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NSSR and Lang Students Explore Suppressed Histories in New York City

On a sunny October afternoon in 2021, Washington Square Park was filled with just about everyone in New York City. Among them were around 25 New School students, their professor, and their guide.

Nearly 400 years ago, the area looked very different. Twenty-eight different farmsteads filled that land, all owned by Black individuals — New York City’s first Black neighborhood. Yet the park today bears no record of this history, nor that of the people who lived there.

That erasure, said Kamau Ware, is not accidental. Ware is an artist, historian, and founder of Black Gotham Experience, an organization dedicated to making “the impact of the African Diaspora missing from collective consciousness as well as the public square.” After a brief introduction, Ware handed each New School student a card bearing the name of a Black person, then asked them to focus on one name: Manuel Trumpeter, a Black farmstead owner. What are the kinds of things that might have been on Trumpeter’s mind? What might he have been feeling, frightened of, excited about as a semi-free Black man in 17th-century New York City?

This empathy-based exercise and subsequent in-depth historical tour of Washington Square Park are integral parts of students’ work in either the “Capitalism and the Settler Colonial Present in New York City” graduate course or “Blind Spots of New York City: Capitalism and Exclusion” undergraduate course, both taught by Benoit Challand, Associate Professor of Sociology.

“This is all very practice-oriented,” says Challand. “The goal is to bring students outside of the classroom and academic, book-centered learning experiences.” In addition to tours with Ware of the park and of the Financial District, students have toured Inwood Hill Park with the Lenape Center and discussed the colonial-era fur trade from the perspective of the Mohawk Nation with the North American Indigenous Center of New York for Culture, Equity, and Economic Justice — all spaces of different kinds of exploitation and erasure.

Developing a Civically Engaged Class

“How can you explain what is capitalism from a historical and sociological perspective?”

During Challand’s first year as a Sociology faculty member at The New School in 2015, he developed a Lang first-year seminar that explored this question via two major commodities, cotton and sugar. As he taught the class, he found that issues around settler colonialism — the replacement of an indigenous population with an invasive settler population — in the U.S.; extraction; land dispossession; and racialization of the other continued to crop up, especially in relation to New York City.

“The big discovery [for me] was to find out how the history of the city is connected to those two commodities all the way to recent times without acknowledging its link with slavery until the 1850s,” he says. This led him to dig deeper into the erasure of past slave rebellions in the city, as well as that of the city’s current large Native American population, and to develop the course in new directions to confront the absence of Black and indigenous people’s memory in New York City landscape, architecture and monuments.

After meeting Ware during a tour in 2017, Challand asked him to lead a tour on erasure of the city’s Black history for the Lang seminar. Following positive reviews, Challand brought Ware into the course as a partner via a Lang Civic Liberal Arts grant, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. They taught together in 2018 and 2020, and now again in 2021.

New this year is a version of the course at the graduate level at NSSR. While both courses explore the same content and read the same texts, Challand says that undergraduate students are “more creative in terms of how they express knowledge” while graduate students have a “deeper, more robust engagement with literature” in class discussion and in written assignments. The courses are now supported by a Mellon Periclean Faculty Leader grant, which has allowed Challand to bring in the additional indigenous community partners.

Assisting with the graduate course is Emmanuel Guerisoli, a Sociology PhD student who studies settler colonialism in the U.S. from a legal point of view. His Teaching Assistant position is funded by NSSR’s Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, which supports research on New York City and its transformation over the centuries by migration.

Bridging Sociology and History

At both levels, the courses draw deeply upon both history and sociology. At the graduate level, it is one of several Sociology courses that focus on the struggles of peripheral peoples in countries both of the global core and the periphery (read more about the Critical Perspectives in Democratic Anticolonialism project).

Says Challand, “Both disciplines concur on locating capitalism in Atlantic trade, which includes the slave trade. Mercantilism is replaced by capitalism, a new economic and ideological system rooted in exploitation and destruction of native populations….History means an understanding of historical episodes, a past-dependent development. The landscape of New York City is a byproduct of what colonial New York City was in the 17th and 18th centuries. There is continuity and rupture. And from the sociological perspective, capitalism rebundles social relations.”

