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.”

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)

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.