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 Consortium on Trans/disciplinarity Launches at The New School

GIDEST (Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought) was founded in 2014 at The New School via a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, but was born earlier out of discussions around how to bring together New School divisions, create bridges for faculty from Parsons School of Design and The New School for Social Research (NSSR), and help NSSR doctoral students broaden their dissertations.

While GIDEST started out as an NSSR project, it expanded throughout the university with a fellowship program that helped faculty and graduate students develop their research in a collaborative environment and foster interdisciplinary projects. The fellowship program sought to create a space where faculty and students could meet new people from across campus, deepen their research practice, and expand their horizons by exchanging scholarly work and ideas.

In 2022, GIDEST helped launch a new project – the Consortium on Trans/disciplinarity (CT/d), cofounded by Hugh Raffles, Professor of Anthropology at NSSR and Director of GIDEST; Eduardo Staszowski, Associate Professor of Design Strategies at Parsons and co-founder and Director of the Parsons DESIS [Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability] Lab; and John Bruce, Associate Professor of Design Strategies and Co-Director of Transdisciplinary Design MFA.

According to Hugh Raffles, Professor of Anthropology at NSSR and Director of GIDEST, “CT/d aims to create new linkages between the three different units — GIDEST, Parsons DESIS, and the MFA in Transdisciplinary Design. The research lab is GIDEST, the teaching lab is the MFA in Transdisciplinary Design and DESIS Lab is more of an applied lab for community-based projects. Each of the units keeps its identity, but by coming together, we’re able to provide a focus and a set of new pathways for students and faculty who are interested in doing transdisciplinary work of all kinds.”

CT/d aims to make transdisciplinarity more visible at The New School, creating opportunities in transdisciplinary spaces, and allowing students and faculty to move freely through these units in a more seamless and collaborative way. “Creating opportunities for people to work more closely together can allow for different kinds of projects to emerge,” says Raffles.

This spring, CT/d launched a series of dialogues with funding from the dean’s offices at NSSR and Parsons that responded to the conversations happening among faculty, staff, students, and administrators in the wake of the part-time faculty strike by asking “What Is A University For?”

On February 10, 2023, the first dialogue “Why the University Today?” interrogated the purpose of the university in the face of neoliberal order as well as the meaning of labor at the university. The dialogue was moderated by Christoph Cox, Dean of Eugene Lang College, with panelists Wendy Brown, Political Theorist; and Cathy Davidson, Senior Advisor on Transformation to the Chancellor of the City University of New York and Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center,

On March 10, 2023, the second dialogue, “Enabling Infrastructure,” explored what it means to transform the infrastructures enabling and advancing a transformation of the university. The dialogue featured K. Wayne Yang, Provost of Muir College and Professor in Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego and Co-Founder of the Indigenous Futures Institute and Black Like Water; Bedelia Richards Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Richmond and CEO of RaceTalk LLC, and Vanessa Andreotti, Director of the Peter Wall Institute for the Advanced Studies at the University British Columbia and incoming Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria.

The final dialogue in the series, “Remaking, Relearning,” explored the interlocking themes of politics, and the practices of the university; effective infrastructure and scholarship and activism. The event took place on April 7, 2023, with panelists Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at the University of Michigan State University Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Founder and CEO of FLOX Studio and Designer-in-Residence at the School of Visual Arts Design for Social Innovation Master’s program Sloan Leo Associate Professor, at the Superior School of Industrial Design, State University of Rio de Janeiro (ESDI/UERJ) and Coordinator of Design and Anthropology Laboratory Zoy Anastassakis, Brazil and moderated by Renée T. White, Provost, Executive Vice President, and Professor of Sociology at The New School.

Transcripts of all three events will be made available on the GIDEST website.

The Ferenczi Center to Commemorate Professor Jeremy Safran with Memorial Conference

On April 2, 2023, the Sándor Ferenczi Center at The New School for Social Research will host its first Jeremy D. Safran Memorial Conference. The daylong gathering will be hosted on Zoom and celebrate the scholarship, teaching, and supervision of the late Jeremy D. Safran, a co-founder of the Ferenczi Center, a former NSSR Psychology professor and director of clinical training in Psychology, and an internationally renowned psychotherapist.

