Economics PhD Student Kyle Moore Talks Policy and Capitol Hill

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.

Consuming the Past: Victoria Flexner and Edible History

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 10^th-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.

From Flexner’s “Feminist Food, Feminist Art” dinner

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.

From Flexner’s “Evolution of the New York City Restaurant” dinner

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 19^th 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.

Dean’s Fund Supports 2019 Graduate Student Conferences

A glance at the history of The New School for Social Research and the work done here reveals a shared commitment by faculty and students alike to critical reflection and analysis that helps transform our social reality.

That theory is important for practice, and that practice can but only enrich theoretical pursuits is something of a given at NSSR. When we move beyond what’s given, however, the collective task becomes clarifying and understanding the implications of the relationship between theory and practice in and on our time. The idea that the academy is situated within a socio-historical reality and should be responsive to that reality rests as a leitmotif in much of the influential discipline-shaping work that has been and is being done here. It can be experienced not only in the classroom and in faculty research, but also in the many public faces of NSSR, such as the online intellectual commons Public Seminar. But focusing on this side of NSSR alone risks overlooking the rich and dynamic projects and conversations being had by that other important academic population: graduate students.

Much like the faculty that advise them and the institution that houses both, the master’s and doctoral students at NSSR form a dedicated and eclectic group of scholars and activists who come from all over the globe. As active members of the school’s intellectual life, they add to the research community by organizing conferences and workshops on topics and themes that allow their studies to meet contemporary issues and connect with the world outside NSSR. Often times trans- and interdisciplinary, 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 NSSR. They are where the students begin to make their mark as active scholars in their field.

To support students in these important efforts, Dean William Milberg offers funding for student run-conferences and workshops each academic year via the Dean’s Conference Fund. In Spring 2019, the Dean’s Conference Fund is supporting the following conferences:

April 4-5 – Paranoid Encounters (Philosophy) engages with a perspective often disregarded, even rejected by philosophy — that of paranoia — in order to understand and gauge whether philosophy offer anything with respect to the contemporary intellectual and political climate of post-truths, surveillance, xenophobia, and ecological disaster.

April 8-9 – What is to be Done in Brazil? (Multiple Departments) is a conference organized by The Reconvexo Collective at NSSR dedicated to explore and investigate new avenues for social, economic, cultural and political transformations in Brazil in the wake of the far-right’s rise in Brazil.

April 27 – Theft (Anthropology) gathers scholars, activists, and authors together to discuss the uncanny pervasiveness of theft that shapes the contemporary moment — gentrification, the trafficking of bodies, fast-fashion, and the housing of stolen objects in museums — in order to ask whether subversion or subterfuge is possible in overturning the present conditions.

May 3-4 – Kierkegaard as Educator: Paideia, Seduction and the Ways of the Negative (Philosophy) represents a collective inquiry by philosophers and readers of Kierkegaard at different stages on life’s way into how Kierkegaard conceives, enacts and transforms philosophy as paideia (education, a person’s intellectual and moral formation) through techniques of communication, eroticization and seduction

While the summaries above only briefly capture the intellectual depth, critical tensions, and political urgency that motivate the students’ organizational efforts, it should be clear that NSSR’s commitment to socially engaged and meaningful research — research that isn’t afraid of challenging intellectual orthodoxies and academic norms — is in good hands.

Supporting Women in Philosophy

Philosophy takes the most fundamental and universal problems of humanity quite seriously. Yet, as a discipline, it continues to face its own fundamental problem: As of 2016, only 30 percent of undergraduate students, 30 percent of graduate students, and nearly 21 percent of professors in Philosophy are women. Those numbers are even lower for women of color and queer and trans women. Many women who do pursue advanced study in philosophy speak of a serious climate problem, and of informal barriers that keep them from fully flourishing in the discipline.

In 2001, students at The New School for Social Research organized People in Support of Women in Philosophy (PSWIP), a local branch of a widespread network of loosely affiliated Women in Philosophy groups that support and foster scholarship by women in philosophy, and bring attention to some of the most difficult barriers women in a field dominated by men.

Among the most successful and enduring student-organized groups at NSSR, PSWIP has evolved since its founding 18 years ago. What began as a supportive place to share and discuss feminist philosophy has expanded to focus on supporting women in the department with varying research interests. Recent Philosophy doctoral graduate and longtime PSWIP member Juniper Alcorn recalls the shift: “First it was workshopping papers, but eventually it was also about advancing the work of women in the department as well as creating opportunities for them to make connections and other professional development initiatives.”

