Karolina Koziura has won a Józef Tischner Junior Visiting Fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna to work on her dissertation, tentatively titled “Erasing Disaster: The Global Production of Silence and the Great Ukrainian Famine.” From June through October 2021, Koziura will focus on her research, which explores “the production of silence and denial of disasters as shaped by political, media, and scientific narratives.”
Koziura is a PhD candidate in Sociology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research. The roles of political memory and constructed narratives in Central and Eastern Europe play a central role in her work, which has also included a project on the Great Ukrainian Famine. Her work has appeared in many publications, including East European Politics and Societies, Culture, and Ukraina Moderna. Her advisor is Virag Molnar, Associate Professor of Sociology. Koziura is also part of the Decolonizing Eastern European Studies group at NSSR, organized by Jessica Pisano, Associate Professor of Politics.
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.
At The New School, Master’s programs provide an opportunity to forge new paths in one’s professional and intellectual lives, build career-focused and academic skills and networks, and push the limits of interdisciplinary education.
What is that experience like? To find out, Research Matters spoke with two current BAMA students and a BAMA alum about why they chose the program, how it’s helped them, and what they advise undergraduates considering this special program.
Anya Isabel Andrews
BA Sociology 2021 from Lang, MA Liberal Studies 2022 from NSSR
“The BAMA program is such a good opportunity for students to challenge themselves and get the most out of their school.”
Anya Isabel Andrews began her academic career as a neuroscience student at another college. But after an opportunity to tutor students in a juvenile detention center, she decided to transfer to The New School, study sociology, and pursue her longtime dream of becoming a teacher.
The BAMA program gives Andrews the opportunity to broaden the scope of her education in support of her professional ambitions.
“I want to be a teacher, but I have a lot of work to do to become the teacher I want to be, Andrews says. “I’m really interested in trying to expand the classroom into something that it hasn’t looked like for the last 150 years, to see and serve the whole student.”
Together with her advisor, Andrews built her own interdisciplinary curriculum by asking herself, “how is it that I would want to learn?” She added two undergraduate minors, in Politics and in Ethnicity & Race. Classes like “Other Worlds: Exploring the Critical Realms of Science Fiction” with Ricardo Montez, Professor of Performance Studies; “Blind Spots of NYC,” co-taught by Benoit Challand, Professor of Sociology, and Kamau Ware, artist, storyteller, and creator of The Black Gotham Experience; and “Fugitive Planning” with Mia White, Professor of Environmental Studies at Milano School of Management, expanded Andrews’ ideas of education and the world.
The class that has most influenced Andrews’ BA thesis work centered was an art history course, a discipline she had never previously studied. Race, Empire and Archive with Iliana Cepero, Professor of Modern/Contemporary Art History and Visual Studies, examines imperial artists’ representations of colonized peoples. Cepero’s use of art as a means to “engage with the complexity of colonization and socio-racial relations in Latin America” inspired Andrews to create a research project.
“I examined racism and the erasure of African culture from Puerto Rico’s history as it appears in, inspires and is reinforced by, art in social, educational, and institutional realms,” Andrews says. She hopes to show how art “changes the way that we see each other in social life, but also see how it can rearrange inherently racist, colonial thoughts.” Andrews presented this research at the Spring 2020 Dean’s Honors Symposium, and she plans to develop it into her MA thesis.
Andrews recently began taking graduate-level courses and has felt a palpable shift in the energy in graduate classrooms. While being the youngest person in the room can be difficult, “other people in my class never fail to be able to push the bar a little higher for me,” she says.
The BAMA program encourages an attitude of growth, a quality Andrews values. She’s a student activist and was a member of the Black Student Union’s board for two years. “An institution should grow just as much as we should,” she says. “The BAMA program is such a good opportunity for students to challenge themselves and get the most out of their school. An institution has its limitations. If you can use it to further your education, you can turn around and say to that institution ‘Hey, do you want to come along, too? Do you want to grow as well?’ That’s what I want to do coming out of this school.”
