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.”

NSSR and Lang Students Explore Suppressed Histories in New York City

On a sunny October afternoon in 2021, Washington Square Park was filled with just about everyone in New York City. Among them were around 25 New School students, their professor, and their guide.

Nearly 400 years ago, the area looked very different. Twenty-eight different farmsteads filled that land, all owned by Black individuals — New York City’s first Black neighborhood. Yet the park today bears no record of this history, nor that of the people who lived there.

That erasure, said Kamau Ware, is not accidental. Ware is an artist, historian, and founder of Black Gotham Experience, an organization dedicated to making “the impact of the African Diaspora missing from collective consciousness as well as the public square.” After a brief introduction, Ware handed each New School student a card bearing the name of a Black person, then asked them to focus on one name: Manuel Trumpeter, a Black farmstead owner. What are the kinds of things that might have been on Trumpeter’s mind? What might he have been feeling, frightened of, excited about as a semi-free Black man in 17th-century New York City?

This empathy-based exercise and subsequent in-depth historical tour of Washington Square Park are integral parts of students’ work in either the “Capitalism and the Settler Colonial Present in New York City” graduate course or “Blind Spots of New York City: Capitalism and Exclusion” undergraduate course, both taught by Benoit Challand, Associate Professor of Sociology.

“This is all very practice-oriented,” says Challand. “The goal is to bring students outside of the classroom and academic, book-centered learning experiences.” In addition to tours with Ware of the park and of the Financial District, students have toured Inwood Hill Park with the Lenape Center and discussed the colonial-era fur trade from the perspective of the Mohawk Nation with the North American Indigenous Center of New York for Culture, Equity, and Economic Justice — all spaces of different kinds of exploitation and erasure.

Developing a Civically Engaged Class

“How can you explain what is capitalism from a historical and sociological perspective?”

During Challand’s first year as a Sociology faculty member at The New School in 2015, he developed a Lang first-year seminar that explored this question via two major commodities, cotton and sugar. As he taught the class, he found that issues around settler colonialism — the replacement of an indigenous population with an invasive settler population — in the U.S.; extraction; land dispossession; and racialization of the other continued to crop up, especially in relation to New York City.

“The big discovery [for me] was to find out how the history of the city is connected to those two commodities all the way to recent times without acknowledging its link with slavery until the 1850s,” he says. This led him to dig deeper into the erasure of past slave rebellions in the city, as well as that of the city’s current large Native American population, and to develop the course in new directions to confront the absence of Black and indigenous people’s memory in New York City landscape, architecture and monuments.

After meeting Ware during a tour in 2017, Challand asked him to lead a tour on erasure of the city’s Black history for the Lang seminar. Following positive reviews, Challand brought Ware into the course as a partner via a Lang Civic Liberal Arts grant, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. They taught together in 2018 and 2020, and now again in 2021.

New this year is a version of the course at the graduate level at NSSR. While both courses explore the same content and read the same texts, Challand says that undergraduate students are “more creative in terms of how they express knowledge” while graduate students have a “deeper, more robust engagement with literature” in class discussion and in written assignments. The courses are now supported by a Mellon Periclean Faculty Leader grant, which has allowed Challand to bring in the additional indigenous community partners.

Assisting with the graduate course is Emmanuel Guerisoli, a Sociology PhD student who studies settler colonialism in the U.S. from a legal point of view. His Teaching Assistant position is funded by NSSR’s Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, which supports research on New York City and its transformation over the centuries by migration.

Bridging Sociology and History

At both levels, the courses draw deeply upon both history and sociology. At the graduate level, it is one of several Sociology courses that focus on the struggles of peripheral peoples in countries both of the global core and the periphery (read more about the Critical Perspectives in Democratic Anticolonialism project).

Says Challand, “Both disciplines concur on locating capitalism in Atlantic trade, which includes the slave trade. Mercantilism is replaced by capitalism, a new economic and ideological system rooted in exploitation and destruction of native populations….History means an understanding of historical episodes, a past-dependent development. The landscape of New York City is a byproduct of what colonial New York City was in the 17th and 18th centuries. There is continuity and rupture. And from the sociological perspective, capitalism rebundles social relations.”

