Who Climbs the Academic Ladder?

NSSR PhD Economics students publish paper on career trajectories of Black and Hispanic economists and sociologists

Across disciplines, academia is reckoning with its own whiteness. In 2017, 76 percent of university faculty members in the United States were white. While racial diversity has increased over the past two decades, professors are still much more likely than their students to be white.

The path to tenure is riddled with obstacles. White men are the most likely to become full-time professors, and as a result are more likely to set the agenda and priorities for departments and academic institutions. They receive the highest salaries and positions of power, creating a cycle and social atmosphere that can be difficult to infiltrate.

In collaboration with the American Sociological Association (ASA), two Economics PhD candidates and one Economics PhD alum from The New School for Social Research (NSSR) co-authored three papers on the academic barriers that underrepresented minority (URM) PhD graduates and faculty members face. Published in the Review of Black Political Economy — the leading peer-reviewed journal for research on the economic status of African-Americans and the African diaspora throughout the world — their main paper, “Who Climbs the Academic Ladder? Race and Gender Stratification in a World of Whiteness,” looks at the career trajectory of Black and Latino economists and sociologists. The other two publications explore the experiences of women of color in economics and sociology how “raced” organizations influence the tenure process for faculty members in sociology.

Economics PhD candidates Kyle K. Moore and Ismael Cid-Martinez (left to right in cover photo) worked alongside Jermaine Toney, Assistant Professor of Economics at Rutgers University and an NSSR Economics PhD 2017 alum, to co-author the papers with other scholars of economics and sociology; Roberta Spalter-Roth, PhD, Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Social Science Research, and Amber Kalb, a PhD candidate in sociology at George Mason University spearheaded the work demonstrating how the social sciences exclude women of color from intellectual legitimacy. Other co-authors include Jean H. Shin, PhD, and Jason A. Smith, PhD, of the ASA. The team presented their findings at the 2019 American Economic Association annual meetings and in 2018 as working papers.

Using a sample population of Black and Latino students in the U.S. who graduated from PhD programs between 1995 and 2006, they set out to uncover what percentage of these URM scholars in sociology or economics succeed in moving up the academic career ladder, identify the existing social structures that can prevent them from doing so, and lay out policy recommendations to remedy the lack of diversity.

Moore and Cid-Martinez spoke with Research Matters over Zoom to discuss the interdisciplinary nature of “Who Climbs the Academic Ladder” and what this work means for the future of economics, and academia at large.

Of Economists and Sociologists

Moore and Cid-Martinez are in the last year of their PhD programs, currently working on their dissertations, and both are former research assistants at NSSR’s Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis. Moore is also a Senior Policy Analyst with the Joint Economic Committee in the U.S. Congress, while Cid-Martinez is a consultant for UNICEF’s Data and Analytics Unit. They got involved in the project when ASA approached NSSR’s Department of Economics about comparing faculty diversity within economics and sociology.

“There was a lot of energy behind wanting to compare the two disciplines, to see whether or not things were different for underrepresented minority scholars in economics versus sociology,” Moore says. “We were asking the same questions, looking at pipeline problems with diversifying both disciplines and asking which things matter in becoming a tenured professor.”

Cid-Martinez added, “Despite the fact that they are often treated as disparate fields, both sociology and economics share similar concerns with issues of inequality and inter-group disparities.”

“Our project invokes W.E.B. Du Bois, who is the shared heritage of economics and sociology, having completed coursework in economics and spearheaded sociological inquiries on stratification,” Toney says.

For “Who Climbs the Academic Ladder? Race and Gender Stratification in a World of Whiteness,” the researchers set out to measure stratification by the distribution of academic rank and examine differences based on discipline, institution type, race/ethnicity, gender, and publications in terms of academic career success. To understand the exclusivity of academia in economics and sociology, the researchers embarked on a labor-intensive, mixed-methodologies approach, reviewing the resumes and CVs of PhD cohorts in the two fields between 1995 and 2006. They reasoned that these graduates should have had enough time to have moved from tenure-track assistant professors to tenured associate professors within eight years, though not all did so, and some should have had time to become full professors within 14 years.

“One of the main contributions that we wanted to have with the paper is that we wanted it to be non-intrusive,” Moore says. “So we didn’t want to have to rely exclusively on survey data. We wanted to be able to identify folks and gather as much data in a secondary way as possible to build out the trajectory of their careers.”

This is where the interdisciplinary nature of the project became crucial. “That intensive sort of mixed methods research is not something economists typically do,” Moore says. “But our sociologist colleagues were more familiar with doing that type of work.”

