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.

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.

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 30th 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 30th 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 30th 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.”

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.