Although course material temporally ends in the mid-1800s, course discussions address contemporary topics. “We try to look at the legacies, and how racial capitalism and its hierarchies have evolved and developed with time,” says Guerisoli. “In the final sections of the course, it was impossible to ignore what happened last year [uprisings following the murder of George Floyd by police] and Black Lives Matter, and the effect that it had. This is completely influenced by what happened in colonial times.” Discussion topics include the complicity of academia in erasure, pushback against monuments to colonial leaders, reparations, and the establishment of Juneteenth as a national holiday in the U.S.

“I’m very happy to see the students very engaged both academically, theoretically, but also politically,” says Guerisoli, who has been a TA for a previous Sociology class taught by Challand, “and that we’re able to discuss what are very much provocative topics that are not easy to engage with and don’t have any easy answers or simple answers.” He cites a recent debate around the discourse of nativism; that indigenous people might use nativism to counter settler colonial practices, but that white supremacists use the same discourse against migrants.

Melisa Rousseau is a Sociology MA student who registered for the course without much prior academic knowledge of the topics it addresses. But with race as a primary area of focus for her studies, the course seemed like a great fit. “I really didn’t even know about what settler colonialism was,” she says. “I signed up because I had taken Benoit’s class before, and he and Emma together are a really good team, so I knew it would be a good course.”

The course has not only offered her new perspectives on slavery and the genocide of Native Americans; it’s also reframed how she thinks about race, space, and place, and New York City itself.

“The course has significantly changed the way I see New York City,” she says. “I’m not just walking through Washington Square Park anymore, right? It’s got a different meaning now. The same with Wall Street or City Hall. I never realized that interred a block away from City Hall are up to 20,000 skeletons [of Black individuals]. Now when I walk in Lower Manhattan, it has a different meaning.”

And she appreciates the multifaceted aspects of the course. “We’re able to integrate what we’ve learned on the tour with what we’re also learning in the readings,” she says. And on top of that, we’re keeping journals [which integrate] what we’re reading and our experience on the tours.”

Ware’s October tour ends outside a building just east of Washington Square Park where, in 1911, nearly 150 Jewish and Italian immigrant garment workers died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. A small plaque on the building commemorates the tragedy, one of the worst industrial disasters in U.S. history and a major turning point in labor history and occupational safety. He notes the differences between the site and the nearby park in terms of public memory and erasure. But one parallel remains: the extra work those “othered” must do — ideally with a wide base of support but often alone — to fight for visible change in a society built on their erasure.

Photo credit: Emmanuel Guerisoli

 

Meet Our Postdocs: Niina Vuolajarvi Brings Activism-Informed Research to the Zolberg Institute

Niina Vuolajarvi began her postdoctoral fellowship at NSSR in January 2021, bringing her long background of activism and academic research “at the intersection of sex work studies and migration studies” to the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility.

Before starting her PhD in Sociology at Rutgers University, Vuolajarvi organized around migrant rights, anti-racism, feminist movements and sexual rights in Nordic countries. Later, as a doctoral student in Finland, she became aware of the debate surrounding sex work, especially one curious characteristic of the discourse: “The way feminists have been one of the main groups promoting oppression of sex workers rights and sex workers’ self-expression,” she says.

Vuolajarvi began her doctoral field work among migrant sex workers in 2013, when discussions of the “Nordic model” of legislation—which criminalizes the purchasing of sex, but not the selling of it—were increasing in Finland. As part of her organizing work with feminist networks trying to halt the promotion of these laws, Vuolajarvi compiled a research report on the effect of client criminalization on sex workers for the Finnish National Gender Studies Association. 

“I noticed there actually wasn’t much empirical research done involving sex workers themselves, interviewing them to see how [they] themselves experienced this law,” Vuolajarvi says. “There was especially no research that would have included migrant sex workers.” 

