Psychology Publications: 2015

Faculty in the Department of Psychology shared thoughts about their recent work.

Emanuele Castano

Emanuele Castano, Professor of Psychology, recently published On Social Death: Ostracism and the Accessibility of Death Thoughts (Death Studies, 2015). From Castano, on the article:

“I have been exploring the role that social inclusion plays in quelling existential anxiety for many years (possible links to several articles and chapters). I typically show that when primed with death individuals identify more strongly with groups they belong to, such as American, or Psychologists. Research in psychology also shows that when people are excluded from social groups, namely ostracized, they tend to act aggressively. In this article I put the two lines of research together: I made people feel ostracized (yes, horrible!) and showed that this enhances the salience of death thoughts. In other words, the experience of being ostracized enhances existential anxiety, which in turn may be responsible for increased aggression.”

Castano was also recently invited to speak at Stanford University’s School of Medicine about his recently celebrated article, co-authored with David Kidd, 2014 Psychology alumnus and current postdoctoral fellow (“Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,“ Science Magazine, 2013). Watch the lecture below.

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Bio | Castano received his PhD from the Université Catholique de Louvain. His work revolves around three main areas, Collective Identity, Intergroup Relations and Morality; Social Identity, Ideology, and the Human Condition; and Empathy and Theory of Mind. He has authored more than 50 publications, mostly scientific articles in highly regarded journals, and consulted with international organizations, governments and other institutions. His recent work on the effects of literary fiction on Theory of Mind was published in Science and received media coverage worldwide. Currently, Castano serves as co-chair of the Psychology department, representing the Cognitive, Social, and Developmental area.

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Sociology Publications: 2015

Faculty in the Department of Sociology shared thoughts about their recent work.

Carlos Forment

Carlos Forment, Associate Professor of Sociology, recently published “Ordinary Ethics and the Emergence of Plebeian Democracy across the Global South: Buenos Aires’ La Salada Market” (Current Anthropology, 2015). He remarked about this new work:

“While working on this essay on South America’s largest informal market, after publishing recently a second essay on worker-occupied factories, and preparing myself to study urban scavengers in Buenos Aires, it dawned on me that these and the other cases-chapters of my next book are emblematic of a novel and heterodox form of democratic life that is emerging across the global south and which I now call plebeian citizenship.”

Other publications include Shifting Frontiers of Citizenship: The Latin American Experience (Brill, 2012) and Democracy in Latin America, 1760-1900: Volume 1, Civic Selfhood and Public Life in Mexico and Peru (University of Chicago Press, 2003).

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Carlos Forment (2015) — Ordinary Ethics and the Emergence of Plebeian Democracy across the Global South: Buenos Aires’ La Salada Market
Carlos Forment (2015) — Ordinary Ethics and the Emergence of Plebeian Democracy across the Global South: Buenos Aires’ La Salada Market
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Carlos Forment et al. (2012) — Shifting Frontiers of Citizenship: The Latin American Experience
Carlos Forment et al. (2012) — Shifting Frontiers of Citizenship: The Latin American Experience
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Carlos Forment (2012) — Democracy in Latin America, 1760-1900: Volume 1, Civic Selfhood and Public Life in Mexico and Peru
Carlos Forment (2012) — Democracy in Latin America, 1760-1900: Volume 1, Civic Selfhood and Public Life in Mexico and Peru
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Bio | Forment received his PhD from Harvard University. His research interests include governmentalized populations and plebeian citizenship across the global South; neoliberalism and public life today; civil society across the post-colonial world; citizenship: ancient, modern and contemporary; and, nationhood and selfhood in 19th-century Latin America. Currently Forment serves as Director of the Janey Program in Latin American Studies.

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Faculty Contributions to Public Seminar

Public Seminar, an online exchange of critical perspectives on contemporary social issues, began at the New School for Social Research and now has contributions and readers from around the world. Several NSSR faculty have shared thoughts on pressing matters, have debated healthily with their peers, and have used Public Seminar as a tool for pedagogical experimentation.

Here are just some of many contributions made by our faculty in the last year.

Julia Ott: Slaves: The Capital That Made Capitalism

Excerpt: “Racialized chattel slaves were the capital that made capitalism. While most theories of capitalism set slavery apart, as something utterly distinct, because under slavery, workers do not labor for a wage, new historical research reveals that for centuries, a single economic system encompassed both the plantation and the factory.

Family_of_African_American_slaves_on_Smiths_Plantation_Beaufort_South_Carolina-crop-473x375At the dawn of the industrial age commentators like Rev. Thomas Malthus could not envision that capital — an asset that is used but not consumed in the production of goods and services — could compound and diversify its forms, increasing productivity and engendering economic growth. Yet, ironically, when Malthus penned his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, the economies of Western Europe already had crawled their way out of the so-called “Malthusian trap.” The New World yielded vast quantities of “drug foods” like tobacco, tea, coffee, chocolate, and sugar for world markets. Europeans worked a little bit harder to satiate their hunger for these “drug foods.” The luxury-commodities of the seventeenth century became integrated into the new middle-class rituals like tea-drinking in the eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, these commodities became a caloric and stimulative necessity for the denizens of the dark satanic mills. The New World yielded food for proletarians and fiber for factories at reasonable (even falling) prices. The “industrious revolution” that began in the sixteenth century set the stage for the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

But the “demand-side” tells only part of the story. A new form of capital, racialized chattel slaves, proved essential for the industrious revolution — and for the industrial one that followed.”

Read the full piece at Public Seminar.

Bio| Julia Ott is Associate Professor of Historical Studies and Co-director of the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University. Ott was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in 2009-2010. Ott specializes in economic history and political history. She is the author of When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2011).

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