Connections
between The New School for Social Research and Germany are both long-standing
and numerous, ranging from the University in Exile in the 1930s to the Technical
University of Dresden exchange program today,
A transformative
moment in this transatlantic relationship happened in 1965, when New School
President John Everett worked with the Volkswagen Foundation to create the
Theodor Heuss Chair of the Social Sciences. Named for the first president of
West Germany, this was the first professorship in the United States supported
by a German foundation; Volkswagen endowed the chair for five years, after
which the German federal government assumed responsibility. According to the
most recent history of The New School for Social Research by Judith Friedlander,
the chair “evolved out of earlier exchanges of mutual recognition and
appreciation” between Heuss and New School leadership; like many University in
Exile faculty members, Heuss himself had been dismissed from an academic
position by the Nazis in the 1930s.
Early
Heuss Professors included sociologists and philosophers who had studied
critical theory in postwar Frankfurt School with the original founders of the
Institute for Social Research, among them Jürgen Habermas. Today, the Heuss
Professorship rotates between NSSR departments.
In
2018-2019, the Politics Department welcomed Hubertus Buchstein, a Full
Professor in Political Theory and History of Political Ideas at the University
of Greifswald. In addition to teaching a spring seminar on Habermas and the
current work of Critical Theorists in Germany, he also completed extensive
archival research on political theorist and University in Exile professor Otto
Kirchheimer. Read on for more about his year here.
***
RESEARCH MATTERS: So I hear you’ve been to The New School a few times before! Can you tell us about your own academic history and what brought you here?
HUBERTUS BUCHSTEIN: When I was working on my PhD thesis at the Free University of Berlin in the late 1980s, the topic involved some emigrants I knew were at The New School. So when for the first time in my life I came to America in 1990, I went to The New School. I wanted to see the building where Hannah Arendt had been — I simply wanted to be at the building!
I also
got in contact with Andrew Arato and his wife Jean Cohen. He was the only one
in the huge Frankfurt School camp who wrote critically about Eastern Europe. When I came back as a Humboldt Research
Fellow in 1994, I taught a class with Andrew on the
political sociology of the Frankfurt School. I came for the next seven years,
every year for two months in February and March, and taught a class twice a
week.
Since
then I’m still in close contact with The New School and I come every year to
New York. It was very easy to make friends here, to get to know people. It’s
very international and this was totally different than what I knew.
RM: It was that different than Berlin?
HB: Berlin is Germany’s biggest city. But in comparison to New York it was a sleeping city. And in those days my Political Science department in Berlin didn’t have so many international students, in particular from Eastern Europe and from Latin America.
Teaching
was also quite different. Here it’s more lecture-style seminars. In Germany we
start in our theory classes with a discussion of the text. We have assigned
sometimes 20, 30 pages only for class and the students have to read them three
times so it’s like 80 pages. Here you assign a book but you can’t always do
such a close reading. I really had to adjust to this style of teaching.
This story originally appeared on the Insights blog from the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at The New School for Social Research
Kyle Moore starts a new job on Capitol Hill next week. He’ll be joining the Democratic staff of the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) as a Senior Policy Analyst.
Our first order of business is to offer Kyle a hearty congratulations on his success! Kyle is a long-time member of the SCEPA and New School community, and we wish him well as he goes forward in his economics career.
Kyle earned his MA in Economics from the New School for Social Research, served as a SCEPA fellow within the Retirement Equity Lab (ReLab), and went on to pursue his PhD in the department, which he is currently writing. Some of Kyle’s ReLab work can be found here and here. The Review of Black Political Economy also recently published his research done with ReLab.
As Kyle begins his journey to impact policy within the hallowed halls of our government, he shares a little of his experience below. His story reflects the same desire to confront some of today’s biggest challenges that attracted many of us to the New School. He talks about how he got to where he is today and gives some advice to those who will follow him.
What will you do in this job?
My role will be to write reports and issue briefs on the economic policy issues that matter to Democratic Members of Congress, to prepare briefings for and help contact experts to participate in Congressional hearings on those topics, and to help write the JEC response to the annual Economic Report of the President.
Can you describe your research work and focus?