Together, they discovered that the career paths of URM faculty can be limited due to a process that legitimates a non-Hispanic White male set of rules and practices, including value-neutrality — the idea that a researcher must be totally impartial — and objectivity.

One of the major frameworks for the study was the idea of social and human capital and its relationship to advancing an academic career path. There is, of course, the well-known aphorism in academia of “publish or perish” — meaning that how often and in which journals scholars publish work can be a critical metric in the tenure process. Their findings confirmed that publications are likely the most significant measure leading to promotion. But authoring and getting an article to publication goes much deeper. “Having a group of people to relate to and publish work with and co-author with, build relationships with, is key,” Moore says.

As a discipline, sociology was founded upon the idea of social stratification, or classifying groups of people based on inequalities in power and resources. Applying this approach to economics illuminated how, traditionally, the discipline focuses on the individual rather than looking at larger social structures. The emphasized focus on publication status and other forms of human capital perpetuates a system of exclusivity. By bringing social theory into economics, the researchers were able to identify how critical inclusive social networks can be to progressing a career in academia.

“These disciplines don’t account for the fact that minority faculty do a lot of service work with respect to minority students, and that’s not often captured in determining who gets tenure, who doesn’t get tenure, whether or not those support networks exist in those fields,” Moore says. Participation in ‘raced’ organizations and activities was similarly devalued, and URM faculty who did not receive tenure likely dropped out of academia and found alternative employment. “I think that’s the case for the social sciences more broadly. A lot of these insights from the paper are going to be able to apply more broadly.”

Looking Inward and Ahead at The New School

Broadening the scope of traditional economics and fostering interdisciplinary approaches is at the core of NSSR. “One of the advantages coming from the New School and our department is that we started with a very pluralistic, or heterodox, perspective in looking at economics” Cid-Martinez says. “So that in itself provided us with a different lens from which to view and treat these issues.”

“The paper itself is a product of The New School,” Moore says. “More people should do more interdisciplinary work and The New School encourages that in its curriculum. I think it’s a very valuable thing to do just as a scholar.”

While the New School provided the perfect environment to build out this research, no institution is immune from reflecting on faculty diversity. “We make important recommendations in the paper,” Cid-Martinez says. “They have a lot to do with not just stopping at diversity hiring. That’s part of the solution, but it’s not enough. We share a responsibility to bring in underrepresented minorities to enrich diversity of representation, methods, and thought, but it is even more important to make sure that they have positive opportunities to climb the academic ladder, that they feel included in their universities and departments, and that they are part of the conversation about the direction in which these need to move. These recommendations are pretty universal; they apply to disciplines outside of the social sciences and even to the most progressive universities and departments in the country.”

These papers have gained widespread attention within the greater economics field. With the momentum of national discourse around internalized racism in hiring structures, Moore and Cid-Martinez are hoping to continue the work and move forward these conversations.

“What we studied were the things that allowed folks to gain access to tenure in the eight years after their initial cohort in our sample population,” Moore says. “But moving forward, there are new areas of social capital that are important that we haven’t considered. The main one that’s big on my mind right now is EconTwitter,” a community of economists active on the social media platform. “Twitter is a relatively new and important vehicle that is driving impact in the profession and academia more generally. I suspect that participation on that platform may be a valuable tool for URM scholars in leveling the playing field. A junior scholar can put their ideas out there and have them be digested in the same format and reach as an established academic.”

These new ways of putting out work and rising within disciplines could be extremely relevant to changing the structure of academia, and deciding who climbs the career ladder towards tenure.

Works Cited

Moore, K. K., Cid-Martinez, I., Toney, J., Smith, J. A., Kalb, A. C., Shin, J. H., & Spalter-Roth, R. M. (2018). Who Climbs the Academic Ladder? Race and Gender Stratification in a World of Whiteness. The Review of Black Political Economy, 45(3), 216–244. https://doi.org/10.1177/0034644618813667

Spalter-Roth, R., Shin, J. H., Smith, J. A., Kalb, A. C., Moore, K. K., Cid-Martinez, I., & Toney, J. (2019). “Raced” Organizations and the Academic Success of Underrepresented Minority Faculty Members in Sociology. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 5(2), 261–277. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649218807951

Spalter-Roth, R., & Kalb, A. C. (2019). Women of Color in Economics and Sociology: Poor Climate, Unequal Treatment, and Lack of Legitimacy. Institute for Women’s Policy Research. https://iwpr.org/publications/race-ethnicity-economics-sociology-inequality/

Cailin Potami is a writer, an editor, and a student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program. They live in Queens with their cats, Linguini and Tortellini.

