Meet NSSR’s Fall 2020 MA Project Grants and Dean’s Conference Fund Award Recipients

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:

Disaster Magazine

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.

Tentative date:
April 1-2, 2021

Aaron Neber, Weiouqing Chen, Kyle O’Dowd (Philosophy)

Anthropology & Design Exhibition (ADX)

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.

Tentative date:
April 24-25, 2021

Weston Finfer (Liberal Studies)

New NSSR Student Group Radically Rethinks Space Exploration

In February 2020, during “those gray days before the pandemic struck,” a new interdisciplinary student group emerged at The New School for Social Research (NSSR). Affectionately nicknamed “Space Squad” or sometimes “that weird space thing,” New School Policy and Design for Outer Space (NS-PDOS) examines the dynamics and distribution of egalitarian models of governance and design in all aspects of space exploration, areas that are frequently overlooked and under-researched in space studies at large. Specific areas of focus include space habitat governance, economy, existential risk, communications & information theory, and bioastronautics.

Asking the Right Questions

The founders of NS-PDOS — Weston Finfer, Rae Rosenthal Boehm, and James Boyd, all NSSR Liberal Studies MA students; Collin McClain, a student in the Bachelor’s Program for Adults and Transfer Students at the Schools for Public Engagement; and Dalia Amellal, from Parsons’ Theories of Urban Practice MA program — met in Post-Planetary Design, an interdisciplinary course at Parsons School of Design taught by Ed Keller, a former Associate Professor. “So many of the questions placed in that class spilled over into everything else we wanted to keep doing,” Finfer says, “so we were like, ‘Let’s keep doing it.’”

One of the fundamental questions that NS-PDOS inherited from Post-Planetary Design is that of scale. How do we think on a microscopic level? Conversely, how do we think on a planetary level? Keller’s September 2020 lecture for NS-PDOS’s launch event, “The Cosmopolitical Gesture — Coordination, Recursivity, and Universal Models,” (embedded below) built on this: “How might we design across a range of different scales and link those design moves and analytical moves back to universalist models?”

The Cosmopolitical Gesture–Coordination, Recursivity, and Universal Models: Ed Keller
Ed Keller introduces modes of interdisciplinary design thinking and strategizing in the context of outer space. From cosmopolitics to microbial assemblages, this is a talk that is vast in scale and scope. This is our launch event for New School Policy and Design for Outer Space (https://thenewschool.space), as well as our first lecture in our Transceiver speaker series.

NS-PDOS has adopted the strategy from the class of subverting questions to reframe problems of development on Earth and beyond. McClain explains, “One of the things I took from Ed’s class and try to bring to NS-PDOS is using space, using science fiction, and cosmopolitics, to think about geopolitics and think about very earthly issues with a new perspective, but also to consider how we get [beyond Earth], because if we don’t handle issues here on Earth, we can’t get to these eventual futures that we dream of and work towards.” Recalling a class in which Keller coupled footage of burning oil fields with the question “What does oil want?,” Rosenthal Boehm adds that this question, “what does a thing want?” has become her go-to in exploratory conversions, because it ”puts us face-to-face with the limits of our ontological frames and invites us to push beyond them.”

A Social Perspective on Space Exploration

Much of the existing scholarship on space exploration contains thorough design and engineering plans, but doesn’t leave room for error or for the texture of human experience. McClain gives two examples: the assumption that agriculture will thrive as long as we bring the right crops and select out pests, and proposals about governance that do little to address the skewed power dynamic of a governing body controlling the most basic elements of survival —food, water, and even air. Part of NS-PDOS’ work is calling those assumptions into question and seeking radical solutions.

NS-PDOS is a chapter of the international organization “Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS).” SEDS has historically focused on engineering, technology, and space design, but NS-PDOS brings a different perspective to space exploration by taking social research as their primary mode.

Nick Travaglini, also a Liberal Studies MA student and a core member of the group, says “one of the interesting ways that we try to differentiate ourselves and distinguish ourselves is through making sure that we are very explicitly focused on aspects of the social — coming out of NSSR, we want to make sure social research plays a key role.” In fact, NS-PDOS is at the cutting edge of SEDS’ movement toward incorporating the humanities. The theme of SpaceVision, SEDS’ 2020 international conference, was “Beyond Earth: Humans as an Interplanetary Species.” As part of the conference, Travaglini led a panel discussion called “STEM to STEAM,” about incorporating the arts into space studies.