This year’s PSWIP facilitators, Philosophy MA students Katie Gruszecki and Tara Mastrelli, have continued that tradition. Describing PSWIP as a “research and publications support group,” the group’s main focus is its weekly meetings in which members workshop a variety of research, from papers and abstracts to oral presentations and exams. During a recent session, Gruszecki presented a paper on Hegel and bodily harm. “I show the difficulty in accepting Hegel’s argument for denying one the right to die with dignity,” she summarizes. “I argue for the right to die with dignity due to the necessity to abstain from violence involved in staying alive under certain conditions.”

Discussion facilitation during PSWIP meetings reflects the group’s mission and members’ concerns about climate in the field. Once limited to women in the department, PSWIP is now open to philosophers of all genders. Male allies are regular contributors and group discussions run on the “progressive stack” technique; as moderators make a list of who would like to speak, women and gender minorities are given priority.

While typical philosophical discussions can often take on a rather antagonistic tone, PSWIP cultivates an atmosphere that is more constructive. “Here, people who’d feel reticent to speak in class can have a more inviting space in which to share their ideas,” Gruszecki says. Members accomplish this by placing greater emphasis on providing a charitable interpretation of others’ work, and by being aware of unhelpful interpersonal dynamics. “This means that we try to give the most generous interpretation of other people’s positions, as well as providing each other the benefit of the doubt,” Mastrelli adds.

“I always think of PSWIP as a platform to not only have these discussions about the state of the field that makes it necessary for this kind of group to exist, but to also create a platform for people to succeed in philosophy,” says Alcorn. Informal networks of peer mentorship have formed through PSWIP outside the classroom, and the group has supported initiatives including a dissertation support group and alumni network.

One of PSWIP’s major initiatives this academic year is the relaunch of their annual journal, which had been on hiatus since 2014. The journal showcases papers that have been workshopped in PSWIP throughout the year, providing readers with a view into the type of rigorous work that can be created and celebrated through a supportive scholarly environment. It also provides members with an opportunity to gain editorial experience and have their work published. Past journal editors have gone on to hold faculty positions and attend doctoral programs at Stony Brook University, University of Texas at Austin, and Emory University, among others. And through a new agreement with the Philosophy Documentation Center, the journal will now also reach readers beyond NSSR.

While all of these efforts serve to lift up marginalized voices, PSWIP is also working to change ongoing gender, sexual, and racial dynamics in the field. The group is challenging NSSR’s Philosophy Department to explicitly address some of the most pressing issues concerning marginalizing gender dynamics within the discipline: implicit bias, stereotype threat, and a general sense that women, queer, and trans students’ contributions are less valued. “We want to support philosophy students, graduate or undergraduate, who face oppression on the basis of their gender,” says Gruszecki. Reflecting that commitment, this year’s PSWIP Colloquium speaker is writer and critic Andrea Long Chu, who will discuss her forthcoming book, Females: A Concern (Verso, 2019), on March 14, 2019.

In previous years, PSWIP members conducted student surveys that showed considerable differences between the classroom experiences of men and people of other genders. These differences reflected a sense that men tend to dominate not just readings, but also in-class discussions as well as more informal departmental social dynamics. This survey led to many important conversations, calls for more attentive practices on the part of administration and faculty around class management, event planning, and even hiring and admissions practices.

The current PSWIP leadership looks to build on this legacy. “This year we’ve launched a gender dynamics share space, which is a Google Form that people can use to anonymously collect testimony to discuss internally or bring up at the yearly departmental town hall,” Mastrelli explains. “Perhaps this is something that doesn’t require action now, but will allow students to feel heard today and perhaps someone to feel they are not alone tomorrow.” By building this database of shared experiences, current members seek to support their fellow students of today as well as build a stronger foundation and brighter future for future Philosophy scholars.

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.

Connecting with Ancient Greece through the Onassis Fellowship

Over the decades, faculty and students in the Department of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research have earned a reputation for advancing scholarship of contemporary Continental philosophy, especially that of Germany and France. But since 2014, those interested in Ancient Greek philosophy, history, language, and culture have received a tremendous boost thanks to the Onassis Foundation Fellowship. By providing generous funding for several doctoral students as well as a dedicated lecturer, the fellowship is helping emerging scholars access critical sources, develop new interpretations, and draw important connections between ancient and twenty-first century thought.

Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy (above right), helped bring the special philanthropic relationship to life. Having worked closely with the Onassis Foundation for nearly a decade, he felt “able to show them the kind of work that our students and faculty are doing and its close relation to ancient Greek thought, [as well as] the importance that learning Greek has to philosophical studies at The New School for Social Research,” he says. “I have been absolutely delighted with the collaboration.”

