2019 NSSR Viewbook

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The New School for social research

Graduate and Certificate Programs

newschool.edu/nssr


bell hooks W.E .B. Dubois

hannah arendt Marc jacobs

ai weiwei


harry bel afonte

ani difr anco

mar tha gr aham john c age

For 100 years, we’ve shared with the world the power of “the new”— creative thinking put into action. Our name has become synonymous with progress. This year, we honor the innovators from our community who have come before you, the scholars, artists, activists, and designers who have made their mark on the world. You join this remarkable lineage when you become a New Schooler. newschool.edu/100

Margare t Me ad


bell hooks W.E .B. Dubois

hannah arendt Marc jacobs

ai weiwei


The New School was founded in 1919 by a group of progressive intellectuals looking for a new, more relevant model of education. Our school of social science, philosophy, and history— The New School for Social Research—is now a world-renowned graduate school within a comprehensive university, which also includes an innovative liberal arts college, a forward-looking performing arts school, and a top-ranked design school. Guided by deep intellectual inquiry and a desire to understand social problems through academic discovery, The New School for Social Research embodies the core values of the entire university. Students have the opportunity to study side by side with prominent faculty, shape the intellectual future of the school and the entire university, and be a force of new thought, knowledge, and ideas in the world.

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Discover a university that has been progressive since its inception.


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Introduction

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5 The New School for Social Research and the University: Past, Present, and Future 6

Message from the Dean

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Intellectual Life in New York City

Areas of Study

10 Anthropology 16

Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism

22 Economics 28

Gender and Sexuality Studies

30

Historical Studies

36

Liberal Studies

42 Philosophy 48 Politics 54 Psychology 66 Sociology

Centers and Publications

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Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies

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Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis

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Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility

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77 Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought 78

Safran Center for Psychological Services

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Sรกndor Ferenczi Center

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Hannah Arendt Center

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Center for Public Scholarship

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Center for Attachment Research

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Institute for Critical Social Inquiry

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Janey Program in Latin American Studies

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Transregional Center for Democratic Studies

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Center for Research with Infants and Toddlers

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Husserl Archives

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Academic Publications

Dissertations 92

Recent Dissertation Titles

University Information

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Graduate Minors and Academic Resources

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The Office of Admission and Application Procedures

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Faculty Information

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INTRODUCTION I.

II.

III.

THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH AND THE UNIVERSITY

message from the dean

INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN NEW YORK CITY

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Figs. 1 and 2 World-renowned scholars like Hannah Arendt and Ann Stoler have shaped NSSR’s intellectual history.


INTRODUCTION

The New School for Social Research and the University: Past, Present, and Future sociologists Emil Lederer and Peter Berger, psychologists Max Wertheimer and Jerome Bruner, philosophers Hannah Arendt and Reiner Schürmann, and historian Charles Tilly. The mission of The New School for Social Research—inspired by progressive American thought, European critical theory, and the legacy of the University in Exile—is grounded in the core social sciences and broadened with a commitment to philosophical and historical inquiry. Now, 100 years after the university’s founding, The New School for Social Research remains true to the ideal of a school of free inquiry for students and faculty of different ethnicities, religions, and geographical origins who are willing to challenge academic orthodoxy, connect social theory to empirical observation, and take the intellectual and political risks necessary to improve social conditions.

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The New School for Social Research fosters an intellectual environment that challenges orthodoxy, promotes public debate, and cultivates academic rigor. Scholars including Charles A. Beard, James Harvey Robinson, Thorstein Veblen, and John Dewey came together in 1919 to establish a “new school” where “well qualified investigators and thinkers [could] enjoy the advantages of one another’s thought and discoveries, and … talk freely upon any theme they judge fit.” The establishment of The New School transformed the academy—something it continues to do today. In 1933, recognizing the danger Hitler represented, leaders of The New School created the University in Exile, a haven for European scholars and artists whose lives were threatened by National Socialism. The University in Exile was fully incorporated into The New School in 1934 and was later renamed the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science. In this way, The New School established a reputation for upholding the highest standards of scholarly inquiry while encouraging a persistently critical perspective on the major political, cultural, and economic issues of the day. The Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science, eventually renamed The New School for Social Research, continues to attract distinguished and socially active faculty who challenge long-held theories and push scholarship and social discourse in new directions. Scholars who have graced the school’s halls include economists Adolph Lowe and Robert Heilbroner, political scientists Arnold Brecht and Aristide Zolberg,