The conversation brought Travaglini back to questions Keller raised in his NS-PDOS opening lecture: “Suppose we find life in space. How do we think about the dynamics that may play out between humanity and/or other species that we bring into space, away from earth, when we interact with whatever other forms of life may be out there?”

One way to approach these questions, the group proposes, is to take seriously not only hard research, but also speculative writings and films about space, like the 2016 film Arrival. “We need to look at these works and ask, ‘What does this tell us about society now? What does this tell us about changes we can make if we don’t like the speculative futures that may come out of this?’” Travaglini says.

Building a Group in a Pandemic

NS-PDOS’s inaugural meeting — the only time they’ve met in person — was March 10, 2020. Students built NS-PDOS amid a lockdown, working to create relationships and develop a routine. “I know that when I see something coming up in the [NS-PDOS] group chat, it’s going to be something good to discuss this week,” Finfer said. “When we all sign in on Wednesday at 6 PM, we’re going to have a lot to talk about, and that becomes an exciting thing to look forward to.” Over the summer, NS-PDOS members created two working groups, and core membership has grown to 25 students.

The Future Ontologies working group challenges the colonialist and white supremacist thinking that underlies much of the scholarship on space exploration. Rosenthal Boehm, a core member of the group, explains: “In Future Ontologies, we…try to imagine what could we possibly think if we were outside of the moment that we are in, with all known data about failed utopian projects or settlements or outsider projects.”

The group turns to critical theory to unravel a legacy within space studies that includes colonialism, capitalism, and even Nazism. Rosenthal Boehm poses the questions: “If we are living in a community where all of our biometrics are collected by the operating system that runs the community, are we still human? But also, is that fascism? What is the relationship between the technological, the material, the individual and the ideological that plays out in a space habitat that has such radically different terms for existence?”

The Cybernetics and Systems Theory working group looks at the concept of systems broadly, and what it means to think in systems. This overlaps with Finfer’s Liberal Studies MA thesis work on cybernetics, algorithmic information theory, and geoengineering. He has particular interest in the concept of Algorithmic Randomness, a limit in computation that makes absolute certainty impossible.

Graphic from the NS-PDOS Instagram promoting Valerie Olson’s lecture for the Transceiver series

In addition to the working groups, NS-PDOS also runs the Transceiver Speaker Series, which has, to date, featured Keller, Valerie Olson, and Allison Duettmann. The group is also planning two major events for the Spring 2021 semester:

A conference on Space Habitats, which will bring together designers, architects, artists, social theorists, and web designers, and which will also include an interactive web-design element that weaves together several space habitats, with attention to detail and consideration for the human experience.
A conference on Space Laws and Policy. Finfer moderated a panel on the subject at SpaceVision, and hopes this NSSR conference will create a space for more in-depth thought. “ What are the global accords that can help us address planetary scale issues? Our entry into space is such a closed system. It has to be so technically perfect that it doesn’t have room for leaks, errors, entropy, randomness in the same sense that we do on this planet.”

Calling All Space Enthusiasts

NS-PDOS welcomes members from all academic backgrounds and disciplines. Current members includes designers, software engineers, students of Western esotericism and alternative religions, media and culture theorists, and philosophy students. Those interested or curious need not have any background at all in space studies, only need a desire to learn together and an investment in the group’s overall goals.

“We’re interested in bursting open the door to radically new futures,” Rosenthal Boehm says. “Yeah,” adds Finfer. “Basically, we want to change the world.”

For more information or to join NS-PDOS, please visit their website, and follow them on Instagram @newschoolspace and Twitter @nspdos to keep up with upcoming events, like the next installment in the Transceiver Speaker Series.

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.

