cailin Potami is a writer, an editor, and a student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program. They live in Queens with their cats, Linguini and Tortellini.

New Ways to Approach Global Mental Health Challenges

Mental health disorders are currently the leading cause of disability worldwide. Still, access to culturally relevant treatment is complicated by a wide range of social and economic barriers. And with more than 40 percent of the world population under the age of 25, many child and adolescent mental health problems are largely neglected.

Faculty and students at The New School for Social Research are spearheading a major effort to expand both research on global mental health and interventions to help people on the ground.

An Interdisciplinary Cohort

In Fall 2019, NSSR launched the Global Mental Health subject area as a way for Psychology students to explore this specialized area of study while deepening their research, developing closer relationships with faculty, connecting with outside job opportunities, and more.

Adam Brown, Associate Professor of Psychology and head of the subject area, notes that courses on the topic have filled up quickly, and that the cohort of students interested in Global Mental Health — like Psychology PhD student Evan Neuwirth — is growing substantially. And it’s not just Psychology students who are involved; increasing numbers of Parsons School of Design students interested in how design can support mental health are enrolling in courses, too.

Adam Brown, Associate Professor of Psychology and head of the Trauma and Global Mental Health Lab at NSSR

Opportunities in the field are also growing. Students in Brown’s Spring 2020 Global Mental Health course were excited to partner with the Mayor’s Office of ThriveNYC to help address critical gaps in New York City’s mental healthcare system — a project that was unfortunately disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, Brown says, “it speaks to amazing potential community partnerships that exist locally with international implications about ways to work with different organizations and agencies, while building on the creativity and knowledge basis of New School students.

New External Support

One of the classes offered in the Global Mental Health subject area is Child and Adolescent Global Mental Health, taught by Miriam Steele, Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of the Center for Attachment Research.

“This is a very innovative program because there are very few global health programs within psychology doing this kind of work,” Steele says. Steele’s work has largely looked at childhood development, bridging psychoanalytic thinking and clinical practice with contemporary research practices.

Her current course explores current trends in child and adolescent mental health services and examines responses to social and cultural traumas, with specific focus on refugee populations and displaced children. NSSR MA and PhD students from across disciplines, as well as Parsons design students, engage in team-based project work, partnering with government agencies and NGOs working to deliver interventions to children in Africa and South Asia. Together, they work to find innovative solutions and prototypes for the global mental health challenges their stakeholders propose.

The course’s Teaching Assistant, Zishan Jiwani, is a Psychology MA student and a Zolberg-IRC Fellow in Mental Health in Humanitarian Settings who has also studied transdisciplinary design at Parsons. “Zishan and I will really co-teach the class,” Steele says. “Together, we will deliver a blend of psychology, intervention science and design education to guide students in conducting user experience research, prototyping, and testing solutions remotely.”

Miriam Steele, Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of the Center for Attachment Research (left), and Zishan Jiwani, Psychology MA student (right)

“An important objective of this class is to support the cultivation of a deep understanding of how mental health and psychosocial support is delivered for children and families in low-income settings in the Global South,” Steele says. “The interdisciplinary design challenge helps students engage meaningfully with the promise and pitfall of mental health interventions.”

The course will benefit from a distinguished list of guest speakers who are at the helm of child and adolescent global health include Aisha Yousafzai from Harvard School of Public Health, Lisa Cogrove from the University of Massachusetts – Boston, Marinus van IJzendoorn from Erasmus University Rotterdam & the Department of Public Health and Primary Care, School of Clinical Medicine, University of Cambridge, UK.

Mentors from partnering organizations will help guide the student teams through the nuances of their specific challenges. Current projects include partnering with Strengthening Families for the Well-being of Children in Nairobi, Kenya to support teen mothers reintegrate into society after giving birth, and working with the Effia Nkwanta Regional Hospital in Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana to help parents of special needs children cope with their children’s diagnosis.

For the Fall 2020 semester, Steele and Jiwani were successful in securing funding from the Association for Psychological Science Teaching Fund, which was then matched by the Two Lilies Fund, a global early childhood mental health initiative. Microgrants will be awarded to all group projects that show courage, creativity, depth and provide a clear rationale for how they plan to use the funding. Teams will also have an opportunity to request a small amount of funding to develop prototypes midway through the semester.

Steele hopes that publicizing this work will inspire students from across a range of disciplines to engage with these crucial issues at The New School, which is unique in its ability to blend design and psychology in this particular way. The class, which will be offered online in Fall 2020, will also set up a protocol for other universities to develop their own global mental health studies, as well as offer an outline for an engaging and experiential online classroom experience.

“COVID-19 has presented an unprecedented challenge for teaching complex subjects like child and adolescent global mental health through an online format,” Steele said. “However, we plan to use the online format to greatly benefit the classroom experience by expanding our reach outside of New York and bringing in more collaborators virtually.”

From the Lab to the People

In Brown’s Trauma and Global Mental Health Lab, faculty and students are investigating disparities in mental health issues as well as developing innovative solutions and interventions that can reduce barriers to care in low and medium-resourced contexts, especially in the wake of COVID-19.

Recently, Brown connected with the World Health Organization about a short-term mental health treatment plan called Problem Management Plus (PM+). The pilot program to train his Lab students in PM+ would have been conducted in partnership with the Danish Red Cross, which has used PM+ primarily in areas facing humanitarian crises. Now, his ab students are learning PM+ remotely so they can help deliver it online to those in need. Read more in this New School News story.

Brown is also working with three students — Psychology MA students Camila Figueroa Restrepo and Jamie Gardella, and Milano MA student Maria Francisca Paz y Mino Maya — on a study about intergenerational memories among immigrant communities in New York City.

Together with a local nonprofit, they’re working with families of Ecuadorian heritage to understand how their narratives of migration get passed down through generations, and the extent to which knowledge of that narrative is connected with better mental health outcomes.

And, funded by a grant from the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation, Brown and his lab students are working with Danny Horesh of Bar Ilan University on an international study examining the psychological implications of the pandemic. Together, they are assessing multiple factors including stress, anxiety, and quality of life, and looking at predictors of distress and well-being.

Cailin Potami is a writer, an editor, and a student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program. They live in Queens with their cats, Linguini and Tortellini.

Social Research on Plagues

The journal’s update of 1988’s “In Time of Plague” examines the human history of pandemics and what it means for the current moment

“After decades of dividing our time between apocalyptic fears of nuclear holocaust and private fears of personal ruin, we now face a threat that is profoundly social, requiring a public, community response. Most of us until recently have assumed, perhaps without thinking, that the number of life-threatening infectious diseases was finite, soon to be cured and prevented by medical science…. Now it appears that this idea—that we stand outside our own history, that we, unlike our forebears, are immune to widespread medical disasters—is very doubtful.”

This description feels very poignant in the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Yet these are the words Arien Mack used to introduce the Fall 1988 issue of Social Research, which addressed the HIV/AIDS crisis. Called “In Time of Plague,” the special issue followed the journal’s first-ever public conference, “In Time of Plague: The History and Social Consequences of Lethal Epidemic Disease.” Now, more than 30 years later, Social Research is publishing a new issue with the same title this summer — on COVID-19.