As a researcher, I’m mainly interested in understanding the causes and consequences of identity group-based social and economic disparities. I want to provide explanations (and hopefully policy solutions for) persistent gaps in health, wealth, income, and employment across race and gender. To do this, I work within the traditions of stratification economics, institutional economics, and the political economy of health. My dissertation work is centered on the health consequences of racial disparities in access to economic resources and exposure to potentially stressful events. I also have a deep interest in the philosophy of social science and in economics’ role in academia and policy circles as a social science
What interested you in working on Capitol Hill?
My interest in working with the JEC, and with economic policy more broadly, stems from my view that social scientists have a responsibility to put their knowledge and their work into practice. Because the subject matter of the social sciences (particularly economics) is human well-being, those who have the time and resources to study the social sciences are called to two purposes: to make others aware of the causes and extent of social and economic problems, and to do what’s possible to alleviate those problems. Inequality, poverty, and racial disparities in mortality and morbidity are too important to be treated as only academic concerns; they have real consequences for people’s lives. Working with the JEC gives me the opportunity to get research directly into the hands of members of Congress — research that could make a real impact on people’s life chances.
What are your hopes as you go forward in this new position and in your career?
I’m looking forward to learning a lot about how economic policy is shaped while working with the JEC. My hope is that I’ll be able to direct people towards better understandings of the causes and consequences of economic inequality. I’d especially like to bring the expertise I’ve built studying persistent racial economic disparities to the staff, in hopes that progress can be made towards reducing those disparities. I also hope that the position will give me a more well-rounded understanding of economics and economic policy, beyond my current areas of expertise, that will be valuable for the students I plan to teach once I make my way back into academia.
How did your time at SCEPA and in the NSSR Econ Department influence your decision to work in policy?
Taking courses within the Economics department at NSSR and working at SCEPA and the Retirement Equity Lab set me up to take on this role in policy. Both sets of experiences were essential in shaping my understanding of the relationship between academic research and economic policy.
NSSR’s Economics department is steeped in a tradition of political economy that’s constantly asking of its students “What is the end (purpose) of economic study?” Without that framing, it’s possible to treat economic study as just a set of interesting data puzzles. The critical perspective that’s baked into the coursework at NSSR steers students towards discussions of social and economic inequality, and what we can do about that inequality. Working at SCEPA and ReLab allowed me to put that critical frame developed through courses in the Econ department to practice, translating academic research into policy briefs and white papers using accessible (non-academic) language. I was able to produce a body of work on the intersection between race, aging, and retirement policy while there, developing some expertise on those subjects. I also gained valuable technical skills working with statistical software, government databases, and longitudinal surveys that I’ve used for my own research and will continue to use in my work with the JEC.
As a role model for other NS Economics students, what advice would you give a current NS Econ student if they wanted to follow in your footsteps?
It’s important to seek out opportunities to produce work with your name on it that will be publicly distributed. Whether it’s a blog post, an op-ed, a chapter review, a policy brief, or an academic research paper. Your body of work is something that accumulates over time, follows you throughout your career, and will often open a lot of doors for you. Any time is a good time to start writing.
Start going to seminars, academic conferences, and events. Ask questions there, meet people, talk about your research, and if you don’t have a clearly defined topic, talk about what you’re interested in. The key is to make connections with people; the more people that know who you are and what you’re interested in, the more of a chance there is that when they hear about an opportunity that might be good for you, they send it your way. Doing good work is a necessary but insufficient condition for getting to a position where that work can make a difference.
Put together a group of colleagues and mentors you can rely on to speak openly with about work, research, and the troubles that come along with academic life. It’s not easy for anyone, and no one gets through coursework or research entirely on their own. Research and scholarship are both social processes, so it makes sense that the best research and scholarship is done in groups. Most importantly though, having people to talk to and confide in is essential for maintaining mental health throughout grad school.
Given the polarization of politics today, what role do you think current New School Economics student can play in creating real and positive change?
NSSR Economics students are perhaps uniquely positioned among the universe of Econ students in that they aren’t discouraged from taking Economics’ role as a social science with real social and political implications seriously. NSSR Econ has a “vision” that is, at its core, unabashedly progressive. That vision is something that economics as an academic discipline desperately needs, but it’s equally needed at think tanks and in the places where economic policy is shaped.