Although course material temporally ends in the mid-1800s, course discussions address contemporary topics. “We try to look at the legacies, and how racial capitalism and its hierarchies have evolved and developed with time,” says Guerisoli. “In the final sections of the course, it was impossible to ignore what happened last year [uprisings following the murder of George Floyd by police] and Black Lives Matter, and the effect that it had. This is completely influenced by what happened in colonial times.” Discussion topics include the complicity of academia in erasure, pushback against monuments to colonial leaders, reparations, and the establishment of Juneteenth as a national holiday in the U.S.

“I’m very happy to see the students very engaged both academically, theoretically, but also politically,” says Guerisoli, who has been a TA for a previous Sociology class taught by Challand, “and that we’re able to discuss what are very much provocative topics that are not easy to engage with and don’t have any easy answers or simple answers.” He cites a recent debate around the discourse of nativism; that indigenous people might use nativism to counter settler colonial practices, but that white supremacists use the same discourse against migrants.

Melisa Rousseau is a Sociology MA student who registered for the course without much prior academic knowledge of the topics it addresses. But with race as a primary area of focus for her studies, the course seemed like a great fit. “I really didn’t even know about what settler colonialism was,” she says. “I signed up because I had taken Benoit’s class before, and he and Emma together are a really good team, so I knew it would be a good course.”

The course has not only offered her new perspectives on slavery and the genocide of Native Americans; it’s also reframed how she thinks about race, space, and place, and New York City itself.

“The course has significantly changed the way I see New York City,” she says. “I’m not just walking through Washington Square Park anymore, right? It’s got a different meaning now. The same with Wall Street or City Hall. I never realized that interred a block away from City Hall are up to 20,000 skeletons [of Black individuals]. Now when I walk in Lower Manhattan, it has a different meaning.”

And she appreciates the multifaceted aspects of the course. “We’re able to integrate what we’ve learned on the tour with what we’re also learning in the readings,” she says. And on top of that, we’re keeping journals [which integrate] what we’re reading and our experience on the tours.”

Ware’s October tour ends outside a building just east of Washington Square Park where, in 1911, nearly 150 Jewish and Italian immigrant garment workers died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. A small plaque on the building commemorates the tragedy, one of the worst industrial disasters in U.S. history and a major turning point in labor history and occupational safety. He notes the differences between the site and the nearby park in terms of public memory and erasure. But one parallel remains: the extra work those “othered” must do — ideally with a wide base of support but often alone — to fight for visible change in a society built on their erasure.

Photo credit: Emmanuel Guerisoli

 

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National Science Foundation Awards NSSR Student Santiago Mandirola for Research on Latin American Socio-Economic Life

Santiago Mandirola, a Sociology and Historical Studies PhD candidate, has been awarded the competitive National Science Foundation Science and Technology Studies Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (HEGS-DDRI) for his dissertation “Markets in the Making: Financial Technology and Socio-Economic Life in Latin America.”

Mandirola’s research explores the role of consumer credit scoring systems and Financial Technology (FinTech) in the socio-economic lives of people living in South America’s Southern Cone.

While credit scores have become cornerstones of socio-economic life in the U.S., determining who can afford to buy a house or go back to school, large-scale credit scoring systems have not been able to take hold in Latin America in the same way. The most obvious reason for the disparity, Mandirola says, is that far fewer people there engage with formal banking systems — only about half of the population has access to a bank account, and they generally have enough resources to meet their needs without credit.

Mandirola is particularly interested in the methods FinTech companies have adopted to fill that gap since moving into Latin America’s credit industry in the 2010s. “I’m trying to look at what programmers, engineers, and risk analysts do in order to take information that is traditionally non-economic, like a certain person’s browsing patterns…and how they refine that information so they can make economic predictions about whether or not that particular buyer is credit-worthy,” he explains.

“I’m always concerned about trying to get as close to the subject as I can, and to try to use that information in a way that is as faithful as possible to the source.”