NSSR’s Flagship Journal

“Social Research has been a part of The New School for Social Research since its beginning,” Mack says. Founded as an international quarterly in 1934, one year after The New School’s first president created the University in Exile as a refuge for scholars forced to flee Hitler’s Europe, Social Research aimed to create a public voice for the growing university. The flagship NSSR journal now operates in partnership with the school’s Center for Public Scholarship (CPS), founded and directed by Mack, which is dedicated to promoting “free inquiry and public discussion, bringing the best scholarship in and outside of the academy to bear on the critical and contested issues of our times.”

Arien Mack, Alfred and Monette Marrow Professor of Psychology, became editor of Social Research in 1970. Under her leadership, Social Research pivoted to thematic issues, and from 1988 onward paired some of them with large public conferences that explore current, pressing social issues in their historical contexts. Past issues have looked at such complex concepts as loyalty, fairness, and unknowability, as well as more focused subjects like the future of Cuba and transitions to and then from democracy. As Mack said in a 2020 Public Seminar interview with Jim Miller, Professor of Politics and Liberal Studies and Director of the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program, “Had I been in any other university, I would have been [only an experimental] psychologist. I would have published, probably more academic research. But I would not have had the kind of extraordinary run of intellectual fun that [editing] Social Research has offered me.”

“We held our first funded conference at a moment where there was an enormous amount of hysteria around the HIV-AIDS crisis,” Mack says of the program, whose proceedings were published in the 1988 “In Time of the Plague” issue. Her intention in organizing the conference was to examine the epidemic in light of the long human history of plagues, with the goal of fostering open dialogue among scholars and scientists, combating misinformation around AIDS, and offering a more effective and nuanced public response.

The Right Time to Republish

“Pandemics and plagues have been with us since the beginning of time,” Mack continues. “There are things we have learned and things we have ignored. It occurred to us that this was a great moment to republish this issue and invite authors, some who contributed to the first issue and some new contributors, to comment on the new pandemic.”

Cara Schlesinger, Managing Editor of Social Research, underscores this point. “One of the important takeaways from this issue,” she says, “is that there were lessons that were learned during the AIDS crisis and lessons that were forgotten… and when we forget history, we risk repeating it. Almost every event we [at Social Research] have done has addressed that idea in some way and tried to bring the past to bear on the present. Unfortunately, this time the past we are reminded of is very recent. Despite all of the powers and pressures working against that memory, maybe this time we will do a little better at remembering.”

The COVID-19 edition of In Time of Plague is divided into two sections. The new essays that comprise the first section navigate the moral dilemmas, inequalities, and misinformation that shadow the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing comparisons to the AIDS crisis. The second section republishes the complete collection of original papers. Contributors of both the original and new material were drawn from across disciplines.

Charles Rosenberg, Emeritus Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, wrote a paper in 1988 on the definition of disease as well as a new piece on shaping a pandemic narrative. Willam Foege, former executive director of the Carter Center and famed epidemiologist, originally published “Plagues: Perceptions of Risk and Social Responses” and has now contributed an essay entitled “Plague Revisited.” New contributors include Teresa Ghilarducci, NSSR’s Schwartz Professor of Economics and Policy Analysis and director of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, with “When Economists Take a Back Seat to Virologists”; William Hirst, NSSR’s Malcolm B. Smith Professor of Psychology, on how the pandemic will be remembered; Mariano Aguirre, advisor to the Human Rights Institute, on the connections between inequality and the impacts of COVID-19; and Mary T. Bassett, former commissioner of health for New York City, who explores how “epidemics track along the fissures of our society, exacting the highest toll among the marginalized, discriminated, and excluded.”

Join a Webinar

The Center for Public Scholarship will also be holding a two-part public webinar series to launch the new edition of In Time of Plague. See more information and register here.

The first panel, “Inequalities and Plague,” will be held Wednesday, August 5, 12:30-2:00 p.m. EDT. Panelists include Ghilarducci, Aguirre, and Bassett, as well as Ahmed Bawa, Chief Executive Officer of Universities South Africa.

The second panel, “Comparing Plagues: AIDS and COVID-19,” will be held Wednesday, August 12, 12:30-2:00 p.m. EDT and will be moderated by Ron Bayer, elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Panelists include Foege; Ruth Macklin, Distinguished University Professor Emerita of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Gerald Oppenheimer, Professor of Clinical Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University; and David A. J. Richards, Edwin D. Webb Professor of Law at New York University.

Since its first issue, Social Research has aimed to preserve the founding ideals of The New School for Social Research and to make intellectual inquiry around social and political issues more accessible for the New York community and beyond. In the introduction of this new issue, Mack writes, “It is my hope that by reissuing our 1988 issue, with new comments by experts on how the current COVID-19 pandemic resembles and differs from the AIDS epidemic, we will once again help our readers better understand what is happening now and what we might expect.”

Cailin Potami is a writer, an editor, and a student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program. They live in Queens with their cats, Linguini and Tortellini.

Who Climbs the Academic Ladder?

NSSR PhD Economics students publish paper on career trajectories of Black and Hispanic economists and sociologists

Across disciplines, academia is reckoning with its own whiteness. In 2017, 76 percent of university faculty members in the United States were white. While racial diversity has increased over the past two decades, professors are still much more likely than their students to be white.

The path to tenure is riddled with obstacles. White men are the most likely to become full-time professors, and as a result are more likely to set the agenda and priorities for departments and academic institutions. They receive the highest salaries and positions of power, creating a cycle and social atmosphere that can be difficult to infiltrate.

In collaboration with the American Sociological Association (ASA), two Economics PhD candidates and one Economics PhD alum from The New School for Social Research (NSSR) co-authored three papers on the academic barriers that underrepresented minority (URM) PhD graduates and faculty members face. Published in the Review of Black Political Economy — the leading peer-reviewed journal for research on the economic status of African-Americans and the African diaspora throughout the world — their main paper, “Who Climbs the Academic Ladder? Race and Gender Stratification in a World of Whiteness,” looks at the career trajectory of Black and Latino economists and sociologists. The other two publications explore the experiences of women of color in economics and sociology how “raced” organizations influence the tenure process for faculty members in sociology.

Economics PhD candidates Kyle K. Moore and Ismael Cid-Martinez (left to right in cover photo) worked alongside Jermaine Toney, Assistant Professor of Economics at Rutgers University and an NSSR Economics PhD 2017 alum, to co-author the papers with other scholars of economics and sociology; Roberta Spalter-Roth, PhD, Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Social Science Research, and Amber Kalb, a PhD candidate in sociology at George Mason University spearheaded the work demonstrating how the social sciences exclude women of color from intellectual legitimacy. Other co-authors include Jean H. Shin, PhD, and Jason A. Smith, PhD, of the ASA. The team presented their findings at the 2019 American Economic Association annual meetings and in 2018 as working papers.

Using a sample population of Black and Latino students in the U.S. who graduated from PhD programs between 1995 and 2006, they set out to uncover what percentage of these URM scholars in sociology or economics succeed in moving up the academic career ladder, identify the existing social structures that can prevent them from doing so, and lay out policy recommendations to remedy the lack of diversity.

Moore and Cid-Martinez spoke with Research Matters over Zoom to discuss the interdisciplinary nature of “Who Climbs the Academic Ladder” and what this work means for the future of economics, and academia at large.