In 1976, NASA’s Viking 1 orbiter, which was circling around
Mars, delivered one of the most striking and close-up images of this distant place
that had ever been seen by earthlings. The photograph featured what looked like
a human face sculpted into the surface of the planet. While many realized that
the face was simply a coincidental pattern of light and shadow caught at just
the right time, some took this “face on Mars” as evidence of abandoned alien
civilizations and government cover-ups.
Picture and close-up of the “face on Mars” taken by the Viking 1 orbiter
Visual perception has a difficult job. Starting from highly
limited sensory input (flat, low-resolution images), it fills in gaps, adding
information that was never there to begin with. Such extrapolations can provide
an accurate sense of the world, or they can lead us astray. The wonders and
folly of perception motivated Benjamin Van Buren, the new Assistant Professor
of Psychology at The New School for Social Research (NSSR), to develop a
research program concerning the precise mechanics of attention, perceptual
inference, and illusion.
But how exactly does one study perception? One approach, which Van Buren favors, is psychophysics, a branch of psychology that deals with the relationships between physical stimuli and mental phenomena. Van Buren’s work maps visual inputs onto visual experiences, an approach favored by Gestalt psychologists, who discovered, for example, that how you see something moving depends dramatically on the context in which you view it.
Which dot is circling the other?
Van Buren gives the above example: Which dot is circling the other? We perceive the relationship between the two dots (i.e. which is stationary, and which as ‘orbiting’) by referring their motion to an external reference frame — either the screen or the moving background texture. The influence of background motion on the appearance of the dots strongly supports the Gestalt view of perception — that wholes take precedence over parts, and the appearance of parts depends on the wholes they are seen to comprise.
Gestalt
Psychology has a long history at The New School; the first University in Exile faculty
included Max Wertheimer, considered the father of Gestalt psychology, and
Rudolph Arnheim. More recently, working outside the Gestalt tradition, Arien
Mack, Alfred J. and Monette C Marrow Professor of Psychology, has advanced the
study of perception with her research on inattentional blindness.
Van Buren’s path to NSSR began with an interest in visual aesthetic experiences. “In high school, I was always doing art-related stuff; making animations, wood carvings, and kinetic sculptures after Jean Tinguely. Then I got to college and the whole universe opened up before me,” he recalls. At the University of Pennsylvania, he followed a program in cognitive science and started working with Anjan Chatterjee on projects in neuroscience and aesthetics. “I wanted to see if it was possible to use a relatively ‘hard’ scientific approach to better understand things that seem more ineffable, like art experiences,” he says. This led him to a string of projects exploring the cognitive demands of viewing photographs of beautiful and ugly landscapes, how attention is deployed to attractive faces, and how artists’ painting styles change as a result of Alzheimer’s disease.
Most recently, Van Buren has also been probing the perception of intentions. Strictly speaking, when we see somebody reach out to hold our hand, or run to catch a train, the sensory data contain nothing more than physical states and changes. But in both of these cases, we experience the action in more than merely physical terms — we see it as performed by an agent with a mind, who has beliefs and goals. As a case study, his research has focused on another strong and storied illusion, in which we reflexively see simple geometric shapes (which we know to be inanimate) as alive and goal-directed when they move in particular ways.
In the same way that we can’t help but experience other visual illusions, we can’t help but see the shapes in the above Heider and Simmel film as animate, and telling some kind of story
Van Buren explains that seeing the world in this rich way is adaptive, driven by evolutionary pressures and the demands of development. Successful interaction with the world requires seeing it in all sorts of ways that go beyond the input data. “You can conceive of perception as solving a number of different problems. And we need not always think of perception as one process; it can be understood a variety or processes that are tacked together as solutions to problems that are posed by the environment,” Van Buren says.
For the past several years, Van Buren has been investigating
perception’s curious “solutions” at Yale University, where he earned his
doctorate, and at KU Leuven in Belgium, where he conducted postdoctoral
research. His projects have explored everything from the perception of food’s
caloric content to visitors’ aesthetic experiences in art galleries. Most
recently, he has been interested in the question of how and when a still photo
— which, strictly speaking, corresponds to a single moment of time — is seen to
represent a longer stretch of time (from a few seconds to hours).