Andrews plans to go abroad in pursuit of a Master’s degree in Education after graduation, so she can apply the skills she’s learned to rebuild the United States’ education system.
Oscar Fossum
BA Global Studies 2020 from Lang, MA Anthropology 2021 from NSSR
“The BAMA program helped me get two degrees done in five years. As a non-traditional student, that was a big plus for me.”
Oscar Fossum had an unconventional path to The New School. In 2014, he began a BA in Political Science at another university, but took leave to work for a start-up nonprofit called WeCount. There, he designed a web-based tool that connected unhoused people with services and resources, working under the guidance of an anthropologist who showed him the critical human element of design.
“We were able to use his research to better understand one of our big user groups,” Fossum explains. “If you really understand the population of the people you’re trying to serve, you know how to reach them, how to connect with them, how to engage with them, how to build something for them.”
WeCount was a “genesis point” for Fossum’s interest in anthropology and design. The New School’s BAMA program provided a direct path for Fossum to continue the research he had become passionate about. He entered the Global Studies program at Lang with a Chinese Studies minor.
“The BAMA program helped me get two degrees done in five years. As a non-traditional student, that was a big plus for me,” Fossum says. “As a person with a background in making a technology for a marginalized group of people that actually understands this population, The New School seems like a good place to get a design research background, not from a corporate money-making angle, but as a generative way to make better experiences for people.”
Fossum’s undergraduate classes gave him room to explore different disciplines while remaining oriented toward his goal. “I was taking classes that critically examined infrastructures, but I was also taking design classes with an emphasis on community engagement,” he says. One of his favorite classes was “Technopolitics” with Antina von Schnitzler, Professor of Anthropology, which helped lay the groundwork for his research on infrastructures as social artifacts, and the social formations built around them.
“I feel really glad that I was able to assemble my curriculum to meet the goals that I have for anthropology and design,” Fossum says.
Shannon Mattern, Professor of Anthropology and head of the Anthropology and Design subject area for MA students, has worked with Fossum since 2018. She guided him from his undergraduate research on zoning laws in New York City to shift his focus to the topography of the internet, specifically mesh networks.
For the last year, Fossum has researched mesh internet networks in New York City, and created a podcast chronicling his interviews with people like Greta Byrum from the Digital Equity Laboratory. “This technology was an immediate case of internet infrastructures being deployed in a non-mainstream, anti-corporate way…it’s a great project for The New School, where we think about subverting dominant narratives,” Fossum says.
Since completing his BA, Fossum has worked to create a more formal space for anthropological design research within The New School. “I’m glad to say that, since coming here, I’ve seen the focus on anthropology and design become more sophisticated,” he says. In April 2021, he and a small group of other MA students, working closely with Mattern, will lead the university’s first Anthropology and Design Exposition.
“I’ve been really glad to be met with open arms,” Fossum says. “There is space for students to come in here and make things happen.”
After he graduates in May, Fossum hopes to work with a technology company or doing city-planning. “If I can get a job where I’m creating systems better for people or making them cause less harm to the people interacting with them, then that’s a win.”
Grace Song
BA History 2018 from Lang, MA History 2019 from NSSR
“[Due to] the fact that the professors at The New School treated me with respect as a budding academic, I have gained the confidence to reach out and talk to scholars that I admire at various conferences and lecture events.”
Grace Song pinpoints the beginning of her academic journey to a 2013 encounter with the College Board handbook.
“I always knew I wanted to do U.S. history,” Song says. The handbook put The New School on her radar, and even before she applied, she began researching historians at Lang and NSSR she might want to work with.
Enrolling as a History BA student, Song remembers that Neil Gordon, her faculty advisor and a Literary Studies professor and former Lang dean, was incredibly influential in her academic path. Gordon recognized her drive and recommended that she apply to the BAMA program. He also encouraged her to hone her interests by declaring minors in Museum and Curatorial Studies and Politics.
Song began taking MA-level classes as a junior, taking two graduate classes and four undergraduate classes at once. She completed two theses — one for her BA and one for her MA — all while applying for PhD programs. Additionally, she studied abroad in Florence, Italy; interned at a small art gallery; coached the Debate Club; worked in the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies and in the Provost’s Office, and did research with faculty.