INTRODUCTION

Message from the Dean

William Milberg Dean and Professor of Economics 6

The New School for Social Research has long dared to be different. We are a graduate school with a distinctive intellectual tradition that thrives on public debate and academic rigor, and our small programs encourage close collaboration between students and professors. This year, we celebrate our 100th anniversary as a maverick institution of higher education, committed deeply to academic freedom and to understanding the great issues of the day. In the 1930s, New York City luminaries created the University in Exile here as a refuge for brilliant scholars being silenced, fired, or worse by Hitler, the Nazis, and fascism. This role as a beacon of hope for the excluded became the underpinning of our intellectual life as a graduate school of the social sciences, philosophy, and history. And what about the present? How does this ethos persist, and how does it continue to define our reputation around the world? Here is where I turn to you and the current historical moment. You come to The New School for Social Research in part because of our legacy of promoting freedom of thought, defending the rights of the oppressed, and critiquing a society

rife with inequality and injustice. We offer you the knowledge and expertise of our global network of scholars and practitioners. We expect that in turn, you will commit to expanding your intellectual horizons, challenging and inspiring us, and pressing for change in the world at large. The New School for Social Research is where psychology students break new ground in the study of empathy, ethnicity, technology, trauma, and gender and work to relieve distress in individuals and communities. This is where deep philosophical discussions of contemporary politics take place. This is where radical rethinking of financial and economic processes is incubated. This is where migration, economic development, and the very notion of crisis are rethought. This is where leading critical thinkers from around the world—Luc Boltanski, Danielle Allen, Susan Buck-Morss, and Yanis Varoufakis, to name a few— give talks. I am enormously proud of the work of our students, faculty, and alumni, as well as their commitment to the ideals of what a progressive university—a New School—can and must be. I hope you will consider joining this very special community of scholars.


INTRODUCTION

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At The New School for Social Research, students take full advantage of the school’s location in one of the world’s hubs of scholarship and culture, New York City. The city offers a dazzling array of academic resources, including universities, scholars, cultural institutions, libraries, nongovernmental organizations, and the United Nations, as well as vibrant public and private sectors offering research and employment opportunities. Students engage with the rich intellectual, cultural, and political life of New York City in a variety of ways that enhance their academic experience at The New School. Because of our international reputation and our location in New York City, The New School for Social Research attracts the world’s most prominent scholars as visitors and guest speakers. As a member of the Inter-University Doctoral Consortium (IUDC), The New School for Social Research offers doctoral students the opportunity to take specialized courses and interact with scholars at Columbia University, CUNY Graduate Center, Fordham University, New York University, Princeton University, Rutgers University, and Stony Brook University. Students who study at The New School for Social Research can do more than earn a graduate degree; they have the opportunity to draw knowledge from many aspects of life in New York City and to influence and shape the future of both the city and the world.

THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

Intellectual Life in New York City


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AREAS OF STUDY

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Fig. 3 Max Lerner teaches his popular monthly class, America in a World Framework.


ANTHROPOLOGY

I. OVERVIEW

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II. DIALOGUES


ANTHROPOLOGY

Anthropology Overview

Degrees Offered The Department of Anthropology offers MA and PhD degrees. All graduate anthropology students at The New School enter through the MA program. Students who complete MA requirements with sufficient distinction may apply for admission to the PhD program.

Recent Courses Contagion: Affect, Law & Bioinsecurities Ethnography and Writing Anthropology and Time Immigration Politics & Policy Critical Foundations of Social Theory Technopolitics

Recent Outcomes Katyayani Dalmia (PhD ’19): Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Zurich (Switzerland) Charles McDonald (PhD ’19): Postdoctoral Fellow, Rice University Rhea Rahman (PhD ’18): Assistant Professor, Brooklyn College Marisa Solomon (PhD ’18): Assistant Professor, Baruch College Blair Bainbridge (MA ’16): Doctoral Student, University of Chicago Cameron Brinnitzer (MA ’16): Doctoral Student, University of Pennsylvania Kadija Ferryman (PhD ’16): Postdoctoral Fellow, Data and Science Research Institute Diego Cagüeñas Rozo (PhD ’15): Director, Center of Ethics and Democracy, Universidad Icesi (Colombia) Elise Gerspach (MA ’15): Marketing and Operations Project Manager, Accion U.S. Network Matthew Rosen (PhD ’14): Assistant Professor, Ohio University