NSSR Students Win Competitive 2020-2021 Research Grants

The landscape for academic grants, fellowships, and scholarships — especially for those involving travel and fieldwork — has been dramatically affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, several NSSR students have won competitive grants for the 2020-2021 academic year to support their dissertations and other research projects

Sara Hassani received a 2020 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, one of just 65 doctoral students in the U.S. to receive the award this year.

In her dissertation, entitled “Cloistered Infernos: The Politics of Self-Immolation in the Persian Belt,” Hassani investigates the steep and gendered rates of self-immolation plaguing the domestic sphere in the Persian belt countries of Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and mounts a conceptual challenge to common distinctions between self-destructive acts of resistance and suicide in the study of politics. Her research draws on fieldwork, interviews with survivors of self-immolation, nurses, burn surgeons, and civil society actors, as well as 200 qualitative surveys from across the region. Hassani’s work challenges the pathologizing rationalizations characteristic of epidemiological accounts of self-burning and theorizes this lethal and affective form of agency and protest through the lens of marginalized actors who exist within the cultural, political, and socioeconomic realities of apartheid. Her research has been published in the International Feminist Journal of Politics.

A Politics PhD candidate advised by former NSSR professor Banu Bargu, Hassani cites the department’s Theory Collective as critical to her work. “There’s no better place in the world to study political theory and I’m incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to learn and grow as part of this community,” she says.

In addition to the Mellon/ACLS fellowship, Hassani has also received the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship (2017-2019), and an NSSR Prize Fellowship (2014-2017). She was also a 2015 fellows at NSSR’s Institute for Critical Social Inquiry,

Tatiana Llaguno Nieves received a research grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). She will use the award to study for one year at Humboldt University of Berlin, where she will work with Rahel Jaeggi, Professor for Practical Philosophy.

A Politics PhD candidate, Llaguno Nieves is advised by Nancy Fraser, Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics. In her dissertation, entitled “Paradoxes of Dependence,” Llaguno Nieves provides a counter-narrative to the dominant language of independence that permeates political theory, defending the philosophical and political value in taking dependence as a starting point and as a general life condition. She looks to Hegel, Marx, feminist theory, and environmental critique to develop an understanding of dependence that is not necessarily opposed to freedom, and argues that it is rather the logic of domination, expropriation and exploitation that pervades our current organization of dependence that must be questioned.

Llaguno Nieves originally came to NSSR — a place she describes as “a true intellectual home, always stimulating and transforming, as well as the perfect place to work at the intersection of politics and philosophy” — from Spain as a Fulbright Fellow. In addition to the DAAD award, she has also received an NSSR Dissertation Fellowship and a 2019 Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award.

Karolina Koziura won a 2020 American Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies Association Dissertation Research Grant. Her project, “The Making of Holodomor in State Archives: Narratives of Famine and their Afterlives in Contemporary Ukraine,” seeks to understand the Great Ukrainian Famine as a global event shaped by Cold War-era politics of knowledge production. Koziura plans to use the grant to fund additional archival research in Ukraine.

A PhD candidate in Sociology and Historical Studies, Koziura explores problems of nationalism, spatial transformations, and memory politics in Central and Eastern Europe. Her adviser is Virag Molnar, Associate Professor of Sociology, and her work has appeared in East European Politics and Societies, Culture, and Ukraina Moderna, among others. She is a member of the Decolonizing Eastern European Studies group at NSSR

Koziura has received an NSSR Prize Fellowship (2014-2017) and the Integrative PhD Fellowship (2018-2020). Her research has also been supported by the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium.

Masha Shynkarenko has received the Helen Darcovych Memorial Doctoral Fellowship at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta for her work on nonviolent resistance and community identity formation among Crimean Tatars across the USSR, Ukraine, and Russia.

A Politics PhD candidate, Shynkarenko explores nonviolent resistance, democratic practices, and memory politics in the post-Soviet context. Her advisors are Jessica Pisano, Associate Professor of Politics, and Jim Miller, Professor of Politics and Liberal Studies. Her dissertation focuses on the nonviolent movement for self-determination of Crimean Tatar indigenous people across USSR, Ukraine, and Russia.

Shynkarenko is a Research Fellow at the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, doing ethnographic and archival research in Ukraine, and has published essays on Ukrainian politics and the dream politics of Burning Man in Public Seminar. She is a member of the Decolonizing Eastern European Studies group at NSSR and has also received an NSSR doctoral fellowship.

Dina Shvetsov received the American Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies Association Understanding Modern Russia Grant for her project, “Property Relations in The Condition of Legal Pluralism in Chechnya: Preliminary Research.”