Of Economists and Sociologists

Moore and Cid-Martinez are in the last year of their PhD programs, currently working on their dissertations, and both are former research assistants at NSSR’s Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis. Moore is also a Senior Policy Analyst with the Joint Economic Committee in the U.S. Congress, while Cid-Martinez is a consultant for UNICEF’s Data and Analytics Unit. They got involved in the project when ASA approached NSSR’s Department of Economics about comparing faculty diversity within economics and sociology.

“There was a lot of energy behind wanting to compare the two disciplines, to see whether or not things were different for underrepresented minority scholars in economics versus sociology,” Moore says. “We were asking the same questions, looking at pipeline problems with diversifying both disciplines and asking which things matter in becoming a tenured professor.”

Cid-Martinez added, “Despite the fact that they are often treated as disparate fields, both sociology and economics share similar concerns with issues of inequality and inter-group disparities.”

“Our project invokes W.E.B. Du Bois, who is the shared heritage of economics and sociology, having completed coursework in economics and spearheaded sociological inquiries on stratification,” Toney says.

For “Who Climbs the Academic Ladder? Race and Gender Stratification in a World of Whiteness,” the researchers set out to measure stratification by the distribution of academic rank and examine differences based on discipline, institution type, race/ethnicity, gender, and publications in terms of academic career success. To understand the exclusivity of academia in economics and sociology, the researchers embarked on a labor-intensive, mixed-methodologies approach, reviewing the resumes and CVs of PhD cohorts in the two fields between 1995 and 2006. They reasoned that these graduates should have had enough time to have moved from tenure-track assistant professors to tenured associate professors within eight years, though not all did so, and some should have had time to become full professors within 14 years.

“One of the main contributions that we wanted to have with the paper is that we wanted it to be non-intrusive,” Moore says. “So we didn’t want to have to rely exclusively on survey data. We wanted to be able to identify folks and gather as much data in a secondary way as possible to build out the trajectory of their careers.”

This is where the interdisciplinary nature of the project became crucial. “That intensive sort of mixed methods research is not something economists typically do,” Moore says. “But our sociologist colleagues were more familiar with doing that type of work.”

Together, they discovered that the career paths of URM faculty can be limited due to a process that legitimates a non-Hispanic White male set of rules and practices, including value-neutrality — the idea that a researcher must be totally impartial — and objectivity.

One of the major frameworks for the study was the idea of social and human capital and its relationship to advancing an academic career path. There is, of course, the well-known aphorism in academia of “publish or perish” — meaning that how often and in which journals scholars publish work can be a critical metric in the tenure process. Their findings confirmed that publications are likely the most significant measure leading to promotion. But authoring and getting an article to publication goes much deeper. “Having a group of people to relate to and publish work with and co-author with, build relationships with, is key,” Moore says.

As a discipline, sociology was founded upon the idea of social stratification, or classifying groups of people based on inequalities in power and resources. Applying this approach to economics illuminated how, traditionally, the discipline focuses on the individual rather than looking at larger social structures. The emphasized focus on publication status and other forms of human capital perpetuates a system of exclusivity. By bringing social theory into economics, the researchers were able to identify how critical inclusive social networks can be to progressing a career in academia.

“These disciplines don’t account for the fact that minority faculty do a lot of service work with respect to minority students, and that’s not often captured in determining who gets tenure, who doesn’t get tenure, whether or not those support networks exist in those fields,” Moore says. Participation in ‘raced’ organizations and activities was similarly devalued, and URM faculty who did not receive tenure likely dropped out of academia and found alternative employment. “I think that’s the case for the social sciences more broadly. A lot of these insights from the paper are going to be able to apply more broadly.”

Looking Inward and Ahead at The New School

Broadening the scope of traditional economics and fostering interdisciplinary approaches is at the core of NSSR. “One of the advantages coming from the New School and our department is that we started with a very pluralistic, or heterodox, perspective in looking at economics” Cid-Martinez says. “So that in itself provided us with a different lens from which to view and treat these issues.”

“The paper itself is a product of The New School,” Moore says. “More people should do more interdisciplinary work and The New School encourages that in its curriculum. I think it’s a very valuable thing to do just as a scholar.”

While the New School provided the perfect environment to build out this research, no institution is immune from reflecting on faculty diversity. “We make important recommendations in the paper,” Cid-Martinez says. “They have a lot to do with not just stopping at diversity hiring. That’s part of the solution, but it’s not enough. We share a responsibility to bring in underrepresented minorities to enrich diversity of representation, methods, and thought, but it is even more important to make sure that they have positive opportunities to climb the academic ladder, that they feel included in their universities and departments, and that they are part of the conversation about the direction in which these need to move. These recommendations are pretty universal; they apply to disciplines outside of the social sciences and even to the most progressive universities and departments in the country.”

These papers have gained widespread attention within the greater economics field. With the momentum of national discourse around internalized racism in hiring structures, Moore and Cid-Martinez are hoping to continue the work and move forward these conversations.

“What we studied were the things that allowed folks to gain access to tenure in the eight years after their initial cohort in our sample population,” Moore says. “But moving forward, there are new areas of social capital that are important that we haven’t considered. The main one that’s big on my mind right now is EconTwitter,” a community of economists active on the social media platform. “Twitter is a relatively new and important vehicle that is driving impact in the profession and academia more generally. I suspect that participation on that platform may be a valuable tool for URM scholars in leveling the playing field. A junior scholar can put their ideas out there and have them be digested in the same format and reach as an established academic.”

These new ways of putting out work and rising within disciplines could be extremely relevant to changing the structure of academia, and deciding who climbs the career ladder towards tenure.

Works Cited

Moore, K. K., Cid-Martinez, I., Toney, J., Smith, J. A., Kalb, A. C., Shin, J. H., & Spalter-Roth, R. M. (2018). Who Climbs the Academic Ladder? Race and Gender Stratification in a World of Whiteness. The Review of Black Political Economy, 45(3), 216–244. https://doi.org/10.1177/0034644618813667

Spalter-Roth, R., Shin, J. H., Smith, J. A., Kalb, A. C., Moore, K. K., Cid-Martinez, I., & Toney, J. (2019). “Raced” Organizations and the Academic Success of Underrepresented Minority Faculty Members in Sociology. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 5(2), 261–277. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649218807951

Spalter-Roth, R., & Kalb, A. C. (2019). Women of Color in Economics and Sociology: Poor Climate, Unequal Treatment, and Lack of Legitimacy. Institute for Women’s Policy Research. https://iwpr.org/publications/race-ethnicity-economics-sociology-inequality/

Cailin Potami is a writer, an editor, and a student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program. They live in Queens with their cats, Linguini and Tortellini.

New Social Philosophy Prize Awards Challenges to Canon

A collaboration between NSSR and Vanderbilt reflects the evolving field of social philosophy

Within the broader field of philosophy, an increased focus on social thought has led to an upsurge of interest in critical theories of race, gender, and class. In response, a group of faculty and students at The New School for Social Research (NSSR) and Vanderbilt University — including Alice Crary, University Distinguished Professor at NSSR, and Matthew Congdon, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt and NSSR Philosophy PhD 2014 alumnus — have created the Prize for Distinguished Achievement in Social Philosophy, which seeks to recognize “groundbreaking, courageous, critical work” in the field.

The inaugural recipient of the biennial prize is Robert Gooding-Williams, M. Moran West/Black Alumni Council Professor of African-American Studies, Professor of Philosophy and of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.