One of his first acts as fellowship program director was to hire Mirjam Kotwick (above left). Originally from Germany and trained as a philologist, she is creating an academic career that bridges the classics and philosophy. “In my work I strive to connect my background and interest in classics with all of these philosophical questions that I have. That can be institutionally challenging. But right now at The New School, the Onassis Fellowship is really bringing both things together. That’s the perfect, ideal setting for me,” says Kotwick, whose recent research includes a book on the Derveni Papyrus, an ancient Macedonian text, and several papers on Orphic poetry, philological methodology, the textual transmission of Aristotle, and allegorical interpretation in the ancient world.

As the Onassis Lecturer in Ancient Greek Thought and Language, Kotwick serves as both a teacher and an expert guide to undergraduate and graduate students interested in a wide range of topics. Her ancient Greek language classes attract philosophy students as well as curious students from other disciplines. “Just learning a language is different than studying philosophy,” she says. “I really try to keep the interests that my students bring to the class by confronting them with original philosophical texts from as early on as possible.” She also informally advises students whose projects touch on her fields of expertise, working with them to ensure they’ve translated or understood those original texts correctly and sharing in the excitement of discovering new ideas.

Kotwick also leads more intensive, topic-based graduate seminars with titles such as “Death in Ancient Greek Thought,” “Aristotle’s Search for Wisdom,” and “The Ancient Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry.” Onassis Fellows and philosophy doctoral students Samuel Yelton and Dora Suarez have found the latter class particularly influential for their academic journeys.

Samuel Yelton, PhD student in Philosophy and Onassis Fellow — PhD candidate Samuel Yelton

An alumnus of St. John’s College and its Great Books program, Yelton chose The New School for Social Research for graduate study because of the school’s specific values, namely “not treating ideas as timeless things, but as objects that have a history and various understandings through time, allowing people to be independent from any dogma in their scholarship.”

For his MA thesis, he examined Book X of The Republic, focusing on Plato’s argument that philosophy is incompatible with poetry and his claim that in the ideal city, poetry ought to be banned. “It’s all about understanding the distinction between form and content, and how an idea’s form can disqualify it from what philosophy is meant to do,” he explains. “Poetry can evade rational criticism, and the seductiveness of its form allows for potentially harmful ideas to get a hold of the soul.”

Now writing his doctoral dissertation, Yelton is diving deeper into this argument by examining a new wave of academic work that ties Greek philosophy more tightly into its broader cultural contours. “Even if Plato posited this quarrel, then there’s still the influences of the surrounding culture, which is largely poetic, as well as the understanding that poetry shouldn’t be understood as an amorphous concept, that there are specific genres [by author]: Homer, Sappho, and Hesiod. Understanding Plato requires that we understand these nuances.”

Suarez came to the U.S. from Uruguay 15 years ago to study modern languages, but unexpectedly fell in love with philosophy. “I feel that we have still not overcome many of the questions that the Greeks were asking,” she says.

Dora Suarez, PhD student in Philosophy and Onassis Fellow — PhD candidate Dora Suarez

In her doctoral dissertation, she is exploring the concept of visibility and its uses within the history of philosophy. “Just as we cannot take Truth and Knowledge for granted we also cannot — and should not — take for granted what counts as visible or invisible, or to be able to see and/or being seeing,” she says. “My goal is to develop a meticulous philosophical recasting of visibility and its implications, in a way that brings to the fore the ways in which we human beings constantly struggle to resist visibility and to resist through visibility.”

This topic is relevant to both ancient and contemporary concerns, and a recent book on the topic is helping Suarez make those connections. “[In] Andrea Nightingale’s Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy, she describes a transition between wander to wonder, from a vita activa to the vita contemplativa. I became intrigued in thinking about how this change to a kind of seeing that has nothing to do with the eyes and that starts with Plato can be traced to the way we think about visibility today,” Suarez says.

Similarly, other Onassis Fellows are also investigating the historical origins of familiar concepts, such as Justice or Nobility, that are now at the center of contemporary conversations. Teresa Casas, from Spain, is using her dissertation to examine the intersection of theatre and politics both in ancient times and today. Angelica Stathopoulos, from Sweden, is exploring philosophy’s historical relation to passivity within ethics and politics. In each of these cases, Greek philosophy offers insight into how such ideas first entered the stream of philosophy, restoring an important sense of perspective and offering a key to understanding their applications and limits.

More broadly, the Onassis Fellowship and its focused attention on all aspects of ancient thought has not only encouraged the department widen its temporal and geographic scope beyond the contemporary Continental, but helped faculty and students alike renew a commitment to looking past a typical disciplinary distinction between “doing the history of philosophy” and “doing philosophy” to really do it all — and well, too.