Saving Democracy from the Plague

Transregional Center for Democratic Studies responds to COVID-19 and explores a path for political recovery

In 2019, The New School began its fall semester like most other years. Students excitedly returned to campus, some walking through its doors for the first time. There was an added layer of exhilaration in the air as the academic year marked The New School’s centennial. The university looked back to its beginnings in 1919 with the founding of its University in Exile — the predecessor to The New School for Social Research — as a safe haven for scholars fleeing Nazi Germany, and a century’s worth of scholarship and community activism. It also began to map its next century amid a current time of unprecedented global turmoil.

Building on this spirit, the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) launched its Democracy Seminar amid the October Festival of New. This “worldwide network of democratic correspondence” met to celebrate the centennial as well as to navigate the rise of authoritarianism around the globe and chart a path forward for the preservation and advancement of liberal democracy.

TCDS was founded at The New School for Social Research in the 1990s, inspired by the dismantling of communist governments in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989. Since then, TCDS has been dedicated to an interdisciplinary and international examination of democratic theory and practice.

Now, almost a year after that October meeting, the fall 2020 semester looks and feels much different, as does most of daily life in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. In response, TCDS has transitioned much of its global programming online, including holding virtual conferences to address pressing issues of the current moment.

Democracy and the Pandemic

Democracy Seminar is a revival and reimagining of the Democracy Seminar of the late 1980s and early 1990s, conceived of by Polish dissident Adam Michnik and brought to life by Michnik; Jeffrey Goldfarb, Gellert Professor of Sociology and Democracy Seminar chair; and Elzbieta Matynia, Professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies and TCDS director. The original Democracy Seminars were semi-clandestine cross-border meetings of pro-democracy intellectual dissidents in East and Central Europe.

Democracy Seminar — also organized by Goldfarb, Matynia, and Jeffrey Isaac, Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington — now fosters worldwide and open discussion among pro-democracy academics, journalists, activists, and more. Originally the group was supposed to reconvene in person this summer for an update on global democracy. Instead, they met over Zoom. On May 20, TCDS held its conference “Democracy & the Pandemic.” In July, they held a public panel: Democracy in a Time of Plague: Challenges & Opportunities in the Struggles Against Authoritarianism, COVID-19 and Racism.

Democracy in a Time of Plague: A Democracy Seminar panel held on July 14th, 2020
Democracy in a Time of Plague: Challenges & Opportunities in the Struggles Against Authoritarianism, Covid-19 and Racism In recent months, democrats have been confronted with multiple crises. In a situation in which democratic “guardrails” have long been eroded, and many countries have been dominated by xenophobic and authoritarian governments, the onset of the coronoavirus presented fundamental challenges to public health, civic commitment, and democratic governance.

“The Democracy Seminar, our worldwide committee of democratic correspondence, moved to Zoom in May,” says Goldfarb. “We met to urgently consider how the COVID-19 pandemic and the pandemic of authoritarianism are related. There was bad and good news reported from Brazil, China, Georgia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, South Africa, Turkey and the United States. While the virus is being used by authoritarians to strengthen their positions in innovative ways, their opponents are also innovatively working to strengthen their opposition, and we used our conference to compare notes. I think there was a general consensus that the situation is bleak, but not hopeless.”

“The alarming worldwide trend of abandoning democratic rule began at least five years ago, but the pandemic has sharpened its visibility,” says Matynia. “We discussed how the pandemic has provided opportunities for authoritarian regimes everywhere to expand their emergency powers in order to consolidate their peculiar autocratic legalism; but we also asked whether it might — under certain conditions — serve to topple them? The issue that was of particular interest to me was whether the very experience of this borderless occurrence, the pandemic, might provide an opportunity for the rebuilding of cross-national bonds of social solidarity.”

Student Collaboration

Students across NSSR participated in the discussions. “The Democracy Seminar is a great and meaningful event for me to hear the voices of the international scholars and activists from all over the world and their insightful reflections on the current global pandemic and democratic crisis,” says Sociology MA student Chang Liu, who contributed an article on China and the pandemic.