Research Matters sat down digitally with Crary, Congdon, and Gooding-Williams to talk about social philosophy and its history at The New School, as well as what this award represents.

Collaborating for Visibility in the Field

Crary and Congdon’s collaboration began when Crary served as Congdon’s PhD advisor in NSSR’s Philosophy department. Crary, who has written extensively on ethics, was a natural fit as a mentor for Congdon, whose research focuses on moral psychology and the intersections of ethics and epistemology.

The two continue to talk often, and in 2019 ran a successful workshop at Vanderbilt on social visibility; topics included the visibility of racism in the United States, the critical significance of art and aesthetic experiences, and the epistemology of ideology critique. They met for coffee the day after the workshop to debrief and both were pleased with how the presentations had gone. That was what led to the idea of further collaboration.

“Partly we were interested in the significance of the fact that, in Anglo-American circles, the idea of social philosophy is a relative newcomer,” says Crary. “We wanted to look afresh at what it means to explore specifically social thought and criticism. What we were doing in pulling together the original workshop was identifying a set of exciting philosophers and political theorists who are working across intellectual traditions not only in theorizing about these things but also in bringing theory to bear on practice.”

They felt momentum growing in the field and wanted to turn their one-time effort into something more sustained. Crary and Congdon developed the Prize for Distinguished Achievement in Social Philosophy and formed a prize committee, which includes Karen Ng, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt and an NSSR Philosophy PhD 2013 alum; Dora Suarez, a current NSSR Philosophy PhD student; Daniel Rodriguez-Navas, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at NSSR; and Eric MacPhail, a current Vanderbilt Philosophy PhD student and an NSSR Philosophy MA 2016 alum.

It makes sense that NSSR is so strongly represented on the committee. The field of social philosophy has strong connections to intellectual traditions represented at The New School since the 1930s, in particular Critical Theory. So while analytic philosophers have increasingly turned to social philosophy in the past 20 years, “these conversations were happening at The New School many decades earlier,” Congdon says. Here, “philosophy is looked at as a distinctively social phenomenon. How inhabiting shared forms of life shapes one’s vision and perception of that world, and shapes what objects are actually in that world. Or how our shared history shapes one’s perception of that world…. That was something that was just in the air at The New School from the beginning; to study just about any philosophical problem was already to want to situate it in a kind of a social context.” Congdon also found the intellectual climate of The New School to include a shared sense of political activism, with students often involved in community organizing and political events on and outside of campus.

Vanderbilt also has a pluralistic Philosophy department, which Crary says is not something to be taken for granted. “Here pluralism means something like — we’re not going to be factional and say the only legitimate kind of philosophy is the kind that’s being practiced in the Anglo-American world, or is in the European philosophical scene, or elsewhere. We both think that this kind of open-mindedness is decisive for philosophizing that is productively engaged with the world and guided by a commitment to social justice. It’s rarer than you would think.”

Changing Who Gets to Be a Philosopher

The first prize recipient, Robert Gooding-Williams, has been instrumental in legitimizing social philosophy.

Challenging the philosophy canon since the 1980s, Gooding-Williams has helped make discussions about race a decisive area for philosophical study — one now recognized by the American Philosophical Association. As a historian of African-American philosophy and a scholar of W.E.B. Dubois, Gooding-Williams has questioned the exclusion of Dubois, Booker T. Washington, and Frederick Douglass from consideration as prominent political philosophers.

“My contributions to social philosophy have largely concerned the diagnosis of social problems, specifically racism and white supremacy,” Gooding-Williams says, as well as “the analyses and political-philosophical responses to racism and white supremacy in the history of African American political thought.”

His essay collection, Look, A Negro! Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture and Politics (Routledge, 2005), explores the concept of Black identity, the nature of Black political solidarity, the significance of Afro-centrism for American democracy, and the impact of racial ideology on aesthetic judgment, while In the Shadow of Du Bois (Harvard University Press, 2011) analyzes Afro-Modern political thought in the U.S. In a forthcoming paper, Gooding-Williams builds on other philosophers’ recent efforts to understand racial domination in terms of practices and the concepts that constitute them; an excerpt of that paper revisits the Ferguson Report and how anti-Black concepts influence police practices.

“He is doing great historical work and also telling a story about what good political philosophy is. He leads us to see clearly that the exclusion of Du Bois and others is a function of racism,” Crary says. “His work is incredibly important and powerful.”

Congdon describes the courageousness in Gooding-Williams’ methodology: “His contribution [is] basically creating and legitimizing whole areas of philosophy that had been delegitimized or not recognized as important.”

Crary and Congdon had planned to make an occasion of the first prize, honoring Gooding-Williams as well as organizing a public lecture featuring prominent philosophers and social theorists, and recognizing graduate students with the NSSR-Vanderbilt Graduate Student Prize in Social Philosophy. Amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, they are monitoring the situation and will make a decision about the event in the coming months, making the health and well-being of the event’s participants a top priority. More information, as well as the organizers’ full congratulatory message to Gooding-Williams, can be found on the NSSR website.

Photo Credits: Left: Matthew Congdon and Alice Crary at a philosophy conference in Paris, 2019; Right: Robert Gooding-Williams via American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2018.

Cailin Potami is a writer, an editor, and a student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program. They live in Queens with their cats, Linguini and Tortellini.

Alumni Research

News

NSSR Politics Alum Camila Gripp Wins Dissertation Award

In her dissertation, entitled “New Dogs, Old Tricks: The Inner Workings of an Attempt at Police Reform in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,” Gripp explores the failed implementation of a comprehensive public security initiative that sought to impose a new kind of community policing in Brazil’s second largest city, and to reclaim territory from criminal organizations through military force. The APSA committee called her research “an incredibly important case about a significant question, with policy implications for police reform, both in Latin America and the Global South, and beyond.” Gripp also received NSSR’s Hannah Arendt Award in Politics for her dissertation.

“I was not expecting it at all!” says Gripp about the APSA honor. But David Plotke, Professor of Politics and one of her NSSR advisors was not surprised. “It’s great that Camila Gripp’s excellent dissertation has been recognized in this way,” Plotke says. “Her work makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of how to reform and regulate policing, and her insights travel across contexts and countries.”

Bringing Qualitative Research to Politics

After finishing her PhD and delivering a heartfelt address as Student Speaker at NSSR’s 2019 Recognition Ceremony, Gripp dove directly into a new job as Senior Research Associate at the Justice Collaboratory of the Yale Law School. There, she is involved in several research projects on criminal justice, including a study to improving communications and trust-building interactions between corrections staff and incarcerated persons in Connecticut, and an interview-based project on how frontline workers of six key institutions in New York City’s criminal justice system — prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, corrections officers, probation officers and Criminal Justice Agency interviewers — perceive the legitimacy of their roles and the institutions in which they work. She’s also helping increase the role of everyday people in decisions around policing and justice via community based participatory action research.

Qualitative research is key to Gripp’s work. She spent one year doing ethnographic fieldwork for her dissertation, including 800 hours of observation while embedded with Rio police officers, as well as 80 interviews with officers and 30 interviews with civilians. The APSA committee was impressed with “the in-depth nature of her ethnographic field work, which involved considerable risk,” stating that Gripp “provided a model discussion of how she conducted ethnographic research, including ethical tensions that can arise, the challenges of gaining sufficient access and trust to study policing, and a thoughtful consideration of her positionality.”