With the NSF grant, Mandirola hopes to travel to agencies developing new methods for credit scoring to observe their processes and conduct interviews with staff. He also plans to attend FinTech conferences and seminars to learn about innovations in the field. While COVID-19 may change his methods, Mandirola says his research style will remain the same. “I’m always concerned about trying to get as close to the subject as I can, and to try to use that information in a way that is as faithful as possible to the source.” he says. “There’s time later to analytically interpret the data collected.”

The topic is a personal one. As a sociology undergraduate in his home country of Argentina, Mandirola became “interested in the processes that try to impose a certain order to that uncertainty, and reliance on that order to make plans, calculations and estimations of how things will go in the future.” When he moved to New York for graduate school at The New School for Social Research (NSSR), he found that every lease he applied for required a credit score — something he did not have — and his interest in that magical three-digit number ignited.

In the 2018-2019 academic year, Mandirola developed and presented the first iteration of his research as part of his fellowship at NSSR’s Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies. Mandirola says the Integrative PhD program, where he was a fellow from 2018-2020, helped him expand his research into the field of Science and Technology studies, broadening his scope to include FinTech. He also has workshopped this project and others at the Janey Program in Latin American Studies, where he is a 2020-2021 fellow. In addition to the fellowship, Mandirola helped operate the Janey Program as a student assistant to the director, Federico Finchelstein, Professor of History.

Mandirola says two NSSR faculty members in particular, have played an integral role in this research. Carlos Forment, Associate Professor of Sociology and Mandirola’s doctoral advisor, has provided important guidance that has helped the project evolve. Forment is the Principal Investigator for Mandirola’s project, and has had a pivotal role in supporting his application and in crafting and improving the project itself.

“Working with Santiago over the years has been immensely rewarding. He taught me what I know about the current debates on FinTech,” Forment says. “Once I had a basic understanding of them, I encouraged him to break with the standard accounts that, not surprisingly, remain focused on the ‘Anglo-European’ world. In studying the particularities of FinTech in Argentina, Santiago is in uncharted territory and joining a small group of scholars who are seeking to rethink the terms of the debate. Santiago is eminently qualified for the task he has set himself.”

Emma Park, Assistant Professor of History and a 2020-2021 Heilbroner Center Faculty Fellow, has supported Mandirola by closely and thoughtfully reading his proposal, and helping him perfect his writing.

“Working and thinking with Santiago over the past couple years has been tremendously gratifying,” Park says. “I have no doubt that his research will not only contribute to our understandings of how the market for credit has been assembled by FinTech firms in the Southern Cone, but is poised to make important contributions to the growing scholarship within Science and Technology Studies that takes sites outside of Euro-America as their point of departure. The research is timely and politically consequential. I couldn’t be more thrilled!” 

Ultimately, Mandirola aims to de-mystify credit scoring tools and determine what influence they have on people’s lives.

“I think this is a moment in which we have to focus more on the impact that these elements can have on our economic lives, our social lives, and especially the lives of more vulnerable populations, who are the ones usually resorting to alternative financial services,” Mandirola proposes. “Is it an impact that’s improving the lives of the people affected by it or not? Just as simple and complex as that.”

Read about how The New School’s Office of Research Support worked with Santiago Mandirola on his dissertation here.

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.
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NSSR Student Karolina Koziura Wins Józef Tischner Junior Visiting Fellowship

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.

Koziura has received an NSSR Prize Fellowship (2014-2017) and the Integrative PhD Fellowship (2018-2020). Her research has also been supported by an American Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies Association Dissertation Research Grant and the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium.

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.
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Aaron Jakes on Egypt, Capitalism, and the Development of Economism

Via his debut book, Jakes offers a new perspective on Egypt under British occupation — and on the United States today

A history book can reflect the peoples and worlds researched as much as of the world unfolding around its author. As Aaron Jakes, Assistant Professor of History at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College, wrote his first book, archival research brought him through worlds of bureaucrats, peasants, journalists, and spies, as financial crises, civil unrest, revolt, and populism electrified the world around him.