Eager to address this disparity for organizing work and for her dissertation, Vuolajarvi interviewed over 200 people, most of whom were sex workers, in Finland, Sweden, and Norway. “I tried to talk with people from different residence permit categories, from different ethnic groups, and also different working locations to really make an intervention in the debate,” she explains. She published her results in her dissertation, Governing in the Name of Caring: Migration, Sex Work and the ‘Nordic Model’. 

Her commitment to centering the voices of directly impacted individuals in academic debates is one way that Vuolajarvi’s background in activism informs her approach as a scholar. She has thoughtfully moved between those spheres, always considering the impact her research could have on the communities it focuses on.

From 2015 to 2017, Vuolajarvi worked as the main researcher on an interdisciplinary project called Deported, which raised public awareness of the criminalization of migration’s impact on communities. The project won the 2017 Visual Journalism of the Year Award.

“You have to make sure your research doesn’t just serve you and your academic career, but that it’s really available to communities to advocate for their rights.”

-Niina Vuolajarvi

“Especially doing research with populations that have been historically mistreated by researchers, where the research has often been mobilized to initiatives that work against these communities, I think it’s very important to think about the politics of your research and what your research does,” she cautions. “You have to make sure your research doesn’t just serve you and your academic career, but that it’s really available to communities to advocate for their rights.”

“I don’t want to speak for sex workers. I think they are very capable of speaking for themselves and can voice their concerns much better than I do,” she explains. “But I also think that producing knowledge and providing tools for the movements in this ‘expert’ role can have a different impact in the debates.”

Since January, Vuolajarvi has met weekly with the Zolberg Institute, where she is developing her dissertation research into a book. “I’m really happy to be at the Zolberg Institute. I took courses there as a graduate student at Rutgers,” she says. “They nurture a very open and warm environment, so it was really easy to land even in the time of Zoom.” Vuolajarvi also hopes to collaborate with The New School’s Gender and Sexualities Studies Institute.  

“Niina will expand the focus of the Institute, through her important scholarship and new courses she will add to our curriculum,” says Alex Aleinikoff, University Professor and Director of the Zolberg Institute. “We are thrilled to have her join us.”

Vuolajarvi also hopes to begin research on “the technologies of governance and policing of sex work,” analyzing the ways that technologies like social media and money transfer companies use algorithms to police sex work. “I would like to look more into these new forms of governance, how they function and how they affect the way sex workers organize their everyday working lives,” she explains. “Also, I want to research how the communities organize to resist these new forms of control.” Vuolajarvi has already published more than 20 articles, book chapters, book reviews and research reports on the policies and politics of immigration, commercial sex, and healthcare.

 Vuolajarvi hopes to move to in-person work at The New School in Fall 2021. “It’s been a very positive experience so far,” she says. “I’m looking forward to getting into the everyday life of the New School.” 

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.

Meet Our Postdocs: Romy Opperman Brings Black Feminist Ecologies to the Philosophy Department

Romy Opperman began her postdoctoral fellowship with NSSR’s Philosophy department in Fall 2020. Opperman’s work focuses on issues of environmental justice through the lenses of Black feminist and decolonial philosophy. 

As a student of continental philosophy, Opperman has always been interested in “questions of control and management of life.” Opperman began looking at the ways Africana philosophy engages with the continental tradition and, at times, repurposes it, posing questions about “humanism, its limits and its links to violence; animality and how it’s bound up in race; and hegemonic conceptions of nature,” and pointing to aspects that thinkers like Foucault had missed in his analysis of racism and biopower. 

That interest took a new form when Opperman was in graduate school at Pennsylvania State University and considering her dissertation. “I was increasingly engaged in Africana philosophy and decolonial philosophy at the same time that a new public consciousness arose around environmental justice issues,” she explains. Opperman saw those philosophical questions come to life through mass political and social movements, from the organized opposition to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline through Standing Rock Reservation to increased public pressure to provide residents of Flint, Michigan with clean water. “I began thinking about what tools I found within continental philosophy and Africana philosophy for trying to understand these events in ways that I thought were useful and different from how one might typically approach them,” she says.