A New York native, Van Buren is looking forward to joining the New School and leading his own laboratory, the NSSR Perception Lab. He envisions the lab as “a space where people feel encouraged to break new intellectual and methodological ground, and where they learn from one another by sharing and debating ideas.” He is also excited about potential interdisciplinary collaborations with Parsons faculty and students. “Designers spend much of their time thinking about how we see the world in order to improve our experience of our surroundings. A lot of this knowledge would be interesting to vision scientists, but communication between these fields has been fairly rare. Fortunately, The New School is known for collaborations across disciplinary boundaries and for a widespread willingness to explore new avenues of research,” he says, citing the example of Professor of Psychology Michael Schober, who conducts research on jazz musicians as they improvise. “This work moves beyond all the existing paradigms in psychology in order to answer profound questions about how people read each other’s signals and create together.”
In Fall 2019, Van Buren will be teaching two classes. In “Visual Perception and Cognition,” NSSR graduate students will survey the latest vision science, including research on the perception of color, motion, shape, material, and depth. “I want to focus on big themes, and I plan to incorporate a lot of demonstrations.” he says. In “The Psychology of Aesthetics and Design,” undergraduates will study existing literature on empirical aesthetics, design a research question, and test their hypotheses through rigorous experimentation. He hopes these projects will reflect students’ own design practices and concerns, and that through them they will also discover new ways in which empirical methods can be used to enhance creative work.
Lucas Ballestin is a PhD candidate in Philosophy. He specializes in political philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. His dissertation is on psychoanalytic theories of political ideology in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
Within
contemporary political language, a constitution is generally considered a
neutral document, one that sets forth fundamental ground rules for how persons
and organizations should conduct themselves politically but stands outside of
the push and pull of quotidian politics itself. It is also understood as a
stable, almost timeless framework that exists outside of the many changes of
ordinary political life. Think of the mechanisms for amending itself the US
constitution sets out, these emphasize an aspiration to enduring currency. Therefore,
most people tend to understand a constitution as both an unbiased arbitrational
document and as something essential to moving about effectively in the world.
But Sandipto
Dasgupta, the new Assistant Professor of Politics at The New School for Social
Research, has a different perspective. A political theorist, he explores the
historical relationship between political institutions, like constitutions, and
political transformation, taking a broad look at the variable historical
composition of political paradigms, from constitutionalism to postcolonialism.
His findings challenge some of the most conventional beliefs we have about the
connection between revolutionary upheaval and political institutions. As he
demonstrates, constitutions are not always the neutral means of closure and
containment, but are sometimes the very tools of genuine political
transformation.
A Global Academic Journey
A
native of Calcutta, Dasgupta began his career with tentative intention of
become a lawyer. He graduated from the National Law School of India University,
the country’s first such school, and worked as a clerk at the Supreme Court of
India. During his studies, Dasgupta discovered that he was especially curious
about the theoretical underpinnings of the law — the historical and
philosophical assumptions that were as fundamental to the legal curriculum as
they were unexamined. “I wanted to look at the legal language more critically
and from a distance,” Dasgupta said.
This
interest led him on a global academic journey, first to Columbia University,
where he earned a PhD in Political Science in 2014. “New York was very
fundamental in shaping me as an intellectual subject,” he says. “I was there in
very interesting political times [Occupy Wall Street], all these new journals,
people talking to each other. I was a shaped as a scholar by these moments
outside the classroom and the library, as much by anything that happened within
them. It also helped me, I think, move beyond India, linking my questions up
with those that resonated globally.”
Dasgupta
also studied at NSSR as part of the Inter-University Doctoral Consortium, sitting
in on Politics classes with Andrew Arato and Andreas Kalyvas, and a class on
Hegel with Jay Bernstein, which he remembers as going late into the night and
often continuing at a nearby bar.
Dasgupta
then moved on to postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University and at the British
Academy in London. “It says something about the postcolonial world that its best
archive is actually in the British Library,” he jokes. He has spent the past
three years back home in Delhi, teaching a range of course on political
ideology and political economy at Ashoka University.