Gripp credits the interdisciplinary nature of her NSSR education with helping her develop this particular skill set. “I’m originally an economist who became a political scientist, and now I work at a law school. This is not a regular trajectory!” she laughs. “This is only possible because I wasn’t constrained by the frames of a certain discipline. I really had an opportunity to study with different scholars, take different classes, and have conversations at other departments.”

Two NSSR faculty members in particular — Plotke and Jim Miller, Professor of Liberal Studies and Politics — mentored Gripp as a student, and she continues to turn to them for guidance today. “I often contact them to talk about career perspectives, publications and next steps,” she says. Plotke also officially submitted her dissertation for the APSA award consideration.

The Future of Policing

Gripp’s work on policing is gaining more attention as movements to defund and abolish the police gain traction across the United States. While she is supportive of discussions on these topics, she is also cautious around demands for immediate change. “I think we don’t necessarily know yet how much communities that need police rely on the police, and what replacing the police with different services would look like,” she says. “The retreat of the role of police needs to come with a reframing of what it means to be a police officer.”

Gripp warns about expanding the social services functions of police officers without proper funding and support, citing her dissertation research. “By having police officers [in Rio] performing functions not generally associated with police, they thought they could bring the police closer to the poor communities and instill empathy in police officers,” she says. Ultimately, the opposite happened; police officers were not given appropriate support to take on their new role, their organizational structure did not support internal procedural justice, and officers progressively shortchanged the innovative model. U.S. cities must think carefully about the role we want police officers to have in communities, Gripp says. We may not want them to take on roles that can be performed by other agencies, but we also do not want them to see themselves as only armed, almost militaristic, enforcement officers who do not need to address other community problems.

She hopes U.S. cities will choose a positive path, and believes strongly in the real-world impact of her work at Yale. Read more in the Justice Collaboratory’s latest report, “Changing the Law to Change Policing: First Steps.”

Federico Finchelstein on his new book, A Brief History of Fascist Lies

In an interview with NSSR students, Finchelstein discusses the changing nature of truth

Federico Finchelstein, Professor of History, returns to studying the history of fascism to understand the current political moment. His new book, A Brief History of Fascist Lies (University of California Press, 2020) is a companion to his 2019 book, From Fascism to Populism in History (University of California Press). This latest work explores the new terrain of “post-truth” and “fake news,” while investigating the long lineage of fascist leaders weaponizing lies.

Emmanuel Guerisoli, Sociology and History PhD candidate, and Ihor Andriichuk, Politics PhD student, sat down over Zoom with Finchelstein to discuss the inspiration behind his research and how lies define politics today.

Listen to the full conversation here:

An excerpt of the edited transcript of the discussion is below

***

On why this book, now

Guerisoli: I wanted to start with a basic question. You mention at the beginning of the book a series of events like the El Paso shooting and a Christchurch shooting in New Zealand that in a way triggered the idea to write this book. Do you want to talk more about that, why you’re writing this book now?

Finchelstein: Those events happened almost by the end of the writing…This [book] is a kind of continuation of a longstanding worry about how and why people believe in fascists, what makes that fascism successful? One of the issues that makes it successful is that these outrageous ideas become a matter of belief. They spread throughout, motivating a lot of people to not only believe, but also to kill in its name, to exert a lot of violence in its name. So the two examples that you mention, Emmanuel, are rather examples from the end of the story.

This book is a kind of continuation of a longstanding worry about how and why people believe in fascists
Finchelstein

….After finishing my work, From Fascism to Populism in History, I wanted to return to some questions that I have been addressing before. This started in a way with a conference that I gave in Italy in the mid-2000s. This was like a longer question of why people believe in fascism and why that belief moves beyond empirical demonstration to be a world of fantasy which, ironically, is believed and presented as true.

Andriichuk: You mention at the very end of the book that you actually started working on this book in 2013, after this conference in Italy. In the introduction, you say that fascists and populists are playing in a league of their own. And if to speak from today about 2013 and the period between those dates, is this league increasing or declining?

Finchelstein: What I mean by that is that all politicians lie. And lying is not an issue which depends on a particular ideology. All ideologies eventually engage with lies and often propaganda. What I mean when I say that they play in a league of their own is that most other political traditions generally do not believe their lies. I think that is an important distinction. The other part of that distinction is that not only do these people believe in their lies, but also they believe that their lies are the truth. Even reality does not correlate to that belief, hat they do is try to change reality and in the book I present many examples of this.

Lying is not an issue which depends on a particular ideology. All ideologies eventually engage with lies and often propaganda. What I mean when I say that they play in a league of their own is that most other political traditions generally do not believe their lies.
Finchelstein

One of them is one of the most dramatic assumptions of these beliefs…is the belief in an anti-Semitic lie…that states that Jews are dirty and they spread disease. They are sometimes presented a virus themselves. This is a lie, and hat the Nazis did with this is to create an artificial war in which this lie could turn into a reality. Jews were, of course, not spreading disease per se, but once they were put in horrible conditions, in ghettos and concentration camps, they didn’t have food, they didn’t have sanitary conditions and so on and so forth. They eventually became ill and certainly spread disease, but they only did so not because that was true, but rather because the Nazis turned their lies into situations which became the truth. But that truth itself is a lie because it’s the effect or the outcome of turning lies into reality.

On believing lies

Guerisoli: Something that I found really quite striking from your book is…that you make a difference that lying is something that also liberalism does. But as you just said, liberalism doesn’t believe…

Finchelstein: Or communism.

Guerisoli: Exactly, they don’t believe their own lies. One could…say, well, liberalism or

communism might be hypocritical, but fascism is a dangerous, sincere type of ideology. The issue is that what you are saying is that also the lying is racist, it is based on this idea that certain communities of people, certain races, certain ethnicities, are superior or have a sacred space in the world. Their leaders appear able to reveal a “sacred old truth” that certain spaces or certain people are sacred and therefore they need to act upon it. And this is, going back to the El Paso and Christchurch shootings, the idea of the replacement theory, that these people believe that migrants or foreigners of people who are not white or Christians are invading and spreading disease, or contaminating, polluting the romanticized idea of their society.

Finchelstein: ….This is exactly what I want to say. It involves racism because fascism historically has been racist. So basically, the idea of truth in fascism, which is, of course, a lie for the rest of us, is a racist lie. It involves demonization, discrimination, and racism. And there uou see the connection between the past and the present.

And here I would like to stress a distinction between the current populism and far-right populism, the current one…I mean Trump, I mean Bolsonaro, I mean Orban, I mean Narendra Modi and others, is that as opposed to most populists in history — starting with Juan Peron to Silvio Berlusconi or Hugo Chavezmeaning populism left and right — they did not exactly engage with lies in the same way. They were much more pragmatic, closer to the liberalism way of lying. Whereas what Trump and Bolsonaro share, not with the populists in history but with the fascists themselves is the idea, this belief in their own lies. A good example of this is that we have a lie that divides us, the lie being that you don’t need a mask to protect yourself from the virus. Even in this country now, people are divided across two ideological lines. I mean, you wear a mask if you believe in science. You don’t wear a mask if you believe in Trump. But Trump himself exposes himself to the disease because he doesn’t wear a mask. There you have a perfect demonstration of how he believes in his own lies.

I think here you see the connection between populism and fascism in a very particular way. The current populism, the current post-fascism, is very different to the post-fascist populism of the past. It’s different in the sense that it is racist, it glorifies violence and also lies as fascists lie.