While Song says her schedule sometimes felt stressful, she credits the entire History faculty with supporting her and reminding her constantly of her abilities.
“I had no confidence coming in; I didn’t realize my intellectual capacity and what I was capable of doing,” Song says. “The faculty at Lang and NSSR really opened that up for me…They’re so accessible and they really treat you like you’re their colleague. They really treat you with respect.”
As an undergraduate, Song became interested in the ways objects facilitate historic memory. “I wanted to ask questions about the ways we remember, and how and why people are preserved,” Song says. “What do we do with too much memory? How do we use a physical object to do history? Whose history?” Her BA thesis examined these ideas through the Christopher Columbus monument in Columbus Circle. Her MA thesis looked at President William McKinley and the storage of his monuments.
Now a PhD student in History at the University of Notre Dame, Song finds the same questions guiding her new research on diplomatic history and the history of U.S. imperialism in Korea. And, she finds that the skills she developed as a BAMA student are helping her thrive. “The historical training and intellectual community that I had the honor of being a part of have prepared me to bring new and fresh ideas to the table,” Song says. “[Due to] the fact that the professors at The New School treated me with respect as a budding academic, I have gained the confidence to reach out and talk to scholars that I admire at various conferences and lecture events.”
Song has two pieces of advice for students interested in the BAMA program: “Manage your time well; don’t push yourself too much. And get to know your cohort. These peers will be your colleagues.”
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.
Research Matters writer Cailin Potami reflects on the work they and their classmates completed in a course that helps make the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program unique.
What would a gossip magazine by houseplants, for houseplants look like? How can people bridge gaps with their families that span generations, nations, and languages? How do we create communal music spaces when we can’t be in the same space? These are just a few questions that guided students’ final projects in the Fall 2020 Design and the Future of Publishing class at The New School for Social Research.
“It was like a dream come true for me,” Cezzar recounts, “because I really felt like communication design students needed to work with non-designers and know more about what it was that they were doing beyond aesthetic concerns.” Students spent half the semester on theory, and the other half working in pairs to design prototypes of design projects.
In 2016, Design and the Future of Publishing became a core course in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism MA program, which Miller directs. With more CPCJ students requesting more time to study design, Cezzar now offers two variations on the course: one in the fall, tailored to non-design students, and one in the spring for both non-design and Parsons students.
“I have a real love for designing classes and for thinking about how different kinds of students can come together,” Cezzar says. “Who’s in the class makes the difference.”
The course still begins with a focus on theory, with lectures and texts on design principles and history, as well as the idea of publishing and the state of the industry. After seven weeks, students are asked to come up with at least six ideas for creative projects that center design, creativity, and iteration, not marketability, presenting students with a rare opportunity for full creative freedom.
Creating a Music Scene in Quarantine
Since COVID-19 lockdowns began, Maya Bouvier-Lyons, a CPCJ student, has been missing live music. Livestreamed shows lack the ephemera that helps foster human connection. “I initially wanted to make a zine version of the playlist experience,” Bouvier-Lyons says. Cezzar challenged her to think about why that idea matters in this particular moment. “That’s when I started thinking about how to incorporate a live music experience into this publication,” Bouvier-Lyons says.
Setlist zine gives New York-based bands a space to connect with listeners on a personal level, even as live music remains impossible.
Setlist, a New York City-based zine, will feature new artists in each issue. Artists will “write in their own handwriting and their own words about their songs, which they choose to feature, and the role that place has played in the creation and life of each song.” Digital elements, like screengrabs of text messages, bring the zine style into the current moment. After the release of each issue, featured bands will perform via livestream on the Setlist Instagram account.
The design of Setlist incorporates photos from shows, the artists’ handwriting, and screenshots of actual text messages.