Excited
to return to New York, Dasgupta views the NSSR Politics Department as the
perfect fit for a scholar such as himself, one interested in “interrogating the
foundations and the assumptions that are built into the discipline,” he says. “The
kind of political theory I do is critical and political. It tries to make
political theory speak to the political life of the present. I always felt that
The New School is the perfect place for that kind of approach.” This summer, he’s
busy planning for “The Political Theory
of Decolonialization,” the first course he’ll teach to NSSR graduate students.
The Role of Constitutions
He’s
also been busy wrapping up his first book,
Legalizing the Revolution (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). In it,
Dasgupta returns to the accepted idea that constitutions act like skeletons for
polities, providing a rigid structure that firm up the basic functions of
administration and jurisprudence alike. He claims that this view narrowly
focuses on and generalizes from a specific period of constitutional writing,
ignoring other roles constitutions might play, especially in bringing to life
the political institutions of a state.
For
example, we tend to look to and study the constitutions of the 18th
and 19th centuries rather than the ones that were written in the 20th.
In those earlier centuries, the story of constitutions “is the story of
closure,” Dasgupta says. “There’s upheaval and revolution and it comes to an
end with a constitution. Constitutions end revolutions.” In the 20th
century, however, constitutions may do exactly the opposite: They transform,
they kick off revolutions. For the newly decolonized states of the twentieth
century, Dasgupta says that “the revolution was in the future. We have a
constitution through which we can do the revolution, transforming the colonial
subject into a postcolonial citizen.” In this second kind of constitution, the
distinction between the time of revolution and the time of law is undone, and
the two meld together. In other words, these post-colonial states challenge our
received notions of constitutions as instruments of order and closure, instead
exploring their possibilities and limitations as instruments of revolutionary transformation.
Dasgupta
has also explored the history of institutionalizing postcolonial visions of
freedom. “When you think about it, the 20th century is this great
moment of freedom, or at least of an image of liberation,” Dasgupta says,
citing the examples of postwar decolonization. “The question that interests me
is, what happens right after? How do we move from an image of freedom to
institutions that help us to build that world?”
In
one of his articles, Dasgupta takes Gandhi as a vehicle for exploring that broad
question of transition into independence. “This is the paradox: he is this enormously
influential figure both within and outside India’s anti-colonial movement, and
yet almost none of his visions of postcolonial India come to fruition.” In this
sense, Gandhi embodies a tension that all postcolonial state leaders must deal
with: What does independence look like, institutionally, if it isn’t a replica
of the European state model?
In Dasgupta’s view, the first three decades after decolonization have witnessed a shift from idealistic potential to a gradual disappointment. This perspective leads him to yet another question: how to construct an account of decolonization that is alive to both its expansive aspirations of emancipation as well as the eventual exhaustion of hope. Gandhi can be seen as case study in what happens when the vision fails to find a way to implement itself, when the anticolonial spirit fails to translate itself into a postcolonial one.
These sorts of issues, along with other recurring questions that newly independent states and leaders grapple with, will be explored in Dasgupta’s Fall 2019 course. “I’m am really looking forward to being at The New School, being back in New York,” he said. “What I look forward to about these graduate seminar is the opportunity to explore interesting questions together with the students. From the conversations I had with my colleagues and some of the students already, I believe that it will be an exciting journey!” he says.
Lucas Ballestin is a PhD candidate in Philosophy. He specializes in political philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. His dissertation is on psychoanalytic theories of political ideology in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
Founded a century ago, The New School for Social Research sought
to have leading scholars teach night courses to working professionals, fostering
a community both cutting-edge and non-traditional with respect to student age
and academic background, as well as to the kind of learning taking place inside
its fledgling walls.
While the university has transformed since then, this vision still
holds true today — at least for Victoria Flexner, a 2019 MA graduate of the Historical
Studies program. Flexner’s work is unorthodox in more than one sense; a
part-time student and full-time business owner, Flexner’s academic focus is on
food history, an emerging field she explores with a thesis that incorporates the
latest scholarship as well as historical fiction.
A native New Yorker with a French father and chef uncle, Flexner grew up in a family with a strong passion for good eating. As a teenager, she worked in food service. But she didn’t think of herself as a lover of things gastronomic until she left the city to complete her undergraduate degree in Scotland. “The food was terrible!” she remembers. She realized that if she wanted to eat well while away from home, she was going to finally have to learn how to cook.