Opperman’s work challenges mainstream conceptions of racism and environmental issues as distinct, with only occasional overlap. “My use of the term racist environments aims to show how racism and the environment are in fact co-constitutive,” she explains. “This is different from the way that environmental racism is commonly understood, that is, where racism and the environment are only sometimes linked in exceptional circumstances.” She proposes a turn to radical Black ecology, which emphasizes the possibility and necessity of imagining a radically different way of being.

Opperman speaks on a panel on Climate Ethics and Environmental Justice at Princeton University, October 2, 2020.

Through her dissertation, “Race, Ecology, Freedom: Climate Justice and Environmental Racism,” Opperman “brought to the fore issues of power, domination, and normativity” by turning her philosophical attention to something discourses in philosophy often overlook: the communities that have already felt the impact of climate change and developed expertise to survive.

“I argued that the radical critique of liberal humanism common to the work of Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, and Saidiya Hartman shows us why it is necessary to break with liberal frames of environmental injustice and offers grounds for an alternative approach to understand the nature of the harm of environmental racism, the stakes of struggles against it, and to imagine its redress, which I term ecological freedom,” Opperman recalls.

Connecting at NSSR

At NSSR, Opperman raises many of the same questions in “Black Feminist Thought: Labor, Genealogy, Memory” a graduate philosophy course she’s taught during the spring 2021 semester. While it’s not explicitly about climate change, the course includes readings from Christina Sharpe and Sylvia Wynter on Black feminist ecologies, and, as Opperman explained, race and the environment are inextricable. “It’s been really important and special for me to be able to go into my first job in a philosophy department and teach a graduate course on Black feminist thought,” Opperman says. “It’s a dream situation!” 

Opperman speaks on a panel on Black Feminist Ecologies at Wesleyan University, February 24, 2021

As she continues working within NSSR’s Philosophy department, Opperman hopes to recruit more women to the graduate program and to expand its curriculum. “Putting feminist philosophy — particularly, but not only, Black and decolonial [feminist] philosophy — as part of our core agenda is really important to me,” she says.

Opperman’s presence has already had a major impact. “We are tremendously happy to have Romy joining the department. Her graduate seminar is making a crucial contribution to our curriculum, as is her writing seminar, which she developed to provide graduate students with much-needed feedback on writing with an eye towards publication,” Zed Adams, Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy says. “It is quickly becoming hard to remember what our department was like without her.”

At its heart, Opperman’s work is deeply interdisciplinary; it incorporates critical theory, film criticism, and gender and sexualities studies. In that spirit, she’s also involved with The New School’s cross-divisional Collaborative on Climate Futures, led by faculty from NSSR and Parsons. Opperman is excited to collaborate with academics from a wide range of backgrounds working on the same questions of race, environment, and power.

Opperman has also worked in collaboration with the Gender and Sexualities Studies Institute (GSSI). She organized and presented at the March 22 GSSI event “Finding Ceremony: Honoring Black Feminist Elders,” which focused on the legacy of Black feminists like Sylvia Wynter and Alexis Pauline Gumbs and former New School professor M. Jacqui Alexander, who Opperman describes as “an amazing queer trans-national Black feminist thinker and spiritual practitioner.”

For the GSSI blog, she wrote “Haunting and Hosting,” which analyses the films Ghost and Twilight City, as well as Alexander’s account of her experience at NSSR, through the lens of Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing. Opperman hopes to continue collaborating with the GSSI, and to uplift the status of Gender and Sexualities Studies within NSSR. 

In addition to working on articles that ask how established topics within climate justice  such as debt, intergenerational ethics, and migration are transformed when approached from Black and decolonial feminist grounds, Opperman is working to turn her dissertation into a book, tentatively titled Africana Ecopolitics: Radical Philosophies of Ecological Freedom. The book will incorporate the perspectives of a wider range of Africana thinkers, and further develop its explanation of “ecological freedom” in relation to decolonization and abolition. “It’s been a really exciting time in terms of a kind of explosion of interdisciplinary work around race and ecology… I think philosophy does have some important tools to offer and ways of thinking that could be a really useful part of that,” she says. “I’m figuring out the best ways [philosophy] can complement people doing all kinds of this work.” 

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.