Bouvier-Lyons hopes that the performances, alongside the zine, can evoke some of the real-life concert butterflies. “[My project] asks questions about how we can use design and publishing to recreate and emulate a real-life experience of community,” Bouvier-Lyons reflects. She hopes to continue publishing the zine. “I had fun putting it together and seeing what it can be. I’m excited about the zine changing with each artist in a way that’s personal to them.”
Exploring Home, Language, and Loss
When her grandmother passed away, Simran Narwani felt a distinct loss of not only of her relative, but of the world that she carried; her homeland, pre-partition Pakistan. “All my poetry grew around this theme, because I will never have a chance to go back to my ancestral home,” she shares. “One of my great-aunts went back, and she said there were only pieces of rock left—there’s nothing of what we left behind. There’s no shadow of it. That hit me hard, and I wanted to get that experience shared.”
Stories from Somewhere is a powerful meditation on language and lineage, combining the languages spoken by its contributors with the languages spoken by their grandparents.
A Media Studies MA student, Narwani saw this project as an opportunity to honor the stories of her family and families like hers. Course feedback helped Narwani expand the project — a book entitled Stories of Somewhere — to young people from across India with similar experiences, and to consider new kinds of forms. She wanted to incorporate letters because their tangibility feels more permanent and more personal than digital formats. Plus, the human texture of letters appealed to her from a design perspective: “I want to see bad handwriting and good handwriting. I want to see your personality!” But when people felt uncomfortable writing letters, she turned to Instagram, asking instead for photographs and stories that “connect you to your childhood…your grandparents…your people.”
Handwritten notes link the past to the present in Stories from Somewhere.
The stories that emerged were complex, exposing grandparents’ flaws and their strengths. “Maybe I don’t know my people from way back when, maybe I don’t understand them,” Narwani says. “But I do know that the fact that we were able to pick up and adapt and make our own element of home everywhere, I think is a vital takeaway.”
The Secret Lives of Plants
CPCJ MA student Jessie Mokhami began thinking about her prototype while comparing gossip magazines for an earlier assignment. Initially, she pitched a houseplant gossip magazine as a throwaway idea for the final project, but Cezzar encouraged her to push the concept further, and ask: What could it really look like for a gossip magazine to be about the social life of something we don’t perceive to have a social life?
The Dirt is a loving exploration of the “celebrity gossip magazine” form.
Mohkami developed The Dirt, a 20-page gossip magazine complete with a letter from the editor, horoscopes, and a “who wore it better” section.
“I’m really looking to explore the format and design layout of a gossip magazine, but really play with it.” The iteration process involved adding lots of color, layering images, and playing with loud fonts. While the prototype is mainly just pictures of plants and lorem ipsum filler text, “I’m trying to emulate a gossip magazine and make readers really feel that it’s exactly that,” Mohkami says.
Bright colors, flashy fonts, and photos of plants adorn the pages of gossip mag staples like “Who wore it better?”
The Opposite of Productivity
Under the best of circumstances, the pressure to lead a productive life stokes my anxiety. Amid a global pandemic, that pressure feels downright absurd — yet it has not wavered. For the course, I, also a CPCJ MA student, channeled that anxiety into a 2021 “Anti-Planner,” designed to minimize productivity and maximize stress.
The Anti-Planner subverts the qualities people most value about planners by scrambling layouts and minimizing the space to write.
I developed my design by polling people on Instagram about their ideal planners and subverting all their responses. Instead of ample space to write, the Anti-Planner incorporates tiny spaces, black pages, and a second-person narrator taking up some spaces. Instead of a clear, consistent depiction of time, the Anti-Planner tries to reflect the subjective experience of time, with days and weeks bleeding into each other, seven Tuesdays sometimes strung together, and to-do lists with tasks longer than the days themselves. I used QR codes to incorporate digital elements in some pages and designed accompanying sticker sheets for others. With an entire year’s worth of space to work with, I could indulge my quirkiest ideas as long as I could find a way to get them on the page.
The Anti-Planner’s design plays with the subjective experience of time–some weeks collapse into themselves, some repeat, and some fall apart.