That connects them not only with the fascists of the past…but also with the fascists of the present, as these terrorists that you were talking about. So this terrorism involves the same lies and even kill, as the fascists did, for these lies. But these lies are also the lies that are being involved by Trump. I mean, this idea of replacement, this idea of invasion. Sometimes it’s even verbatim, that these terrorists use the same words that Trump is using. So Trump is not responsible for their violence, but is enabling it. I mean, he’s not legally responsible for the violence, but he has a responsibility…He’s spreading the same lies as they do.

A good example of this is that we have a lie that divides us, the lie being that you don’t need a mask to protect yourself from the virus. Even in this country now, people are divided across two ideological lines. I mean, you wear a mask if you believe in science. You don’t wear a mask if you believe in Trump.
Finchelstein

On the psychoanalytic history of lying

Andriichuk: ….In the book…you’re stressing that this kind of fascist lie and populist lie is not conscious or intentional. So the person who is lying does not necessarily imply there is a lie. So there is not necessarily a knowledge of this lie.

Finchelstein: Sometimes.

Andriichuk: So it’s kind of subconscious or a gray area. You approach this matter from a psychoanalytical point, and this matter is revealing. My question would be what those populist or fascist lies might reveal in themselves.

Finchelstein: So there are a couple of things….From Hitler, Mussolini, Goebbels, at some level…they recognize that these lies were lies. But even then, the idea was that these lies were servicing the truth, or were enabling the truth, or were at the service of the truth. Sometimes in a minimal way, they were acknowledging to some extent that they were lying for the truth, rendering these in a way smaller than the truth, which was an ideological one, such as racism. Even if this particular person is not spreading disease at the current moment, they insisted on the fact that this person was spreading disease because at the end of the day, what mattered was the big truth, as they understood it. Even Hitler himself will say about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is one of the craziest lies of anti-Semitism and racism…When they asked Hitler about this, Hitler would say, “Even if there are aspects of the Protocols that are not correct or true, they speak to a greater truth.” …. Now, regarding the question of psychoanalysis, as you know from the book, there are different levels of this. The book is about how the fascists understood their lying, but also how anti-fascists at the time were trying to think about the lies of fascism. Among these anti-fascists, many of them were very interested in psychoanalysis, starting, of course, with Freud…but also people like Adorno, people like Mariátegui…Many of them thought that the concepts of psychoanalysis and its approach to the unconscious could help us understand this irrational belief in a form of truth that basically rejects empirical demonstration but have faith as truth in emerging in the inner being.

Traditional media still are looking for a middle ground that doesn’t exist.
Finchelstein

At the beginning of the book, I quote Trump, Hitler, and Mussolini. I compare their understanding of the truth, which of course is quite similar. The truth is not being based on empirical demonstration. Perhaps the most explicit among the three of them…is Trump, who says, “Don’t believe in what you are seeing.” How can you not believe in what you are seeing?..This is extremely irrational, and the unconscious has an important role to play… The other level is that…the fascists themselves were quite obsessed with psychoanalysis. There is a chapter on this issue…and why they thought that psychoanalysis was so problematic for fascism.

Guerisoli: …I wanted to point out that this issue connects to the idea of race, because in the end,… the concern is that Freud is attacking the idea of myth, but particularly what is sacred to fascists, which in this sense would be the nation, particularly for fascists. It’s not that Freud is directly attacking fascists, although in the end he will, but that

by attacking the idea of anything that is sacred as something that is not truth, then what fascists are saying is that “Freud is saying this because he’s a Jew and not loyal to the nation and therefore he’s a virus in our own societies. And you see going around not just in Europe, but also in Latin America, with the clerical fascism types, from Mexico to Argentina.

With the case of Trump, or at least today…you mentioned also that what’s most dangerous is this relationship between conspiracy theories that are believed by a lot of people, but then public officials like Bolsanaro or Trump talk about them as if not facts, but as possibilities that should be addressed and discussed as they have enough evidence of any other type of historical facts. You add to that liberal societies with new media, you have the perfect environment for these to become mainstream, like birther conspiracy and everything else.

Finchelstein: The point here and the problem here is that it’s very hard to discuss lies. Generally, in a rational discussion…arguments need to be supported by facts. Now, if you have on one hand an anti-fascist critique that is supported by facts, and on the other hand pure racist fantasies and xenophobic fantasies, on the other hand there is no middle ground. So that’s why, sometimes, traditional media still are looking for a middle ground that doesn’t exist. Because quite simply, as many of the anti-fascists from the 1970s and 40s pointed out ,on one side, there is the truth and on the other one is fascist lies….you will see sometimes the New York Times…when Trump says something outrageous, or I will say, Trump says something outrageous about the coronavirus. So Trump says there is a miracle cure; experts disagree, somehow implying there are two sides. There are not two sides. Trump is lying; science tells you otherwise.

Cailin Potami is a writer, an editor, and a student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program. They live in Queens with their cats, Linguini and Tortellini.

COVID-19 and Eastern Europe

In Spring 2020, members of the Decolonizing Eastern European Studies (DEES) group produced a series of video essays critically examining how states and societies in Eastern Europe have responded to, and thought about, the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the disease it causes in humans, COVID-19. Each essay draws on long-term, direct engagement with people in the region and with scholarship written in the languages of the region.

The essays and accompanying videos were originally published on the DEES group page and have been reshared here with permission.

DEES on COVID-19: Introduction
Jessica Pisano, Associate Professor of Politics and DEES coordinator
Read her essay here

COVID-19 and Hungarian Democracy
Orsolya Lehotai, Politics PhD student
Read her essay here

Hitler and White Asparagus: The Pandemic in Romania
Elisabeta Pop, Politics PhD student
Read her essay here

Russian Governmentality and COVID-19
Dina Shvetsov, Politics PhD student
Read her paper here

Old Wine in New Bottles: Church and State in Georgia in COVID-19
Malkhaz Toria, Sociology MA student
Read his paper here

What’s Wrong with Ukraine’s Response to COVID-19
Masha Shynkarenko, Politics PhD candidate
Read her paper here

Voices from the Polish Borderland
Karolina Koziura, Sociology and Historical Studies PhD candidate
Read her paper here

NSSR Students Win Competitive 2020-2021 Research Grants

Sara Hassani received a 2020 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, one of just 65 doctoral students in the U.S. to receive the award this year.

In her dissertation, entitled “Cloistered Infernos: The Politics of Self-Immolation in the Persian Belt,” Hassani investigates the steep and gendered rates of self-immolation plaguing the domestic sphere in the Persian belt countries of Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and mounts a conceptual challenge to common distinctions between self-destructive acts of resistance and suicide in the study of politics. Her research draws on fieldwork, interviews with survivors of self-immolation, nurses, burn surgeons, and civil society actors, as well as 200 qualitative surveys from across the region. Hassani’s work challenges the pathologizing rationalizations characteristic of epidemiological accounts of self-burning and theorizes this lethal and affective form of agency and protest through the lens of marginalized actors who exist within the cultural, political, and socioeconomic realities of apartheid. Her research has been published in the International Feminist Journal of Politics.

A Politics PhD candidate advised by former NSSR professor Banu Bargu, Hassani cites the department’s Theory Collective as critical to her work. “There’s no better place in the world to study political theory and I’m incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to learn and grow as part of this community,” she says.