Following Safran’s death in 2018, the Center has honored him by hosting a yearly talk by prominent psychoanalysts, including Nancy McWilliams, Peter Fonagy, and Donnel Stern, on topics related to Safran’s work and legacy. This new conference will expand on that effort by hosting conversations on Safran’s wide-ranging research interests, including Buddhism, will, rupture and repair, Relational psychotherapy, the integration of psychotherapeutic methods, among others. The conference agenda includes panels and talks on these topics by scholars and practitioners, as well as by former colleagues and students of Safran. “We’re hoping that this conference will foster an appreciation of the impact that his work had across the span of his career,” said Jennifer Hunter, a clinical psychologist and Safran’s widow. Hunter is planning the conference together with Ali Shames-Dawson, clinical psychologist, and a former student of Safran who received her PhD from NSSR in 2021.

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In 2008, Safran founded the Ferenczi Center alongside Prof. Adrienne E. Harris — prominent psychoanalyst and faculty and supervisor at New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis — and the late Prof. Lewis Aron, former Director of the NYU Postdoctoral Program and founding president of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.

The Ferenczi Center preserves the cultural memory of Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, who spent four months during 1926 lecturing at The New School. The Center broadly supports scholarship relevant to Ferenczi’s clinical innovations and promotes his legacy of social and political progressivism. It also indexes the important historical role that Ferenczi played in instituting psychoanalysis in the United States.

The Ferenczi Center focuses on three goals:

It sponsors lectures, conferences, and workshops relevant to Ferenczi’s legacy of clinical innovation. Many workshops are geared towards clinicians and lead by Dr. Anthony Bass.
It promotes Ferenczi’s legacy of social and political progressivism, with events that touch on the political significance of Ferenczi’s legacy, such as a conference on émigré analysts and American psychoanalysis in 2019.
It contributes to the ongoing vitality of psychoanalysis as a cultural, intellectual, therapeutic discipline.

However, the DNA of the Center is not only defined by the work of Ferenczi but also the vision that Safran and his co-founders had regarding the relevance of Ferenczi’s work. Miriam Steele, Marrow Professor of Psychology at NSSR and co-chair of the Center with Harris, explained, “Ferenczi came to The New School about 100 years so there’s that connection, but I think you know, it was really Adrienne, Lew, and Jeremy’s vision to see the importance of Ferenczi’s work in the Relational psychoanalytic movement, which is a thriving part of psychoanalysis today.”

Relational psychoanalysis is a school of thought that emerged in the 1980s which emphasizes the psychic role of relationships over those of the sexual and aggressive drives. Perhaps its biggest impact was in the realm of clinical technique, where it introduced the idea that, above all, the main factor in a treatment is the tenor of the relationship between analyst and analysand. The founders of the Center saw in Ferenczi’s work, especially his paper, “The Unwelcome Child and his Death-Instinct,” an important precursor to Relational thought.

In fact, the idea to start the Center came to the founders from one of the main figures in the Relational movement, Stephen A. Mitchell. “Mitchell had all these ideas, and he would tell us, the sort of new generation in the movement, ‘Why don’t you do something on Ferenczi?’ The first conference I went to on Ferenczi’s work, never having read a word of him, I sat in the auditorium and thought, ‘Oh my god, this is incredible! This is really what attachment theory is about. This is this could be our psychoanalytic grandfather,’” said Harris.

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After Safran died in 2018, Aron died in 2019. Harris, the last surviving founder of the Center, says: “I feel a sadness that Jeremy and Lew didn’t get to see what this all came to be and what it grew into. Theirs were very early, unexpected deaths. It is painful to recount, and I’m sure that’s true for Jeremy’s students and the many people he mentored. It was a shock to us all.”

Yet, their work lives on as the Ferenczi Center supports a new generation of scholars. Two NSSR Clinical Psychology PhD alumni, Ali Shames-Dawson and Matthew Steinfeld, currently sit on the Center’s board. And this year, in conjunction with the conference, the Center awarded two younger professionals in psychoanalytic training with the inaugural Safran Memorial Fellowship. These fellowships include mentorship by members of the Center and support in producing works related to the fields of Safran’s inquiry. The two fellowship recipients, Nick Fehertoi and Ariel Yelen, mentored by Barry Magid and Dodi Goldman respectively, will offer short presentations on their projects at the conference. Fehertoi’s talk will focus on agency and its relationship to authenticity, in the spirit of Safran’s multidisciplinary pluralism and an eye toward bridging the gaps between psychoanalysis and neighboring fields. Yelen’s talk, entitled “Psychoanalysis of the Unspectacular,” will develop Safran’s ideas about the paradox of non-duality. The Center plans to continue to offer these fellowships in Safran’s name for years to come.

The day will conclude with a keynote by Darlene Ehrenberg, followed by a toast to Safran. “He loved to have a glass of wine,” said Hunter with a laugh.