A Politics PhD student working with Jessica Pisano, Associate Professor of Politics, Shvetsov has written on political risk in Central Asia, constitutionalism in Israel, and privatization in Muslim regions of Russia. She is a member of the Decolonizing Eastern European Studies group at NSSR, and her current research focuses on alternative frameworks for analysis of social change in the transition from historical socialism to capitalism.

Shvetsov was a contributing writer and moderator for a project bridging critical social theory and artistic practice at the Vera List Center of Art and Politics, “Dialogues on a Future Communication. (Part 2. Resilience)” by Berlin-based artist Jenny Brockman, and currently teaches sociology and social theory at Stern College for Women at Yeshiva University. She is also an NSSR Prize Fellow.

Making a Magazine in a Pandemic

**A Back Matter staff member shares the process of creating the publication (partly) remotely**

After being admitted to the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism (CPCJ) Master’s program at The New School for Social Research in Spring 2019, I was invited to the launch party for a student-created magazine called Back Matter.

With an open bar at Von in NoHo to commemorate the end of their semester, Back Matter editors gave toasts to months of production and passed out copies. Nervously mingling with my soon-to-be professors and peers, I flipped through the pages of the magazine, enamored.

Producing Back Matter has become a rite of passage for CPCJ students. The magazine typically covers the publishing industry at large, and students in the relevant course direct their issue’s theme and aesthetic, filling roles across editorial, design, web development, social media and marketing, publishing and business.

Formally known as the Multimedia Publishing Lab, the class was designed by CPCJ co-founder Rachel Rosenfelt, former publisher at The New Republic and founding editor of The New Inquiry, as a kind of capstone project, an opportunity for students from across The New School to apply their skill sets and interests to the full process of creating a magazine.

Now, the class is co-taught by Jon Baskin and Jesse Seegers. Baskin, who handles the editorial mentoring, is the CPCJ Associate Director and a founding editor of The Point, a thrice-yearly magazine of philosophical essays and criticism. Seegers — who has worked architecture, design, writing, editing, publishing, and research — serves as the design beacon and teaches core classes in CPCJ and at Parsons School of Design.

After that night, I committed to the CPCJ program. I was drawn to how it merged design and writing practices. Now, I am finishing up my second semester and pursuing an interdisciplinary graduate minor in Design Studies. At the beginning of Spring 2020, I enrolled in Multimedia Publishing Lab with the intention of stepping outside of my editorial comfort zone and getting more portfolio experience with print design.

“This goes to the heart of what CPCJ was designed to achieve,” Baskin said. “I think the founders, Jim Miller and Rosenfelt, saw from the beginning that too much of professional publishing is bifurcated into different departments that barely communicate with one another. One of the goals of the program, embodied most successfully in this class, is to help graduate students who can work across those divides.”

We began the semester applying for and receiving our positions, noted in the masthead above.

The editorial team picked out submissions, working with Baskin to guide student writers through the editing process. Second-year CPCJ students Taia Handlin, Editor-in-Chief, and Shulokhana Khan, Managing Editor, spearheaded this effort.

Meanwhile, the design team began to envision how the magazine would look and feel like. Creative Director Annika Lammers, a Parsons Master’s student, managed the overall visual concept, applying her spatial design skills to construct the physical publication. As Art Director, I spent hours with her pouring through other magazines and taking trips to Printed Matter, an artbook distributor in Chelsea, for inspiration. With the help of Seegers, we made mockups, printed them, printed them again, and then printed them yet again. We had big ideas of unique binding techniques, using the school’s risograph printer, experimenting with paper weights and textures. We worked with the editorial team to blend the thematic contents with visual expression. We created a graphic treatment to begin laying out the print product.

The publisher began seeking printing quotes, and the digital team drew up plans for a website and social media marketing. We set editorial calendars, print dates, and budgets, and we started planning our own launch party.

Then the world changed.

AAnnika Lammers and Alexa Mauzy-Lewis working on Back Matter in the before-times | *Photo by Hector Gutierrez,* Back Matter Marketing and Communications Director

*Jon Baskin on a class trip to Printed Matter in the before-times| Photo by Annika Lammers, Back Matter Creative Director*

Back Matter *staff meeting in the before-times | Photo by Hector Gutierrez*

“We began this second edition of Back Matter in January. Then, none of us was imagining our current reality, structured by daily video chats and people actually debating if silk scarves are better or worse than bandanas in stopping a pandemic,” wrote Handlin in her Letter from the Editor. “We just wanted to make a sassy magazine that pokes holes in the immense, white, privileged landscape of publishing.”

