Research In Action

Nancy Fraser receives honorary doctorate from University of Liège

Nancy Fraser,  Henry Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics, was recently awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Liège, Belgium. The other honorees included Judith Butler (UC Berkeley) and Caryl Phillips (Yale University). Fraser joined Phillips for a conversation at University of Liège in October, which can be viewed here.

Below is a brief overview produced by University of Liège about this year’s recipients of the honorary doctorate.

Bio | Fraser received her Ph.D. in philosophy from City University of New York in 1980. She specializes in the areas of social and political theory, feminist theory, 19th and 20th century European thought, and philosophy of social science. Fraser has received five honorary doctorates since 2006. Fraser has published fourteen books, and over 80 scholarly articles, book chapters, and essays. In 2013, Fraser published the book Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (Verso Books). Her scholarship is the subject of several edited volumes, from the 2007 book, (Mis)recognition, Social Inequality and Social Justice: Nancy Fraser and Pierre Bourdieu (Routledge) to the forthcoming Justice, Criticism, and Politics in the 21st Century (UNSAM, Argentina).

Choose a publication below to learn more.

Nancy Fraser et al. (2014) — Transnationalizing the Public Sphere
Nancy Fraser et al. (2014) — Transnationalizing the Public Sphere
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Nancy Fraser (2013) – Fortunes of Feminism
Nancy Fraser (2013) – Fortunes of Feminism
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Nancy Fraser’s (2013) “New Frontiers of the Left”
Nancy Fraser’s (2013) “New Frontiers of the Left”
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Faculty Profiles

Miriam Steele: Breaking Cycles of Neglect Using Attachment Research

“I never get to see myself from the outside, I’m always judging myself from the inside,” reports a parent participating in a New School-Albert Einstein Medical Center clinical research collaboration directed by New School for Social Research psychologist Miriam Steele and her colleagues. Steele suggests that stepping outside of the interaction prompts reflective functioning, a theoretical framework she developed with her collaborator and husband Howard Steele over a decades-long examination of parent-child attachment. They have used the lens of attachment research to examine everything from the intergenerational links in parent-child relationships, intervention approaches to address child maltreatment, adoption, and the development of body image. She describes her work as bridging “the world of psychoanalytic thinking and clinical practice with contemporary research in child development.” In the course of our recent conversation it became clear that, for Steele, to research is to learn, to teach, and to help people – and to discover the next big question.

Group Attachment-Based Intervention

Steele’s focus is a psychological intervention called Group Attachment-Based Intervention (GABI), and she assesses its impact in a randomly controlled trial, federally funded by the Human Resources Services Administration.  The research team – comprised of faculty and graduate students at NSSR, as well as clinicians and researchers from Albert Einstein College of Medicine – brings together parents and young children from the Bronx for a thrice-weekly session of a group-based clinical treatment. As described in her co-authored article, Looking from the outside in: the use of video in attachment-based interventions (Attachment & Human Development, 2014), GABI is designed “to reach parents with histories of multiple adverse childhood experiences and ongoing exposure to poverty, domestic and neighborhood violence and risk of child maltreatment.”  This intervention grew out of a community-based intervention, setting it apart from interventions conceptualized in an academic setting and then delivered to patients.

The project started with one fundamental assertion, said Steele: “We know from neurobiology that well-nurtured brains look different from those that are not. That’s been well documented. The question is, how can we bring about change ?” Steele thinks that such a transformation in a parent could be brought on in part by an important aspect of the intervention: a parent watching video footage of her interactions with her child and being asked to reflect on what she sees while also hearing the reflections from her peers in the group.

Continue reading “Miriam Steele: Breaking Cycles of Neglect Using Attachment Research”

Research In Action

Selected Faculty Achievements, 2015

The Faculty of the New School for Social Research are actively publishing books and scholarly articles. Below are some highlights of faculty-published research and research-related awards they have received this year.

Politics

fraser_bookNancy Fraser, Henry Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics, has been awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Liège, Belgium for her work and commitment to society.

Fraser received her Ph.D. in philosophy from City University of New York in 1980. She specializes in the areas of social and political theory, feminist theory, 19th and 20th century European thought, and philosophy of social science. Fraser has received five honorary doctorates since 2006. Fraser has published fourteen books, and over 80 scholarly articles, book chapters, and essays. In 2013, Fraser published the book Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (Verso Books). Her scholarship is the subject of several edited volumes, from the 2007 book, (Mis)recognition, Social Inequality and Social Justice: Nancy Fraser and Pierre Bourdieu (Routledge) to the forthcoming Justice, Criticism, and Politics in the 21st Century (UNSAM, Argentina).