Like Mohkami’s The Dirt, the Anti-Planner was not my initial choice; the task of creating 52 spreads seemed too intimidating. However, Cezzar and my classmates encouraged me, seeing potential in the project. The class’s collaborative environment, where everyone had investment in everyone else’s work, made an enormous difference. The final design incorporated ideas from almost everyone in the class.
Learning by Design
Design as a discipline, Cezzar contends, offers a wealth of opportunities for education and growth, even for non-designers. Every creative process “from making music to fitting a pipe” depends on the same steps: developing an idea, doing research, iterating on that idea, developing a prototype, and integrating feedback. The class offers a space to practice those steps and, importantly, to practice failure and patience.
“Learning design is a way for people to indirectly confront hesitation about learning technology, about learning about ideas, about learning how to read and write. People don’t study design because they’re great at these things. A significant number of students come into the classroom really hesitant about it, Cezzar says. “I think it’s really good for some students to understand that new skills are not closed forever. You can actually learn anything you want, as long as you are able to kind of get past feeling so embarrassed about not knowing something that you can’t continue learning.”
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.
On December 4, near the end of a year defined by COVID-19, MA and PhD students from the Psychology department at The New School for Social Research gathered on Zoom to present their research on the global mental health landscape amidst the global pandemic.
The symposium was organized by Julia Superka, a PhD candidate in Clinical Psychology, and Olivia Cadwell a PhD candidate in Cognitive, Social, and Developmental Psychology. As members of the Trauma & Global Mental Health Lab, both have been working on pandemic-related mental health issues for months. But they didn’t realize that so many of their peers were as well.
NSSR’s Psychology department is a collaborative space. “I have always thought of this department as a community who uses tools, theories, and methods from psychological science as a way to inform and respond to our most critical challenges,” says Adam Brown, director of the Trauma & Global Mental Health Lab and Associate Professor of Psychology. Students conducting research throughout the department’s 16 labs have opportunities to discuss their work and its implications for broad-scale problems. Amid a shift to remote learning, those interactions have changed. “The chats that happen before class and collaboration that sparks in the hallways are much harder to organically build,” Superka says. Brown approached Superka and Cadwell with the idea for a student-led symposium to bring those students together.
In November, Cadwell and Superka circulated flyers inviting Psychology students with research at any stage related to COVID-19 to present their work. They received 12 abstracts with extraordinary breadth, and then coordinated across different labs, countries, and time zones to make the virtual symposium a reality. Topics included “data about clinical symptom severity and possible predictive markers for developing psychopathology during the pandemic…different ways technology was impacting the therapeutic process and being developed to reach as many people having difficulty coping as possible,” and “the implications of COVID from a global lens, including international research specifically in Turkey, India and China,” Superka recounts.
Research in Action at The Safran Center
Brown opened the virtual space by celebrating the adaptability of the students, so many of whom made changes in their research to address the urgent mental health needs the pandemic caused or exacerbated.
“One of the most remarkable things about being at NSSR is being surrounded by peers who have pivoted and adapted their research so quickly to this crisis,” Superka echoed in her opening remarks.
Olivia Cadwell, Safran Center for Psychological Services director Richelle Allen, and Julia Superka discuss overlaps across different research projects.
While national studies have looked at the impact of the pandemic on mental health generally, they have not closely analyzed symptoms for people already receiving treatment when the stay-at-home order began. The first project, presented by Clinical Psychology PhD student Hally Wolhander from the Psychotherapy work group from Safran Center for Psychological Services (directed by Richelle Allen, Assistant Professor of Psychology), focused on this often-overlooked demographic and measured patients’ symptom-severity during the pandemic. The group’s research showed that Safran Center patients with strong therapeutic alliance — the cooperative, working relationship — with their providers seemed to remain on track for reducing the severity of their mental health symptoms. Wolhander added that the group was still curious about the impact of teletherapy (versus in-person therapy) itself.
The Safran Center gave students the opportunity to observe the effects of COVID-19 and teletherapy on mental health services.