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we decided to trudge on virtually. We launched the new issue on the magazine’s website and began to roll out the articles and illustrations we had crafted.

It wasn’t easy. “We have had to relearn ways of communicating, sharing information, and effectively coming together to cohesively formulate the vision and content of the publication,” says Lammers. “We are now sharing different time zones from Australia, to Korea, to the U.S.”

“I cannot help but think that the initial design decisions made at the very start of the publication are reflective of our current surrounding environment,” Lammers says. “Back Matter’s hand-drawn illustrations, risograph-printed pages and sewn-bound finish strips back the complexities and reveals insight into the way we had to critically adapt and think about the publication.”

The Back Matter team is continuing to build out the website, publishing new pieces weekly. Cailin Potami wrote a piece on underrepresentation in publishing. Jessie Mohkami explored the gender gap in book club culture. Adji Ngathe Kebe explained how comp titles paved the way for the racist bestselling disaster American Dirt.

Soon, we’ll share a special section that responds to the landscape of media in a crisis. We are working to finish our final print design, with hopes of printing it in the fall, if those who are not graduating will be able to return to campus by then.

*Screenshot of the print title for a piece by CPCJ student Fareeha Shah.*
*Full article available* *online*.

*Screenshot of the first-page layout for a piece by CPCJ student Cailin Potami.*
*Full article available online.*

The ending of this semester is bittersweet. Instead of celebrating our work together at a bar in the city, we are sitting alone in our respective homes at our computers. Through blood, sweat, and InDesign tears, we will have the final design for a print magazine, but its future, like many things, is TBD. Still, we were able to provide a digital home to the works of some incredible New School writers and illustrators — graduate work and research that was produced in the face of global chaos.

Publishing, at large, has been forced to adapt. This issue of Back Matter will always be a relic of this time.

Alexa Mauzy-Lewis is the Art Director of Back Matter magazine and a Master’s student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism Program. Cover art is by Hector Gutierrez.

Cailin Potami is a writer, an editor, and a student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program. They live in Queens with their cats, Linguini and Tortellini.

Student Fellows Innovate at NSSR Centers and Institutes

How student research is informing new modes of interdisciplinary social thought

The New School was founded in 1919 as a place where scholars could advance progressive social thought and provide the public with accessible and relevant education. The school’s early thinkers came together across disciplines to explore major social issues of the day: migration and mobility, democracy and fascism, capitalism and socialism.

A century later, The New School for Social Research continues that important work through myriad classes, publications, public programs — and especially through interdisciplinary centers and institutes. In these special spaces, faculty and students meet across departments and divisions to research many of the same major social issues. Centers and institutes help fuel policy debates, promote public discussion, and welcome visiting scholars into the New School community.

Many of NSSR’s centers and institutes have robust student fellowship programs that provide Master’s and PhD students with financial support and mentorship as they conduct major research projects. Research Matters spoke to current fellows at three centers, looking at student work across issues of economic empowerment, migration, and ethnographic design

GIDEST: The Intersection of Social Theory, Art, and Design

*Photo credit:* GIDEST fellow Otto von Busch

The Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography & Social Thought (GIDEST) is The New School’s home for transdisciplinary ethnographic research at the intersection of social theory, art, and design. Funded by a grant from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, GIDEST “draws on The New School’s tradition of politically-engaged, historically-grounded, and theoretically-innovative social research” and connects scholars across the university, especially in their bi-weekly seminar series on art and theory.

Hugh Raffles, Founding Director of GIDEST, is a Professor of Anthropology whose work is a sustained ethnographic inquiry into relations between humans, animals, and things. As a GIDEST Senior Fellow himself, he has been completing The Book of Unconformities (Penguin Random House, August 2020), in which he uses anthropology, history, and geology to explore the stories of stones.

“The work of the student fellows is central to the institute,” Raffles says. “They bring their own expertise and interests into the group, and help create a supportive and dynamic environment in which we can all develop our ideas. As GIDEST fellows, they gain structure and the experience of participating as peers in high-level conversations with accomplished scholars and practitioners,” and receive mentoring on their research projects.

The current cohort of GIDEST fellows include faculty and students working in Politics, Psychology, Photography, Media Studies, Historical Studies, and Sociology. Amanda Arena-Miller is a PhD candidate in Psychology and GIDEST fellow whose work explores the relationship between dance and interoceptive awareness — a person’s ability to sense internal bodily states.