Having learned how to fare for herself in a foreign land,
Flexner graduated and returned to New York. Drawing on her passion for food and
her knowledge of the city’s restaurant industry, she was able to secure a job as
a publicist for celebrity chefs and restaurants. “While I was working in food
PR,” she says, “I was like, ‘There’s got to be a way to take my love of history
and my practical skill set of having worked in the food business and blend the
two together.’”
The result was Edible History, a company that hosts themed dinners based on historical recipes. Flexner introduces each course with a short history lesson, while her team brings out authentic recreations of meals from across the centuries: three types of ceviche from pre-Columbia, colonial, and modern Peru; dinner as it would have taken place in 10th-century Baghdad; a bit of medieval Mongolian cuisine. In 2018, she hosted a feminist-focus dinner party inspired by Judy Chicago’s famous art installation “The Dinner Party”; major outlets from the New Yorker to Vogue covered it.
As her business expanded, Flexner was decided to pursue
additional education. “I realized if I wanted to be any kind of authoritative
voice on history — if I wanted to
stand in front of people and talk about history and not only have them care but
to take me seriously — I
needed to get another qualification,” she explained.
Flexner chose NSSR because it offered freedom to do explore what she wanted — a freedom she didn’t see at other New York universities. “It felt like what I was trying to do with food and history where it’s not quite the food business, not fully academic, it’s kind of existing in this weird new space,” she said. The parallels between Flexner and fellow Historical Studies alumnus Rien Fertel, who studies barbecue in the American South, are many.
NSSR doesn’t employ any food historians, but this isn’t so unusual; the academic study of food history is relatively young, and there are few specialized graduate programs in it. “The field is kind of a mix between popular history and a newer academic version which is still figuring itself out,” Flexner said. Food historians vary in the kinds of materials they study; some are more archival materials-based while other are more theoretical The study of food is not only the history of a cuisine — its ingredients, its influences — but also about the institutions and cultures that it’s connected to. Some food historians argue, for instance, that the desire for luxury food products such as pepper and spices paved the way for European expansionsim and imperialism. “The entire world from different spheres was drawn together because of a search for a luxury food product. That’s pretty mind blowing,” Flexner explains.
Flexner’s time at
NSSR allowed her to explore food history through a variety of different
periodical and regional lenses. Her work culminated in Spring 2019 with a
thesis on the history of the restaurant in New York.
As a social
practice, the restaurant first emerged in 1760s France and gradually made its
way to the United States. Flexner argues that the restaurant truly came into
its own due to a number of overlapping factors, but cited one of them as the
emergence of the 19th Century boarding house. During a period in
which most New Yorkers lived in boarding houses, where meals were served in a common area and
at set times. “The food was notoriously disgusting at all boarding houses across
the spectrum,” Flexner says. A combination of a desire for good food and lack
of access to private kitchens created a market for third spaces in which people
could pay to eat. “By 1855, there would have been eateries that had the
components of what we now recognize as the restaurant,” Flexner adds, alluding to a public-facing
private food service venue offering a menu of options and working within
certain operating hours.
The overlap between
her business and her studies has been fundamental to her success in juggling
her studies and a full-time job. “Research that I’ve done at school has
benefited Edible History, of course, and I’ve brought my experiences from the
business into school if I could. It all feels interrelated and I’m here because
I want to become a better historian. It’s beyond useful,” Flexner reflects.
That interrelation inspired Flexner to propose an unorthodox approach to her thesis: As she would an Edible History dinner, she carefully blended traditional historiographical narrative with a bit of historical fiction to narrate the story of the restaurant’s development through the experiences of fictional characters like Lorenzo, an early restaurant pioneer. By adopting this approach, and with the support of her mentors Associate Professor of History Oz Frankel and Professor of History and Department Chair Jeremy Varon, Flexner hopes to heighten her ability to do what impassions her.
“I’ve had one woman tell me that recently, ‘You know, I always hated history, and then my husband started making me come to these dinners. Now I buy history books and read them for fun!”‘ Flexner remembers. “That’s the dream!”
Lucas Ballestin is a PhD candidate in Philosophy. He specializes in political philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. His dissertation is on psychoanalytic theories of political ideology in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
