(text from The New School’s Marketing and Communications, Sep. 1 2015):
This summer, The New School’s Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI), will launch its second year of Summer Seminars. Housed at The New School for Social Research (NSSR) in New York City, the ICSI, founded and directed by Ann Stoler, offers advanced graduate students and faculty from around the world a weeklong Fellowship in which they work closely with eminent scholars who have shaped how we think today.
The Summer Seminars will run from June 12-18, 2016 and will be led by Jay M. Bernstein (New School for Social Research), who will convene the seminar Of Masters and Slaves: Reading Hegel’s Phenomenology; Judith Butler (University of California, Berkeley), who will convene the seminar Freud to Klein: Death Drive, Pleasure, Ethics; and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Columbia), who will convene the seminar Why Marx Today?.
Born of The New School’s historic focus on exploring pressing contemporary issues, the ICSI is designed to cultivate a style of critical inquiry that applies conceptual care and innovation to real-world problems. ICSI provides a rare opportunity for young and seasoned scholars to re-immerse themselves in intensive graduate-level study with leading theorists in morning Master Classes and to workshop their dissertations and book projects in the afternoon.
“ICSI is founded on the premise that responding to current and emergent problems requires developing our collective capacities to formulate new and better questions, rather than relying on ready-made theories,” said Ann Laura Stoler, the founding director of the ICSI and Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research. Stoler is the author of a range of books on colonialisms, imperial genealogies, sexuality and race, most recently Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, as well as Duress: Concept-Work for Our Times, forthcoming from Duke University Press.
The application portal for the 2016 Summer Seminars opens Sept. 1, 2015 and closes Dec. 1, 2015. International scholars, especially those in the Global South, are encouraged to apply; scholarships and travel grants are available.
The 2015 inaugural cohort of fellows included PhD candidates, post-doctoral scholars, and junior and senior faculty from 17 countries who worked intensively in seminars led by Talal Asad (City University of New York), Simon Critchley (NSSR), and Patricia J. Williams (Columbia Law School).