*Amanda Arena-Miller, Psychology PhD candidate*

“My dissertation is a collaboration between the NSSR Psychology department and the Dance Department at Eugene Lang College,” Arena-Miller says. “It was a brainchild of my advisor Miriam Steele (Professor of Psychology) and Professor Neil Greenberg, who is a choreographer at Lang. They were both interested in how dance might impact your awareness of your internal signals and how that relates to the psychology of body representation. I had been working on body image research and experience as a dancer, so I took over that research.”

Arena-Miller has been coordinating this study for over four years, and it has since branched off into additional research on how art practice can impact body awareness. At GIDEST, she is compiling quantitative data on biofeedback and self-reporting; holding interviews; and conducting qualitative research on dance, using grounded theory and ethnographic work to explore interoception.

Although their respective work can appear largely unique — past topics have included ethnographic studies of cellphone designs in China, the research of multiple spatial “under-commons” of Black and Brown community resistance in Mississippi, and the role of television in the resurgence of the historical avant-garde in the late 1960s — GIDEST fellows are able to support and elevate each other’s research with a sense of community.

“We are all interested in how knowledge is created and perpetuated within discourses and academia,” Arena-Miller shares. “Largely speaking, we’re all interested in the production and also having a critical eye on knowledge.” And in addition to the welcome financial support, “we have a space where we present our work and give each other feedback. It’s really enriching.”

SCEPA: Connecting Policy to Economics

*Photo credit: Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis*

The Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA) works within NSSR’s economics department as a research center focusing on policies that raise living standards and foster economic security. Collaborating with economists, SCEPA provides research analysis and policy recommendations in the areas of climate change, public finance, and retirement.

Teresa Ghilarducci, Schwartz Professor of Economics and Policy Analysis, directs SCEPA and helps guide the work of its student fellows. “Educating tomorrow’s economic leaders is fundamental to SCEPA’s mission,” Ghilarducci says. “Our team of fellows and research associates learn how to use their academic and economic skills to impact policies that can better people’s lives. In turn, SCEPA benefits from the diversity of experiences, academic and professional, that our fellows bring to the team’s daily work.”

A noted expert and media authority on retirement policy, Ghilarducci has launched SCEPA’s Retirement Equity Lab, which is dedicated primarily to conducting research on the U.S. retirement system and vulnerable older workers. ReLab engages with both the media and policymakers to share their data and seek major structural reform.

Owen Davis, a former financial reporter, and a first-year Economics PhD student, works as a research assistant at SCEPA’s ReLab. His work helps to illuminate vulnerabilities that have fueled the growing retirement crisis and led millions of American workers to downward mobility in retirement

“We use government and survey data sets to explore how retirement policies and labor market trends affect older workers’ retirement prospects,” Davis explains. “For example, last semester I used a nationally representative data set to show that the financial fragility of older workers has been rising since the 1990s, and remains elevated since the Great Recession. In short, the typical older worker has more debt relative to their assets than they did before the last recession.”

Student fellows contribute their own interests and areas of expertise to SCEPA’s work and also gain hands-on experience in the economics field.

“In many instances, we end up working with our former students as professionals, such as former SCEPA research assistants Kate Bahn, who is now Director of Labor Market Policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and Kyle Moore, senior policy analyst with the U.S. Joint Economic Committee,” Ghilarducci says.

The center’s work is often shaped by movements and financial trends in real time.

“Since the start of the coronavirus outbreak, we have devoted virtually all our attention to predicting how the crisis will affect older workers and determining what policies would be most important to ensuring income and retirement security, as well as basic safety, for older Americans,” Davis says. “We’re hard at work seeing how all of these phenomena will play out for the current crop of retirees and near-retirees. Hopefully we can get our message out to policymakers.”

Zolberg Institute: A New Understanding of Human Movement

Zolberg Institute fellows in Amman, Jordan, summer 2018

The Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility examines human movement in the age of globalization. Building on The New School’s tradition of migration studies, the institute combines art, activism, and research to create a forum on issues of human movement.

Catherine McGahan is the Associate Director at the Zolberg Institute and previously worked for the International Rescue Committee (IRC). “The Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility is the first institute to focus specifically on mobility,” McGahan says. “We pull in different disciplines to create programming that is accessible to the general public, outside of academia. We are working on research, we are working on policy, we are working on academia, we are creating a more robust view of migration and mobility, not just for New York City or the country, but also for the world.”