Read Fraser’s 2014 article, Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode, in the New Left Review.

Bargu_StarveandImmolateBanu Bargu, Associate Professor of Politics, received the 2015 First Book Award from the Foundations of Political Theory Section of the American Political Science Association this September. The book, Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons, was published by Columbia University Press in 2014. From the publisher:

Starve and Immolate tells the story of leftist political prisoners in Turkey who waged a deadly struggle against the introduction of high security prisons by forging their lives into weapons. Weaving together contemporary and critical political theory with political ethnography, Banu Bargu analyzes the death fast struggle as an exemplary though not exceptional instance of self-destructive practices that are a consequence of, retort to, and refusal of the increasingly biopolitical forms of sovereign power deployed around the globe.

Banu Bargu received her PhD from Cornell University in 2008. Her main area of specialization is political theory, especially modern and contemporary political thought, with a thematic focus on theories of sovereignty, resistance, and biopolitics. Her research is situated at the intersection of philosophy, politics, history, and political anthropology, with a regional focus on the Middle East, especially Turkish politics. Bargu’s work draws upon the traditions of continental and critical theory as well as the history of Western political thought, with a keen interest in interrogating these traditions from the perspective of salient political issues and current resistance practices. Since publishing the book Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons, Bargu is currently working on a book-length manuscript on rethinking the materialist tradition, especially in light of the posthumous publication of Louis Althusser’s work on the aleatory.

Read her most recent articles on self-destructive protest (Angelaki: Journal of the Humanities, 2014) and enforced disappearances (Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, 2014).

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Publications

Faculty Contributions to Public Seminar

Public Seminar, an online exchange of critical perspectives on contemporary social issues, began at the New School for Social Research and now has contributions and readers from around the world. Several NSSR faculty have shared thoughts on pressing matters, have debated healthily with their peers, and have used Public Seminar as a tool for pedagogical experimentation.

Here are just some of many contributions made by our faculty in the last year.

Julia Ott: Slaves: The Capital That Made Capitalism

Excerpt: “Racialized chattel slaves were the capital that made capitalism. While most theories of capitalism set slavery apart, as something utterly distinct, because under slavery, workers do not labor for a wage, new historical research reveals that for centuries, a single economic system encompassed both the plantation and the factory.

Family_of_African_American_slaves_on_Smiths_Plantation_Beaufort_South_Carolina-crop-473x375At the dawn of the industrial age commentators like Rev. Thomas Malthus could not envision that capital — an asset that is used but not consumed in the production of goods and services — could compound and diversify its forms, increasing productivity and engendering economic growth. Yet, ironically, when Malthus penned his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, the economies of Western Europe already had crawled their way out of the so-called “Malthusian trap.” The New World yielded vast quantities of “drug foods” like tobacco, tea, coffee, chocolate, and sugar for world markets. Europeans worked a little bit harder to satiate their hunger for these “drug foods.” The luxury-commodities of the seventeenth century became integrated into the new middle-class rituals like tea-drinking in the eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, these commodities became a caloric and stimulative necessity for the denizens of the dark satanic mills. The New World yielded food for proletarians and fiber for factories at reasonable (even falling) prices. The “industrious revolution” that began in the sixteenth century set the stage for the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

But the “demand-side” tells only part of the story. A new form of capital, racialized chattel slaves, proved essential for the industrious revolution — and for the industrial one that followed.”

Read the full piece at Public Seminar.

Bio| Julia Ott is Associate Professor of Historical Studies and Co-director of the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University. Ott was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in 2009-2010. Ott specializes in economic history and political history. She is the author of When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2011).

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News

New NSSR Award Recognizes Graduate Student Teaching

This past Spring term, the New School for Social Research created the Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award to recognize the teaching efforts of its graduate students.

Students and faculty nominated 35 students for the award. Seven award winners were chosen from the nominees. The winners were lauded for their ability to connect complex topics to students’ lived experiences, provoke interesting and respectful discussion, while creating a dynamic and inclusive learning environment.

The 2015 Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award winners are:

Malgorzata Bakalarz, Sociology
Martin Fagin, Psychology
Lara-Zuzan Golesorkhi, Politics
Krista Johansson, Philosophy
Abid Khan, Economics
Hannah Knafo, Psychology
Brandon (Biko) Koenig, Politics

The award will be given annually and the winners recognized at the Dean’s Welcome Reception on Thursday, September 24th.