In addition to the Mellon/ACLS fellowship, Hassani has also received the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship (2017-2019), and an NSSR Prize Fellowship (2014-2017). She was also a 2015 fellows at NSSR’s Institute for Critical Social Inquiry,

Tatiana Llaguno Nieves received a research grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). She will use the award to study for one year at Humboldt University of Berlin, where she will work with Rahel Jaeggi, Professor for Practical Philosophy.

A Politics PhD candidate, Llaguno Nieves is advised by Nancy Fraser, Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics. In her dissertation, entitled “Paradoxes of Dependence,” Llaguno Nieves provides a counter-narrative to the dominant language of independence that permeates political theory, defending the philosophical and political value in taking dependence as a starting point and as a general life condition. She looks to Hegel, Marx, feminist theory, and environmental critique to develop an understanding of dependence that is not necessarily opposed to freedom, and argues that it is rather the logic of domination, expropriation and exploitation that pervades our current organization of dependence that must be questioned.

Llaguno Nieves originally came to NSSR — a place she describes as “a true intellectual home, always stimulating and transforming, as well as the perfect place to work at the intersection of politics and philosophy” — from Spain as a Fulbright Fellow. In addition to the DAAD award, she has also received an NSSR Dissertation Fellowship and a 2019 Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award.

Karolina Koziura won a 2020 American Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies Association Dissertation Research Grant. Her project, “The Making of Holodomor in State Archives: Narratives of Famine and their Afterlives in Contemporary Ukraine,” seeks to understand the Great Ukrainian Famine as a global event shaped by Cold War-era politics of knowledge production. Koziura plans to use the grant to fund additional archival research in Ukraine.

A PhD candidate in Sociology and Historical Studies, Koziura explores problems of nationalism, spatial transformations, and memory politics in Central and Eastern Europe. Her adviser is Virag Molnar, Associate Professor of Sociology, and her work has appeared in East European Politics and Societies, Culture, and Ukraina Moderna, among others. She is a member of the Decolonizing Eastern European Studies group at NSSR

Koziura has received an NSSR Prize Fellowship (2014-2017) and the Integrative PhD Fellowship (2018-2020). Her research has also been supported by the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium.

Masha Shynkarenko has received the Helen Darcovych Memorial Doctoral Fellowship at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta for her work on nonviolent resistance and community identity formation among Crimean Tatars across the USSR, Ukraine, and Russia.

A Politics PhD candidate, Shynkarenko explores nonviolent resistance, democratic practices, and memory politics in the post-Soviet context. Her advisors are Jessica Pisano, Associate Professor of Politics, and Jim Miller, Professor of Politics and Liberal Studies. Her dissertation focuses on the nonviolent movement for self-determination of Crimean Tatar indigenous people across USSR, Ukraine, and Russia.

Shynkarenko is a Research Fellow at the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, doing ethnographic and archival research in Ukraine, and has published essays on Ukrainian politics and the dream politics of Burning Man in Public Seminar. She is a member of the Decolonizing Eastern European Studies group at NSSR and has also received an NSSR doctoral fellowship.

Dina Shvetsov received the American Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies Association Understanding Modern Russia Grant for her project, “Property Relations in The Condition of Legal Pluralism in Chechnya: Preliminary Research.”

A Politics PhD student working with Jessica Pisano, Associate Professor of Politics, Shvetsov has written on political risk in Central Asia, constitutionalism in Israel, and privatization in Muslim regions of Russia. She is a member of the Decolonizing Eastern European Studies group at NSSR, and her current research focuses on alternative frameworks for analysis of social change in the transition from historical socialism to capitalism.

Shvetsov was a contributing writer and moderator for a project bridging critical social theory and artistic practice at the Vera List Center of Art and Politics, “Dialogues on a Future Communication. (Part 2. Resilience)” by Berlin-based artist Jenny Brockman, and currently teaches sociology and social theory at Stern College for Women at Yeshiva University. She is also an NSSR Prize Fellow.

NSSR Welcomes Lillian Polanco-Roman to Psychology Department

The new assistant professor brings expertise on mental health disparities in at-risk populations

Lillian Polanco-Roman joins the Psychology department faculty at The New School for Social Research (NSSR) in Fall 2020 as an Assistant Professor of Psychology. With a background as a clinical psychologist, Polanco-Roman studies how cultural experiences can impact psychopathology, especially in racial minorities and immigrant youth populations. Specifically, her research tackles demographic disparities in suicidal ideation and behaviors in youth.

Research Matters sat down (digitally) with Polanco-Roman to discuss her research, what drew her to the work, and what she’s looking forward to doing at NSSR.

Elevating ‘Social Research’

“I’m interested in the ‘social research’ part of The New School,” Polanco-Roman says. “Part of its mission includes looking at social justice, social and environmental factors, and how that might impact development. These ideas play a huge role in my research. This focus is something that really aligns with me, with research, with my passion.”

Polanco-Roman studies the ‘casualties of racism’ and how racial and ethnic discrimination influences suicidal thoughts and behaviors in minority emerging adults. Culturally related experiences are rarely analyzed in risk assessment for suicide, and she hopes to better understand and highlight the relationships between ethnic identity and depressive symptoms.

Her path to an academic career grew out of her roots right here in New York City. A first-generation college student born and raised in Brooklyn, Polanco-Roman received a BS in Psychology from Fordham University, an MA in Psychology from Hunter College — where she also taught the subject — and her PhD from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Columbia University in the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and has counseled in a clinical setting.

Her upbringing played a strong role in shaping her scholarly interests. “Studying and working here made a lot of sense given the population I’m interested in working with, which is ethnic minority youth and immigrant youth,” she says. “They are well represented in New York City and it’s what drew me to this work. I want to give back to my community.”

During her time at CUNY, Polanco-Roman pieced together her own program of study, first finding faculty studying suicide risk in adolescence. She then connected with a professor who specialized in the impact of racial discrimination on psychopathology. “Working with both of them, I was able to create essentially a tailored programmed where I was looking at cultural experiences of suicide risk and youth by combining these two.”

While forging her own specialized path of study, Polanco-Roman began to translate her research into real-life suicide prevention and minority youth support. While working in the Counseling Services Center at John Jay College, she co-facilitated a group for college students with chronic depression and suicidal ideation that focused on healthy coping strategies. As a training therapist at City College, she also conducted long-term individual psychotherapy in English and Spanish for children and adults at a community-based mental health clinic.

Polanco-Roman is a member of the Youth Suicide Research Consortium, an interdisciplinary network of researchers that aims to improve research on youth suicidal behavior, suicide prevention, and treatment, and to increase research on suicide among underrepresented populations of youth. Her work — which has been published in Journal of Youth and Adolescence; Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy; Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, and other leading psychology journals — has helped illuminate the need for psychologists to account for experiences of ethnic discrimination as a potential source of psychological distress in diagnosing and treating suicidal behavior.

Looking Ahead to Fall 2020

Finding and creating community within larger urban settings is a key part of Polanco-Roman’s life, and it’s also what’s attracted her to The New School and NSSR. City campuses are like a “microcosm of the larger New York City,” she says. “It’s kind of like this dual identity component. I like the small feel within this larger environment. I find it to be more intimate and there’s a lot more learning that can go on there, and stronger connections that can be made.”