A group led by Psychology MA student Leslie O’Brien took up that very question in their presentation on “The Effect of the Transition to Teletherapy on Therapeutic Alliance during COVID-19.” O’Brien began, “Previous literature has indicated that psychologists have raised concerns about the impact of virtual conferencing on the psychotherapy process and therapeutic alliance.” To this group’s surprise, the patients and therapists they surveyed developed a high degree of therapeutic alliance, equal to previous years. The Center did increase the number of appointments patients receive in response to the pandemic, so the research might imply that the additional appointments had some success in preventing symptom deterioration–additional research could show whether that’s the case.
Another Safran Center work group focused on how the shift to teletherapy affected PhD students completing their training at the Center. Many student therapists initially opposed the switch to telehealth, Wolhander explained, because they were concerned that they would receive less broadly applicable training. But by June, students largely reported a neutral or positive experience, and most reported that they felt they had developed new skills.
The Psychological Life of the Pandemic
NSSR’s Psychology labs have also turned their attention to the relationship between mental states, emotions, and navigating these famously unprecedented times.
Clinical Psychology PhD student Emily Weiss from the Psychopathology Lab (directed by McWelling Todman, Professor of Clinical Practice) presented on the implications of a familiar emotional state during the pandemic — boredom. Different people, she explained, have different propensities toward boredom generally. But people who have felt increased boredom since stay-at-home orders began don’t necessarily have a higher boredom propensity. The differences, while subtle, could have a significant impact on distress. While boredom proneness and state boredom both are associated with higher rates of depression, for example, people with lower boredom proneness and higher state-boredom seem to have higher rates of hope and optimism for the future. Likewise, higher boredom-proneness is associated with higher COVID-19 infection, but not higher concern about the virus.
Heleen E. Raes, an MA student, presented research, also housed in the Psychopathology Lab, on the impact of pandemic boredom on substance use, hypothesizing that people more susceptible to boredom may be more likely to use alcohol and drugs.
MA student Ali Revill’s group within the Safran Center found that extraverted patients and patients with lower emotional dysregulation — inability of a person to control or regulate their emotional responses — have experienced higher mental illness symptom severity.
A group based in the Trauma & Global Mental Health Lab developed a self-efficacy app and presented their findings.
MA student Olivia Friedman presented on an app designed in the Trauma & Global Mental Health Lab to build self-efficacy, a critical tool in a moment where feelings of helplessness run rampant, and Cadwell presented research on the influx of politically-fueled COVID-19 conspiracy theories.
Superka presented on behalf of her research group of NSSR and Suffolk University students, which looked at the risk of moral injury — an injury to an individual’s moral conscience and values resulting from an act of perceived moral transgression — for people navigating social distancing and other transmission-related guidelines. Actions that feel like moral failures, like forgetting to wear a mask, can lead to feelings of moral injury, which has long-term negative mental health outcomes. “The pain experienced by individuals who suffer from moral injuries confronts us with the fact that we are, at the core, empathic and moral beings, for whom living in a just world may be just important as living in a safe world,” Superka concluded.
International Research
NSSR Psychology students come from dozens of countries around the world, and many have taken an international approach to their research. Cognitive, Social, and Development Psychology PhD student Meymuna Topcu, presenting research conducted within the Cognitive Psychology Lab (directed by William Hirst, Malcolm B. Smith Professor of Psychology), compared perceptions and projections of COVID-19 between the United States and China, including individuals’ perceptions of personal and governmental efficacy, and their estimated death and infection numbers.
Busra Yaman researched stress and resilience among Turkish and American graduate students during the pandemic.
MA student Busra Yaman, from the Trauma & Global Mental Health Lab, focused on “Perceived Stress, Achievement Motivation, and Resilience Among Domestic and International Graduate Students,” comparing Turkish international students to American students. While she found no significant differences in stress levels between the groups, she did find that international students did not lose motivation despite their high stress levels, while domestic students did. Likewise, international students with higher motivation had higher levels of resilience, while domestic students did not.
A group within the Center for Attachment Research looked at loneliness and mental health among women in rural India.