The Zolberg Institute is also supporting the next generation of migration scholars and immigration advocates. Graduate student fellows come from a diverse range of scholarly backgrounds; NSSR students from Anthropology, Politics, Sociology, Liberal Studies, and Psychology collaborate with students from other programs at The New School, including International Affairs, Public and Urban Policy, and Transdisciplinary Design. They work on a host of projects, including writing content for the Mobilities Seminar series at Public Seminar, NSSR’s publishing initiative, working in specialized faculty research clusters, and producing the Zolberg Institute’s immigration policy podcast, Tempest Tossed.

Special Zolberg-IRC fellowships allow students to work directly on global issues, piloting interventions and policy recommendations that then get rolled out to a global community at large.

Mat Cusick is an MA candidate in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program and a current Zolberg fellow. Cusik is an editor at Public Seminar and works on Tempest Tossed.

“I would say that the Zolberg Institute is where I feel the greatest sense of community in the entire university,” Cusick says. “All of my colleagues share a commitment to issues that matter to me, and we have the opportunity to work together on these issues in various practical ways — writing and editing articles, researching and planning the podcast episodes, hearing and discussing scholarly work in progress, and attending and supporting public events.”

With their robust public events calendar currently on pause, Zolberg has gone digital, launching an online series of discussions with scholars and activists on migration-related issues and COVID-19.

*Mat Cusick, Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA student*

The upcoming season of Tempest Tossed, produced by the student fellows, is a deep-dive on the Trump administration’s immigration tactics, their impact, and their potential lasting legacy.

“I have responsibility for researching and editing the script for an episode on the Trump administration’s ‘virtual wall’ — another way of describing the systematic dismantling of the asylum system,” Cusick shares. “The fellowship has provided me with my first opportunity to be involved directly in a podcast, at all levels of production, from proposing subjects, speakers, and titles, to recording interviews and editing scripts, to strategizing about marketing and promotion.”

As an editor at Public Seminar, Cusick has written his own pieces on migration as well as commissioned and edited the work of major scholars in the field for the Mobilities Seminar, on topics such as asylum policy, offshore detention of refugees, climate change, forced migration, and sanctuary movements.

“Zolberg fellows are engaged in a wide range of important and exciting work around what I consider to be one of the most fundamental political issues of our time, transcending borders,” Cusick says.

Cailin Potami is a writer, an editor, and a student in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program. They live in Queens with their cats, Linguini and Tortellini.

NSSR Students Mark 100 Years of Radical Education

“The New School opened with ‘eclat’ on February 10, 1919, bursting onto Manhattan’s cultural scene with an exciting program of Preliminary Lectures delivered by leading social scientists of the day.”
—Judith Friedlander, A Light in Dark Times: The New School for Social Research and Its University in Exile (Columbia University Press, 2019)

Those first lectures at The New School, then known as The New School of Social Research were the first act of a new academic institution born in protest. The New School’s founders included James McKeen Cattell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, pacifist professors fired from Columbia University during World War I for refusing to sign an oath of loyalty to the United States. Other Columbia faculty soon resigned in solidarity, and together with other progressive intellectuals, they planned and opened a new school to “meet the needs of intelligent men and women interested in the grave social, political, economic, and educational problems of the day.”

The New School marked the centennial of this revolutionary act with the Festival of New, a weeklong festival in October of innovative performances, talks, workshops, screenings, exhibitions, and more open to all.

The New School for Social Research began the Spring 2019 semester with a Centennial lecture series that tackled the themes of migration and mobility, democracy and populism, and economic inequality and the future of capitalism.

NSSR students took that line of critical reflection even further in Fall 2019. With funding from the NSSR Dean’s Office and from The New School, they produced conferences and events that explored NSSR’s history and examined the changing definition of what it means to be “new.”

THE NEW SCHOOL, THEN AND NOW

The institution envisioned in The New School’s 1919 Preliminary Lectures pamphlet is quite different than the university today. That distance between radical ideal and lived reality catalyzed Philosophy PhD student James Trybendis and candidates Teresa Casas Hernandez and Veronica Padilla to organize a conference around pedagogy, and how those 1919 ideals could be rearticulated today in the classroom experience.

“It can’t just be the content [of classes] that’s radical,” says Casas Hernandez. “The form can be a bit stiff. We ask, ‘how can you use other disciplines and methods?’”

The symposium brought together graduate students and faculty from NSSR and Parsons School of Design as well as Pratt Institute. With opening panelists Dr. Robert Kirkbride, P.J. Gorre, and Tara Mastrelli, the symposium began with a discussion of the history, founding philosophies, and possible future of The New School. Attendees then participated in collaborative workshops on belonging, posthuman life, and meaning facilitated by Scherezade Garcia-Vazquez, Eva Perez de Vega, Michele Gorman, and Dora Suarez that aimed at exploring innovative approaches to rethink pedagogy.