These connections can be critical for graduate students. As Polanco-Roman explains, the city setting provides ample opportunities for Psychology MA and PhD students to develop their concentrations. “Whatever one can imagine that they want to study or learn or train in, they can find it here.”

Polanco-Roman looks forward to building on her research with these resources, and collaborating with other NSSR faculty.

She finds herself drawn to the work of Wendy D’Andrea, Associate Professor of Psychology, who runs the Trauma and Affective Psychophysiology Lab. “I’m interested in learning more about the relationship between how traumatic experiences, particularly early childhood experiences, might impact risk for suicide later into adolescence, maybe even young adulthood,” Polanco-Roman says.

Curious about the potential interplay of traumatic experiences, attachment theory, and risk for suicide, Polanco-Roman is also drawn to the work of Howard Steele and Miriam Steele, both Professors of Psychology and co-directors of the Center for Attachment Research.

Polanco-Roman is scheduled to teach courses like Research Methods in the fall, which provides hands-on experience in designing, running, and reporting psychology experiments.

Although academia at large has and continues to make major adjustments to learning due to COVID-19, Polanco-Roman is ready to adapt and be flexible in her first semester at NSSR, using the global pandemic affecting cities and communities as a teaching moment.

“Regardless of using distance learning or being in the classroom, I’m excited to start and I’m excited to work with my new NSSR family, faculty, and students, and make new connections,” she says.

Cailin Potami is a writer, an editor, and a student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program. They live in Queens with their cats, Linguini and Tortellini.

Making a Magazine in a Pandemic

**A Back Matter staff member shares the process of creating the publication (partly) remotely**

After being admitted to the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism (CPCJ) Master’s program at The New School for Social Research in Spring 2019, I was invited to the launch party for a student-created magazine called Back Matter.

With an open bar at Von in NoHo to commemorate the end of their semester, Back Matter editors gave toasts to months of production and passed out copies. Nervously mingling with my soon-to-be professors and peers, I flipped through the pages of the magazine, enamored.

Producing Back Matter has become a rite of passage for CPCJ students. The magazine typically covers the publishing industry at large, and students in the relevant course direct their issue’s theme and aesthetic, filling roles across editorial, design, web development, social media and marketing, publishing and business.

Formally known as the Multimedia Publishing Lab, the class was designed by CPCJ co-founder Rachel Rosenfelt, former publisher at The New Republic and founding editor of The New Inquiry, as a kind of capstone project, an opportunity for students from across The New School to apply their skill sets and interests to the full process of creating a magazine.

Now, the class is co-taught by Jon Baskin and Jesse Seegers. Baskin, who handles the editorial mentoring, is the CPCJ Associate Director and a founding editor of The Point, a thrice-yearly magazine of philosophical essays and criticism. Seegers — who has worked architecture, design, writing, editing, publishing, and research — serves as the design beacon and teaches core classes in CPCJ and at Parsons School of Design.

After that night, I committed to the CPCJ program. I was drawn to how it merged design and writing practices. Now, I am finishing up my second semester and pursuing an interdisciplinary graduate minor in Design Studies. At the beginning of Spring 2020, I enrolled in Multimedia Publishing Lab with the intention of stepping outside of my editorial comfort zone and getting more portfolio experience with print design.

“This goes to the heart of what CPCJ was designed to achieve,” Baskin said. “I think the founders, Jim Miller and Rosenfelt, saw from the beginning that too much of professional publishing is bifurcated into different departments that barely communicate with one another. One of the goals of the program, embodied most successfully in this class, is to help graduate students who can work across those divides.”

We began the semester applying for and receiving our positions, noted in the masthead above.

The editorial team picked out submissions, working with Baskin to guide student writers through the editing process. Second-year CPCJ students Taia Handlin, Editor-in-Chief, and Shulokhana Khan, Managing Editor, spearheaded this effort.

Meanwhile, the design team began to envision how the magazine would look and feel like. Creative Director Annika Lammers, a Parsons Master’s student, managed the overall visual concept, applying her spatial design skills to construct the physical publication. As Art Director, I spent hours with her pouring through other magazines and taking trips to Printed Matter, an artbook distributor in Chelsea, for inspiration. With the help of Seegers, we made mockups, printed them, printed them again, and then printed them yet again. We had big ideas of unique binding techniques, using the school’s risograph printer, experimenting with paper weights and textures. We worked with the editorial team to blend the thematic contents with visual expression. We created a graphic treatment to begin laying out the print product.

The publisher began seeking printing quotes, and the digital team drew up plans for a website and social media marketing. We set editorial calendars, print dates, and budgets, and we started planning our own launch party.

Then the world changed.

AAnnika Lammers and Alexa Mauzy-Lewis working on Back Matter in the before-times | *Photo by Hector Gutierrez,* Back Matter Marketing and Communications Director

*Jon Baskin on a class trip to Printed Matter in the before-times| Photo by Annika Lammers, Back Matter Creative Director*

Back Matter *staff meeting in the before-times | Photo by Hector Gutierrez*

“We began this second edition of Back Matter in January. Then, none of us was imagining our current reality, structured by daily video chats and people actually debating if silk scarves are better or worse than bandanas in stopping a pandemic,” wrote Handlin in her Letter from the Editor. “We just wanted to make a sassy magazine that pokes holes in the immense, white, privileged landscape of publishing.”

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we decided to trudge on virtually. We launched the new issue on the magazine’s website and began to roll out the articles and illustrations we had crafted.

It wasn’t easy. “We have had to relearn ways of communicating, sharing information, and effectively coming together to cohesively formulate the vision and content of the publication,” says Lammers. “We are now sharing different time zones from Australia, to Korea, to the U.S.”

“I cannot help but think that the initial design decisions made at the very start of the publication are reflective of our current surrounding environment,” Lammers says. “Back Matter’s hand-drawn illustrations, risograph-printed pages and sewn-bound finish strips back the complexities and reveals insight into the way we had to critically adapt and think about the publication.”

The Back Matter team is continuing to build out the website, publishing new pieces weekly. Cailin Potami wrote a piece on underrepresentation in publishing. Jessie Mohkami explored the gender gap in book club culture. Adji Ngathe Kebe explained how comp titles paved the way for the racist bestselling disaster American Dirt.

Soon, we’ll share a special section that responds to the landscape of media in a crisis. We are working to finish our final print design, with hopes of printing it in the fall, if those who are not graduating will be able to return to campus by then.

*Screenshot of the print title for a piece by CPCJ student Fareeha Shah.*
*Full article available* *online*.

*Screenshot of the first-page layout for a piece by CPCJ student Cailin Potami.*
*Full article available online.*

The ending of this semester is bittersweet. Instead of celebrating our work together at a bar in the city, we are sitting alone in our respective homes at our computers. Through blood, sweat, and InDesign tears, we will have the final design for a print magazine, but its future, like many things, is TBD. Still, we were able to provide a digital home to the works of some incredible New School writers and illustrators — graduate work and research that was produced in the face of global chaos.

Publishing, at large, has been forced to adapt. This issue of Back Matter will always be a relic of this time.

Alexa Mauzy-Lewis is the Art Director of Back Matter magazine and a Master’s student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism Program. Cover art is by Hector Gutierrez.

Cailin Potami is a writer, an editor, and a student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program. They live in Queens with their cats, Linguini and Tortellini.