You can find the conference agenda and register to attend here.

In addition to his academic work, Prof. Safran also strongly supported making graduate study of Psychology more accessible. The Jeremy D. Safran Fellowship helps tangibly carry that legacy forward. You can learn more about and donate to the Fellowship here.

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.

NSSR Work on Ukraine, 1 Year After the Invasion

Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, New School for Social Research community members have been connecting, reflecting, expressing solidarity, and taking action through scholarship, activism, partnerships, dialogue, and public engagement. One year later, this work continues. Major highlights include:

The New School signed a memorandum of understanding for academic exchange and cooperation with the Kyiv School of Economics and V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, which will allow for the exchange of faculty, students, and researchers, the organization of joint research projects, and more.
Oksana Kis, a senior scholar from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, has joined NSSR as a 2022-2023 Visiting Professor in the Anthropology department. A historian and anthropologist, Kis works on Ukrainian women’s history, feminist anthropology, oral history, and gender transformations in post-socialist countries.
The New University in Exile Consortium has assisted Ukrainian scholars and students both inside and outside Ukraine:
- They made a $50,000.00 gift (funds provided to the Consortium by the Rockefeller Foundation) to the Kharkiv Karazin University Foundation. The funds are to be used to enable the faculty and students to continue their work at the university by, for example, providing a heated communal space where faculty and students can work
- They donated 200 laptops from Siemens for Ukrainian scholars
- They also provide stipends for Ukrainian academics to co-lead online Consortium seminars.
- Their petition in support of Ukraine has 2,485 signatures, including many university presidents.

The Transregional Center for Democratic Studies ran the Transregional Dialogues Fellowship program in Fall 2022, which connected MA, PhD, and independent scholars from Ukraine, all of whom experienced interruption or delay in their academic lives, with their peers at NSSR who are working on similar sets of issues. 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. 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. The Transregional Dialogues program will conclude with an online conference on March 31-April 1st, where Fellows will present their work.
TCDS also hosted the Fall 2022 Conversatorium on Ukraine, a weeklong series of five talks given by scholars and intellectuals whose work focuses on Ukraine. View talk videos on this YouTube playlist.
Jessica Pisano, Associate Professor of Politics, taught the Summer 2022 ULEC War in Ukraine: History, Politics, and Culture. With the support of the NSSR Dean’s Office, the ULEC features an integrated public lecture series, with speakers addressing topics from architecture and public art to urban sociology and rural food production. Speakers include scholars as well as individuals involved in keeping public utilities running under bombardment, musicians continuing to perform in underground public spaces, and others.
Prof. Pisano’s latest book, Staging Democracy: Political Performance in Ukraine, Russia, and Beyond, was released in July 2022. “Staging Democracy moves beyond Russia and Ukraine to offer a novel economic argument for why some people support Putin and similar politicians. Pisano suggests we can analyze politics in both democracies and authoritarian regimes using the same analytical lens of political theater.
Prof. Pisano is also serving as a trustee of the Kharkiv Karazin University Foundation in Ukraine created to support the life of Karazin University during the war.
A group of NSSR faculty and students created Hromada, a blog that offers resources to understand Ukraine and the war on it through local reporting, history, culture, film, and humor. It also shares ways to support Ukrainians, through petitions, resources, protest information, donations and more. Faculty members include Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Elzbieta Matynia, Inessa Medzhibovskaya, and Jessica Pisano. Graduate students include Ihor Andriichuk, Emmanuel Guerisoli, Karolina Koziura, Elisabeta L. Pop, Mariia Shynkarenko, Malkhaz Toria, and Adrian Totten.
The Democracy Seminar, based in the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies, maintained an active Forum on the war, with written contributions from scholars and journalists that offer critical accounts of the unfolding struggle against Russia’s attack on an independent nation and on democracy. It is also continuing to publish “Dispatches from Ukraine,” a collected series of dispatches from journalist Paweł Pieniążek, admiringly called “the poet laureate of hybrid war,” translated from the original Polish by Łukasz Chełmiński.
Public Seminar continues to publish a range of pieces on the war from NSSR faculty and students as well as scholars in and from Central and Eastern Europe.
Members of the Decolonizing Eastern European Studies Group Karolina Koziura, Mariia Shynkarenko, and Amanda Zadorian presented work on Ukrainian politics and history and questions of decoloniaity in a panel moderated by Jessica Pisano on February 24 in the series Decolonization in Focus, organized by the Davis Center at Harvard University with the support of 12 major centers for Slavic studies nationwide.