“Philosophy happens in dialogue and in community,” Casas Hernandez says. “You need a community to think.”

Later, over ice cream, attendees discussed the ideas from the opening panel and the workshops and how they could apply what they learned in their own practices and classrooms. While it might be impossible to return to 1919, or to founding ideals that, in reality were never executed as written, the symposium was a chance to imagine what could be in the next 100 years. What’s important, says Casas Hernandez, is “having this space for discussion.”

AESTHETICS, POLITICS, AND THE CREATION OF THE NEW

Aryana Ghazi Hessami, a PhD student in Anthropology, and Adrian Totten, a PhD student in Politics, met in a Modernist Aesthetics class taught by Jay Bernstein, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy.

It follows, then, that Symposium on Aesthetics, Politics, and the Creation of the New, the Centennial conference they created, was inherently interdisciplinary, a chance for participants from many backgrounds to examine, interrogate, and critique the aesthetic nature of politics and reflect on the foundation of The New School.

Hessami and Totten also had a perfect keynote speaker in mind: Hessami’s MA thesis advisor and NSSR Sociology alumnus Martin Plot, now Research Professor of Political Theory at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council and the Institute of Advanced Social Studies in Argentina.

In his 2014 book The Aesthetico-Political: The Question of Democracy in Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, and Rancière, Plot sought to overcome the binary between normative or analytic approaches to theories of democracy on one side, and Schmittian theories of sovereign decision on the other, by turning toward the phenomenological tradition, which he argues “could give birth to a conception that fundamentally opposes the theological-political view from the position of an aesthetic–in the original sense of ‘aisthesis’–primacy of the plurality of perceptions and appearances in the understanding of the political.” Plot calls this new conception the aesthetico-political, and he expanded on that research and more in his Symposium keynote address, “Becoming Beginners: The Body of Necessity and the Body of Freedom in Arendt and Butler.”

Before his address, the Symposium welcomed graduate students from NSSR, Princeton University, CUNY Graduate Center, the University of Chicago, the University of Costa Rica, and Goethe University, Frankfurt for two panels. The first, ‘The Birth of the New’ addressed philosophical and theoretical considerations of the question of the new in politics; Philosophy PhD candidate Veronica Padilla was the discussant. The second, ‘Aesthetics, Action, Politics,’ discussed empirical case studies on the role of art and aesthetics in politics; Sociology PhD student Zoe Carey was the discussant. Panels were interspersed with mini ‘installations’ featuring presentations of works of art that touched on the Symposium’s theme of the relationship between art and politics.

SOUNDS FROM THE PAST

Since 1972, the student-run Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal (GFPJ) has published essays and translations from some of the day’s leading philosophers and thinkers, including Axel Honneth, Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Trân Duc Thao, and Wolfram Hogrebe.

Their archives run deep, and editorial board members and Philosophy PhD students Krishna Boddapati, Cayla Clinkenbeard, and Ceciel Meiborg discovered some audio treasures: recordings of lectures and conference presentations from major philosophers. While many of those transcripts had been published in the GFPJ and other outlets, some hadn’t ever been published, and few had heard the talks themselves after the fact.

“Last year we applied for the Centennial fund because we found these boxes of reel-to-reel tapes and cassettes, mostly recordings from the 70s and 80s, and it was a mix of lectures, conference presentations, seminars,” says Meiborg. Funding from The New School for ‘Philosophy Recorded: Celebrating 100 Years of Radical Thought at The New School’ helped the GFPJ begin to digitize the recordings, necessary to both preserve the recordings themselves and to allow GFPJ to hear them, since there was no reel-to-reel equipment at the university.

At the Night of Philosophy, a dusk-till-dawn celebration of learning held during the Festival of New, the GFPJ editorial board worked with Zed Adams, Associate Professor of Philosophy to hold a special listening session. A mix of 40 New School students and community members attended in the hopes of hearing snippets of lectures directly from Jacques Derrida, Hans Jonas, Paul Ricoeur, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Charles Taylor. The in-room audio systems didn’t quite work, remembers Meiborg, and the group improvised by playing the recordings on a smartphone held up a microphone.

The GFPJ is continuing to digitize recordings and assess ownership rights for publishing audio files; Meiborg says there’s nothing like hearing the recordings themselves, parsing through the cadences of speech and thick accents. Plans are in the works to publish what they can in written form; a transcript of the Jonas lecture on the responsibility of philosophers and artists, and three lectures by past NSSR professor Aron Gurwitsch on philosophy of mathematics, will appear in the forthcoming Fall 2019 (40:2) Centennial issue.