Research Matters sat down (virtually) with Jakes to discuss that book, Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2020), and how looking at Egypt more than 100 years ago can help us understand not only modern Egypt but also political and economic thought today.

Jakes started working on the book in its first form — his doctoral thesis — in 2007. As he looked at ways that cotton farmers borrowed money in the early 20th century, he couldn’t help but notice parallels with the Great Recession of 2007-2009. In both periods, the growing influence of financial institutions — financialization —characterized political life. “In a moment in which everyone was thinking about finance, it became possible to start thinking about a contemporary moment in which we had parallel discourses of financial and ecological crisis that were treated as though these were completely separate phenomena,” Jakes says. “And so the first cut at the project in light of that present moment was to begin thinking about what it would mean to write an environmental history of a prior moment of financialization.”

Information Access and Control

Digging back more than a century meant Jakes spent years doing research in archives around the world, including Egypt’s National Archives, the United States Library of Congress, and financial archives across England. But gaining access to those materials wasn’t easy.

Egyptian intelligence agencies maintain strict surveillance over the country’s National Archives. Amid a time of water-related conflict with Egypt’s neighbors to the south, Jakes’ application was left in limbo for his use of the word “irrigation”. Jakes enlisted the support of his doctoral supervisor, who then enlisted Egyptian political novelist and journalist Gamal al-Ghitani to pressure the archive director, culminating in a “scathing” op-ed in Akhbar al-Adab, the Egyptian equivalent of the New York Review of Books. The strategy was effective, but Jakes still spent the following three years navigating bureaucratic and technological barriers to information.

“Computerized control actually makes it possible for [the intelligence agencies] to monitor and restrict who can see what, so the cataloging process itself made it possible to just cause huge swaths of documents to ‘disappear’,” Jakes explains. While he was ultimately able to access the resources he needed, he laments that his Egyptian colleagues, without the same degree of foreign institutional support, don’t have the same access — another lasting effect of colonialism.

As his research progressed, a narrative emerged that contradicted the widely-accepted understanding of the British occupation of Egypt, which is rooted in the notion that colonial rule simply consolidated an earlier set of economic arrangements and that ideas about economic life played no significant role in the major movements and struggles of that era. Through his detailed research in both government and banking archives, Jakes pieced together a far more dynamic story about Egypt’s role as a major investment frontier for global finance and about the multiple crises that this process of financialization induced. This new history of capitalism under British rule, in turn, shed new light on the commentaries that Egyptians at the time, from government officials in Cairo to poor peasants in the countryside, offered about the problems they faced. The pages of Egypt’s burgeoning Arabic press likewise became a site for rich and sustained debate about the consequences of the British occupation. And because colonial officials were so emphatic and consistent in their claims about how economic improvement would translate into political legitimacy, developing a rigorous, alternative account of the relationship between economics and politics soon became central concern of Egypt’s growing nationalist movement.

Economism and Trump

Jakes earned his PhD in 2015 and joined The New School’s Historical Studies department shortly after. As he worked on turning his dissertation into his first book, a new event influenced his writing: the election of Donald Trump.

“It was striking that explanations both for the [Bernie] Sanders phenomenon and for Trump’s election often entailed some suggestion that there was a kind of base motive of economic grievance that really explained what was going on,” Jakes says. This is called economism, the attribution of political effects to underlying economic causes.

To this day, economism is often treated as a unique and even defining problem of the left, which, Jakes argues, obscures other important forms. Whereas various thinkers on the left have seen ideas about economic determination as the grounds for a universalist politics, Jakes shows that such claims can just as easily assume a particularistic and exclusionary character. Often entailed in this latter variant of economism is an implicit, racialized judgment about the “kinds of people” who can’t engage in sophisticated politics beyond “base economic motives” — precisely the same rhetoric the British employed to justify their continued occupation of Egypt.