MA student Zishan Jiwani turned the symposium’s attention to India, which has had the second highest COVID-19 infection rates and an extremely strict lockdown. Little research has looked at the virus and lockdowns’ impacts on rural parts of the country. Jiwani presented on behalf of a group within the Center for Attachment Research (co-directed by Howard Steele, Professor and Co-Chair of Psychology and Miriam Steele, Professor of Psychology), on “Understanding the Mental Health Impact of Fear of the Coronavirus amongst Low-Income Women in Rural India,” where women have been cut off from their communal spaces. The group analyzed data from surveys given to women in their homes in the Bahraich District in Northeast India, asking questions about fear of the virus and perceived loneliness. Research found that increased loneliness, increased fear, and increased mental health challenges are all highly associated with each other. Jiwani suggested that these results could influence public health decisions — the epidemic of loneliness requires care and attention, too.
Fostering a Collaborative Space
Around 50 people attended the event, including faculty and students from across the psychology department and throughout the university. By the time presentations came to a close, the collaborative spirit that characterizes NSSR was palpable — students with overlapping research swapped information in the chat, and some of the presenters had already begun answering questions before the formal Q&A began.
The Q&A included many suggestions for furthering research, like including job-loss data in boredom analysis. Adam Brown also proposed a question about the surprising results of the research on telehealth and therapeutic alliance, and Howard Steele sparked a conversation about therapeutic alliance and cultural crises.
Cadwell and Superka hope to recreate this digital community space in the form of future symposiums that highlight ongoing research from within the Psychology department and beyond.
“We saw this [symposium] as a great opportunity for people to come together and talk about the research that we’re doing. It’s really incredible how much everyone has adapted. There is other research being done throughout NSSR broadly…so we are really interested in organizing a recap symposium of the ongoing crisis points we experienced in 2020, including the economy, protests and police brutality, the election cycle, and other global catastrophes,” Cadwell says.
“After we moved to remote learning, I was proud to see how quickly our students stepped up and adapted their research to study the complex psychological impacts of COVID-19. The symposium underscored the breadth of research being carried out across our labs and the sophistication in which our students are doing this work,” Adam Brown reflects. “This end-of the-semester student-led event was a wonderful opportunity for them to share their cutting-edge findings with one another and to create that much needed sense of community that we all miss.”
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.
As part of a commitment to socially engaged and meaningful research, the NSSR Dean’s Office supports a range of student-organized projects and conferences each year. Even amid a pandemic, NSSR students have envisioned incredibly creative, intellectually rigorous, and community-minded projects and conferences. Read on for more about the Fall 2020 recipients of our MA Project Grants and the Dean’s Conference Fund.
MA Project Grants
NSSR launched the MA Project Grant program in 2016 to improve the research environment and academic life for master’s students. Every semester, student join together to create and launch projects across disciplines that address pressing contemporary questions while also building lasting community at the school.
The Fall 2020 recipients of the MA Project Grants are:
An NSSR-Parsons collaboration, Disaster Mag will focus on unemployment in its second issue through 15 essays and various artwork.
Alexa Mauzy-Lewis (Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism)
Future Subject Matter: Selected Texts of Kato K Trieu
The recent passing of Kato K Trieu (MA Liberal Studies ’20) left his peers with a body of work to study, publish and disseminate. Future Subject Matter will collect Kato’s work in a book-bound copy, and cover the themes of gender and sexuality, trans theory, mind and embodiment, science and technology studies, and comparative literature.
Leo Zausen (Liberal Studies)
Critical Race Theory Group
This reading group will help Sociology students link their research and knowledge into critical perspectives on race, discuss elements of race at different times and locations in history, and analyze how theorists and scholars comment on issues of race.
Melisa Rousseau (Sociology)
Anthropology & Design Exhibition (ADX) Student Working Group
This group of Anthropology students — who have either a background in design and/or an interest in exploring the fertile intersection of anthropology and design both theoretically and methodologically — meets weekly to develop programming around an inaugural conference in April 2021 (see more below).
