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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:

Athlete Mental Health and Well-being Symposium

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)

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NSSR Welcomes Sam Winer to the Psychology Department

This fall, The New School for Social Research welcomes Sam Winer as a new Associate Professor of Psychology. A clinical psychologist, Winer uses novel methods and theory to attempt to better understand, identify, and treat individuals experiencing anhedonia, depression, and anxiety. 

Winer is a self-admitted “longtime admirer of The New School” and its historical and current emphasis on social justice, which is also a focus in his own research, teaching, and service to his discipline. In the NSSR Psychology department in particular, Winer admires the emphasis on “depth hypotheses ⁠— what are some of the motivating factors for why people behave as they do, what are some of the repetitive dynamics that can motivate people to act in certain ways. That’s where a lot of my work, which examines the interface of cognitive and motivational explanations of depression, fits in.” He also appreciates the department’s “strong background in empirical research” and “open and inclusive consideration of a wide variety of philosophical ideas.” 

Winer’s recent publications similarly display a range of approaches to the study and treatment of depression and anxiety. He became interested in these conditions as a graduate student at the University of Illinois, Chicago and continued that research as an assistant then associate professor at Mississippi State University (MSU). There, he and the students in his Emotional Processes and Experimental Psychopathology Lab focused on finding cognitive and affective predictors of distress and dysfunction. As Principal Investigator, he has received more than $1 million in grants for this research from the National Institute for Mental Health to investigate Reward Devaluation Theory — research that led the Association for Psychological Science to name him a 2018 APS Rising Star.

Understanding Reward Devaluation Theory

Reward Devaluation Theory (RDT) explores why and how some depressed individuals come to avoid potentially hopeful and positive information. Research into depression has “focused primarily on negative things that you might be threatened by or have difficulty disengaging from,” says Winer. “There’s been less of an emphasis on how positive information is processed. It’s been known that depressed individuals may not have the same normative bias toward positive information” or rewards as people who are not depressed. 

What RDT and Winer’s reanalyses of data show is that “it’s not just a lack of ‘normal’ value or valuation of positivity, however. [Some depressed people] seem to avoid potential positivity. Think of it like The Shawshank Redemption — it’s not that I’ve given up on hope; hope is a dangerous thing,” explains Winer. Many societal factors could feed these biases toward positivity, and Winer says that almost infinite considerations of culture and context can inform why persons come to develop these biases.

At NSSR, Winer is launching a lab with NSSR graduate students as well as New School undergraduates to continue to examine RDT and the cognitive and emotional mechanisms that can help explain how and why some individuals develop these types of biases toward positivity and hopefulness. He’s also looking into treatment choice — why individuals do or do not go into treatment for anxiety and depression — and a more general, endemic fear of positivity and hopefulness throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. “People are trying to decide when to trust and hope again as we continue to resume normal life after the worst of the pandemic. I’m excited to see how understanding of reward devaluation will help inform how we all can fully let positivity back into our lives again.”

One of the methodological approaches Winer sees value in for RDT research is network analysis, which can help show how symptoms of psychopathology connect to one another. “It might be that people have an essence inside of them that is depression,” he explains. “But it might also be the case that the complex connectivity of symptoms over time forms a feedback loop that is the depression for that individual person.” Winer gives an example of a hypothetical person with depression who stops sleeping regularly due to a loss in that person’s life. That lack of sleep makes them not enjoy things anymore, which leads them to be sad, which perpetuates the lack of sleep. But even when the loss goes away, the feedback loop keeps functioning, and that person remains depressed. In particular, Winer will be using temporal network analysis — looking at how networks organize and change over time — to look at clinical and experimental datasets to see how they connect and “pulse.”

Outside of the lab, Winer is excited to step into teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. An award-winning professor several times over at MSU, Winer is teaching Systems of Psychotherapy, an undergraduate course at Eugene Lang College for Liberal Arts, in Fall 2021. In Spring 2022, he’ll be teaching a core Clinical Theory and Technique: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy course to graduate students at NSSR and Emotions to undergraduates at Lang.

“Teaching is, to a large extent, why I got into this business,” Winer closes. “I love being able to teach both at a school for social research and also in a liberal arts college, and to be able to engage with critical theory and critical considerations of psychology in a progressive atmosphere.”

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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

 

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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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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.