While Egypt’s Occupation never explicitly makes this connection, the parallels are there. Chapter two, for example, highlights the way the British used economism to justify abolishing the system of local elections that Egyptians had long practiced on a village level by arguing that they were not qualified to participate in even the most local politics because of a supposed inability to overcome their economic self-interest.

“If there’s one thing that I really want people to understand,” says Jakes, “it’s that making claims about a kind of strong underlying economic motivation in politics is…often a way of making claims about political disqualification, and actually means that in this country, as in Egypt a hundred years ago, when people are talking about the economy, they often are really talking about race.”

Bringing Research Questions into the Classroom

The day after NSSR spoke with Jakes, he taught a chapter of Egypt’s Occupation in his Lang survey course on Middle Eastern history, marking the first time he’s brought his work directly into the classroom. But teaching has long given him new ways to think about the problems at the center of his research.

“There are moments in which I have actually taught about a topic that I am sort of starting to get my head around,” Jakes said. He often designs courses not necessarily around the research he’s done, but rather based on problems that appear in his work, such as “A World of Disasters: Famine, Plague, and Crisis in Global History,” which he calls “an attempt to…chart a history of concepts and ideas about disasters and the way that meaning had attached to them in different social settings.”

Jakes credits students — especially his NSSR research assistants — as well as faculty across The New School in helping this first book project come to fruition. The university has, he says ”a really special kind of ecology to make serious critical research both possible and fun.” Grants from NSSR, Lang, and NSSR’s Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies helped him complete this work.

It’s fitting, then, that the November 9 launch event for Egypt’s Occupation is a full NSSR affair, with faculty members from Historical Studies as well as Anthropology, Politics, and Sociology joining Jakes to discuss the book as well as the fallout from colonialism and financial occupation. Register for the book launch here.

Photo credit: Nina Subin

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.
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COVID-19 and Eastern Europe

In Spring 2020, members of the Decolonizing Eastern European Studies (DEES) group produced a series of video essays critically examining how states and societies in Eastern Europe have responded to, and thought about, the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the disease it causes in humans, COVID-19. Each essay draws on long-term, direct engagement with people in the region and with scholarship written in the languages of the region.

The essays and accompanying videos were originally published on the DEES group page and have been reshared here with permission.

DEES on COVID-19: Introduction
Jessica Pisano, Associate Professor of Politics and DEES coordinator
Read her essay here

Jessica Pisano, Introduction to DEES on COVID 19 1

Uploaded by Decolonizing Eastern European Studies on 2020-06-10.

COVID-19 and Hungarian Democracy
Orsolya Lehotai, Politics PhD student
Read her essay here

Orsolya Lehotai, COVID-19 and Hungarian Democracy

Uploaded by Decolonizing Eastern European Studies on 2020-06-10.

Hitler and White Asparagus: The Pandemic in Romania
Elisabeta Pop, Politics PhD student
Read her essay here

Elisabeta Pop, “Hitler and White Asparagus: The Pandemic in Romania”

Uploaded by Decolonizing Eastern European Studies on 2020-06-10.

Russian Governmentality and COVID-19
Dina Shvetsov, Politics PhD student
Read her paper here

Dina Shvetsov, “Russian Governmentality and COVID-19”

Uploaded by Decolonizing Eastern European Studies on 2020-06-10.

Old Wine in New Bottles: Church and State in Georgia in COVID-19
Malkhaz Toria, Sociology MA student
Read his paper here

Malkhaz Toria, “Old Wine in New Bottles: Church and State in Georgia in COVID-19”

Uploaded by Decolonizing Eastern European Studies on 2020-06-10.

What’s Wrong with Ukraine’s Response to COVID-19
Masha Shynkarenko, Politics PhD candidate
Read her paper here

Masha Shynkarenko, “What’s Wrong with Ukraine’s Response to COVID-19”

Uploaded by Decolonizing Eastern European Studies on 2020-06-10.

Voices from the Polish Borderland
Karolina Koziura, Sociology and Historical Studies PhD candidate
Read her paper here

Karolina Koziura, “Voices from the Polish Borderland”

Uploaded by Decolonizing Eastern European Studies on 2020-06-10.