Oscar Fossum, Lilah Doris, Leila Lin, Elif Geçyatan, Clemente de Althaus (Anthropology)
Gestalt-themed Mini Speaker Series and Events
Max Wertheimer brought Gestalt psychology to The New School, and the university became a center of Gestalt theory within the US. This project will host interdisciplinary events with speakers working in the Gestalt tradition.
Hong B. Nguyen and Mariah Woodruff (Psychology), Leonhard Victor Sedlmayer (Philosophy)
Unbound Podcast
This podcast series will highlight the voices and work of people with underrepresented identities in philosophy and academia — specifically New School PhD students and faculty whose research focuses on diversity, feminism, gender studies, and fields of study that are often not categorized as belonging to the traditional Western canon.
Giuseppe Vicinanza, K. Eskins, Madison Gamba, Emre Turkolmez (Philosophy); Olivea Frischer(Parsons School of Design); Andres Volkov (College of Performing Arts)
LGBT COVID-19 Ethnography & Mental Health Impacts
An ethnographic and psychological survey investigating the social behavior, community resilience, and mental health of the LGBT community in New York City in comparison with cishet residents. With the effects of the COVID-19 in mind, such a project will demonstrate the impact of removing physical community spaces on risk behavior and loneliness.
Julien Lenaz(Psychology)
Dean’s Conference Fund
Often times trans- and interdisciplinary, NSSR student-run conferences blur and contest traditional lines inside and outside of academia and are one of the most productive sites for intellectual growth at the school. They are also where students begin to make their mark as active scholars in their field.
In 2021, the Dean’s Conference Fund will support the following NSSR student-run conferences:
Future Ontologies: Afrofuturism and Indigenous TEK
In response to the worldwide need to elevate discourses that contribute to a decolonial turn in academia and culture in general, the Liberal Studies Student Association is planning a conference that centers the voices of marginalized communities, specifically BIPOC. Taking Afrofuturism as a starting point, this conference will explore its history and contemporary manifestations in order to start a conversation with indigenous traditional ecological knowledge (TEK).
Tentative date: First week of April 2021
Silvana Alvarez Basto, Nicholas Travaglini, José Luna, Katrina Schonheyder, Walter Argueta Ramírez (Liberal Studies)
Animalhouse: Animals and Their Environs
The relationship between animals and their environs has become one of the paramount political concerns of our time. While a particular urgency motivates current discussions of animate life and its habitat, examining this relationship has yielded significant philosophical development throughout the 20th century. This conference will question if and how philosophy’s treatment of animals and their environs can help us make sense of our current situation.
ADX presents NSSR and Parsons grad student works at the intersection of Anthropology and Design. Topics may include applied anthropology, community-oriented design, design research, material studies, critical design and creative technologies. ADX will include three parts: workshops; a VR exhibition with live discussions; and a website portfolio with recordings of the main event.
Tentative dates: April 2021: Virtual exhibition of student works
May 2021: An edited recording of the exhibition, and an analysis of Anthropology and Design based on data from attendees and their projects
Oscar Fossum, Lilah Doris, Leila Lin, Elif Geçyatan, Clemente de Althaus (Anthropology)
Decolonizing Birth and Mental Health
This conference focuses on the enduring impact of colonization on birth practices in the United States. Topics include the medicalization of pregnancy and birth; erasure of indigenous practices and tribal health care practices, ethnoracial disparities in maternal mental health and mortality, anti-racist psychological and medical models of care, the importance of amplifying BIPOC birth practitioners as doula activists, LGBTQ + inclusive reproductive healthcare, and more.
Tentative date: October 2021
Koret Munguldar, Hillary Litwin, Deniz Kocas, Ellen Yom, Lindsey Myers (Psychology)
Human Considerations: rethinking space habitats
Address approaches to thinking and designing space habitats, and sketch founding ideals for a more just and equitable approach to exploring outer space. From the architectural and engineering questions of livability and survivability, to the artistic and sociological considerations of enjoyability, the conference will host a series of speakers and two panels in an attempt to re- imagine the scope of what is at stake when we think about leaving earth.