“The virtual Democracy Seminar was a truly inspiring event for me,” said Malkhaz Toria, a Sociology MA student and coordinator of the Memory Studies Group at The New School. Toria is also an associate professor of history and head of the Memory Studies Center at the Ilia State University in Tbilisi, Georgia. “The distinguishing participants — scholars, journalists, activists, and graduate students from the Americas, Eastern Europe, South Africa, and China — addressed backsliding from democracy exposed by COVID-19. In many countries, we witnessed rising authoritarian rule and right-wing populism before the coronavirus outbreak. However, the already existent pressing issues re-appeared in new lights during the ongoing pandemic. Insightful discussions and debates at the seminar covered an array of topics on how the pandemic is employed by authoritarian governments elsewhere. The Coronavirus revealed disturbing practices of using and abusing power to further impose governmental rules and restrict civil rights while failing to deal with the public health crisis caused by the COVID-19. But panelists also observed democratic ‘innovation’ and ‘awakenings’ to protest and resist these troubling signs of undermining democracy. Fortunately, we also hear strong critical voices from observed countries, and the Democracy Seminar exemplified these sincere hopes for the global defense of democracy.”

In the Same Boat

After a summer of rigorous online programming and intellectual discussion, Goldfarb published an update on the Democracy Seminar, titled “We’re All in the Same Boat.”

“As I wrote over two years ago, when our current group first began to take shape, this is the second iteration of the Democracy Seminar,” wrote Goldfarb “Back then, our immediate situations were strikingly different on each side of the “iron curtain.” Now, we are all in the same boat. The papers prepared for the conference, and our discussions on Zoom all attest to this.” Reflections on TCDS work done this past summer and more ongoing writing can be viewed on Democracy Seminar at Public Seminar.

TCDS is preparing for an online fall 2020 semester and another season of programming via Zoom. They are re-launching the Memory Studies Group at The New School and are looking at summer 2021 for holding their next graduate Democracy & Diversity Institute in Wroclaw, Poland. Among the first events of the semester, TCDS will host Toria and Mykola Balaban, two former Open Society Foundations (OSF) Global Dialogue Fellows at TCDS (2016). They will talk in an online public panel about their collaborative research on “Narrating Conflicts in Post-Truth Era, Facing Revisionist Russia: Ukraine and Georgia in Comparative Perspective,” supported by a ‘Global Dialogs’ Collaborative Research Grant, funded by OSF (2019-2020).

TCDS plans to continue to grow and adapt, standing up to the ever-evolving threats to liberal democracy.

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.

New Ways to Approach Global Mental Health Challenges

Mental health disorders are currently the leading cause of disability worldwide. Still, access to culturally relevant treatment is complicated by a wide range of social and economic barriers. And with more than 40 percent of the world population under the age of 25, many child and adolescent mental health problems are largely neglected.

Faculty and students at The New School for Social Research are spearheading a major effort to expand both research on global mental health and interventions to help people on the ground.

An Interdisciplinary Cohort

In Fall 2019, NSSR launched the Global Mental Health subject area as a way for Psychology students to explore this specialized area of study while deepening their research, developing closer relationships with faculty, connecting with outside job opportunities, and more.

Adam Brown, Associate Professor of Psychology and head of the subject area, notes that courses on the topic have filled up quickly, and that the cohort of students interested in Global Mental Health — like Psychology PhD student Evan Neuwirth — is growing substantially. And it’s not just Psychology students who are involved; increasing numbers of Parsons School of Design students interested in how design can support mental health are enrolling in courses, too.

Adam Brown, Associate Professor of Psychology and head of the Trauma and Global Mental Health Lab at NSSR

Opportunities in the field are also growing. Students in Brown’s Spring 2020 Global Mental Health course were excited to partner with the Mayor’s Office of ThriveNYC to help address critical gaps in New York City’s mental healthcare system — a project that was unfortunately disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, Brown says, “it speaks to amazing potential community partnerships that exist locally with international implications about ways to work with different organizations and agencies, while building on the creativity and knowledge basis of New School students.

New External Support

One of the classes offered in the Global Mental Health subject area is Child and Adolescent Global Mental Health, taught by Miriam Steele, Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of the Center for Attachment Research.

“This is a very innovative program because there are very few global health programs within psychology doing this kind of work,” Steele says. Steele’s work has largely looked at childhood development, bridging psychoanalytic thinking and clinical practice with contemporary research practices.

Her current course explores current trends in child and adolescent mental health services and examines responses to social and cultural traumas, with specific focus on refugee populations and displaced children. NSSR MA and PhD students from across disciplines, as well as Parsons design students, engage in team-based project work, partnering with government agencies and NGOs working to deliver interventions to children in Africa and South Asia. Together, they work to find innovative solutions and prototypes for the global mental health challenges their stakeholders propose.

The course’s Teaching Assistant, Zishan Jiwani, is a Psychology MA student and a Zolberg-IRC Fellow in Mental Health in Humanitarian Settings who has also studied transdisciplinary design at Parsons. “Zishan and I will really co-teach the class,” Steele says. “Together, we will deliver a blend of psychology, intervention science and design education to guide students in conducting user experience research, prototyping, and testing solutions remotely.”

Miriam Steele, Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of the Center for Attachment Research (left), and Zishan Jiwani, Psychology MA student (right)

“An important objective of this class is to support the cultivation of a deep understanding of how mental health and psychosocial support is delivered for children and families in low-income settings in the Global South,” Steele says. “The interdisciplinary design challenge helps students engage meaningfully with the promise and pitfall of mental health interventions.”

The course will benefit from a distinguished list of guest speakers who are at the helm of child and adolescent global health include Aisha Yousafzai from Harvard School of Public Health, Lisa Cogrove from the University of Massachusetts – Boston, Marinus van IJzendoorn from Erasmus University Rotterdam & the Department of Public Health and Primary Care, School of Clinical Medicine, University of Cambridge, UK.

Mentors from partnering organizations will help guide the student teams through the nuances of their specific challenges. Current projects include partnering with Strengthening Families for the Well-being of Children in Nairobi, Kenya to support teen mothers reintegrate into society after giving birth, and working with the Effia Nkwanta Regional Hospital in Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana to help parents of special needs children cope with their children’s diagnosis.

For the Fall 2020 semester, Steele and Jiwani were successful in securing funding from the Association for Psychological Science Teaching Fund, which was then matched by the Two Lilies Fund, a global early childhood mental health initiative. Microgrants will be awarded to all group projects that show courage, creativity, depth and provide a clear rationale for how they plan to use the funding. Teams will also have an opportunity to request a small amount of funding to develop prototypes midway through the semester.

Steele hopes that publicizing this work will inspire students from across a range of disciplines to engage with these crucial issues at The New School, which is unique in its ability to blend design and psychology in this particular way. The class, which will be offered online in Fall 2020, will also set up a protocol for other universities to develop their own global mental health studies, as well as offer an outline for an engaging and experiential online classroom experience.

“COVID-19 has presented an unprecedented challenge for teaching complex subjects like child and adolescent global mental health through an online format,” Steele said. “However, we plan to use the online format to greatly benefit the classroom experience by expanding our reach outside of New York and bringing in more collaborators virtually.”

From the Lab to the People

In Brown’s Trauma and Global Mental Health Lab, faculty and students are investigating disparities in mental health issues as well as developing innovative solutions and interventions that can reduce barriers to care in low and medium-resourced contexts, especially in the wake of COVID-19.

Recently, Brown connected with the World Health Organization about a short-term mental health treatment plan called Problem Management Plus (PM+). The pilot program to train his Lab students in PM+ would have been conducted in partnership with the Danish Red Cross, which has used PM+ primarily in areas facing humanitarian crises. Now, his ab students are learning PM+ remotely so they can help deliver it online to those in need. Read more in this New School News story.

Brown is also working with three students — Psychology MA students Camila Figueroa Restrepo and Jamie Gardella, and Milano MA student Maria Francisca Paz y Mino Maya — on a study about intergenerational memories among immigrant communities in New York City.

Together with a local nonprofit, they’re working with families of Ecuadorian heritage to understand how their narratives of migration get passed down through generations, and the extent to which knowledge of that narrative is connected with better mental health outcomes.

And, funded by a grant from the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation, Brown and his lab students are working with Danny Horesh of Bar Ilan University on an international study examining the psychological implications of the pandemic. Together, they are assessing multiple factors including stress, anxiety, and quality of life, and looking at predictors of distress and well-being.

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.

Who Climbs the Academic Ladder?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of Economists and Sociologists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking Inward and Ahead at The New School

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited

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

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

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

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