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Address urgent social and political problems of the 21st century. Since its inception, the Department of Anthropology has fostered cutting-edge empirical, historical, and ethnographic scholarship. Dedicated to providing the interdisciplinary breadth necessary for innovative research, the department builds on its close relations with the entire faculty of The New School for Social Research and the university as a whole. As members of a leading department for graduate anthropology studies in the United States, the faculty emphasize critical reflection at all levels of inquiry. The department fosters an intimate, dynamic intellectual environment in which students can thrive. Faculty and student work is characterized by carefully conducted ethnography, innovative research methodologies, and an awareness of the importance of historical context. Students explore analytic and social issues through ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and theoretical reflection. They can participate in faculty courses and projects developed both individually and in collaboration with other graduate programs and centers at The New School, including the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility; the Graduate Institute of Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought; the Center for Research with Infants and Toddlers; the Julien J. Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs; Parsons School of Design; the India China Institute; the Janey Program in Latin American Studies; and the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies. MA students can also focus on the Anthropology and Design subject area.


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DIALOGUE 01

Expressing Immortality Through an Artistic Lens Abou Farman Assistant Professor of Anthropology

NSSR’s focus on interdisciplinary study, he has merged both into a holistic area of scholarship. Now, instead of simply giving a straightforward talk at an academic conference, Farman might give a performance. He notes that his research greatly influences his art projects, which have recently covered topics marginalized by both secularism and religion, like shamanism, possession, and magic. With his interest in artistic expression, Farman has enabled students to work with multiple media and complete nontextual projects. Although his research is specialized, Farman still spends a great deal of time teaching traditional anthropology to students. He says the traditional approach has shaped his own thinking, even as he operates in an unorthodox space in the discipline. According to Farman, the big questions anthropology raises, from “What is human?” to “How do people relate to nonphysical entities?” resonate today as much as they did in the past, even as the way those questions are asked and answered has evolved. In working with graduate students, Farman describes himself as an “anarchist shepherd,” guiding students without explicitly telling them to follow him. Rather, Farman advises students to look for the research paths that emerge from their own interests and their interactions with him.

Fig. 4 Abou Farman creates 3D representations of cancerous tumors in his art studio.

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When you first meet Abou Farman, he will tell you he has “all the time in the world.” One would expect nothing less from an anthropology professor who studies secular immortality. Although he researches the ways in which people strive to permanently extend the future, Farman himself remains grounded in the present, attentive to every thought and idea presented to him. His measured words reflect the rigor and intellect of his scholarship. A self-described anthropologist of “not dying,” Farman’s research concentrates on secularism, death, and the history of death in relation to the process of secularization. Farman states that the anthropology of death can intersect with religion and include cross-cultural approaches to dying but also intersect with medical anthropology and include brain death and organ transplants. He focuses on efforts to extend life radically or indefinitely through technoscientific means, including cryonics, artificial intelligence, and biogerontology. Through his research on immortality, Farman has been able to cross boundaries and disciplines, working with sociologists, scientists, technologists, and artists. However, “artist” is a label Farman himself rejects. Although he has actively pursued an art practice for more than 15 years, he prefers to think of this work as a method of producing spaces and possibilities that text cannot. For years, he kept his art practice and his research separate, but recently, influenced by


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DIALOGUE 02

Applying Critical Anthropological Theory to Current Issues Ann Laura Stoler Willy Brandt Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and History

common sense and what practices and conceptual conventions contribute to the inequities we inhabit.” This personal philosophy led her to found the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry. For one week each summer, the institute invites three top scholars to teach on the topics for which they are well-known. Doctoral candidates, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty from around the world come to the institute to immerse themselves in intensive “master classes,” workshops, and rigorous discussion. Stoler calls the institute an outgrowth of her teaching and a place where the academic community can feel accountable to the world in which they live. Stoler, like the rest of the anthropology department, adopts a hands-on approach with graduate students. Both she and the program invest a tremendous amount of time and energy in MA students, ensuring that they are ready to join top doctoral programs around the country. Stoler credits the interdisciplinary nature of the program with strengthening students’ scholarship. She also points to the collaborative nature of the program as a benefit. In the department, different cohorts come together in workshops to share and review knowledge from fieldwork and dissertations, enabling new students to learn from more experienced ones. Together with Stoler, students find unexpected angles and open one another up to completely new ways of thinking and working.

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After a career spanning more than 30 years of scholarship on the political economy of imperialism, one might assume Ann Laura Stoler had exhausted nearly all possibilities for research on that subject. But motivated by a deep need to ground theoretical work in current issues, Stoler continues to find new avenues in her work and new methods to rethink how the imperial past and present inflect the racial and political climate of today. At the start of her career, Stoler researched the ways in which labor relations were shaped by relations of sexuality and gender on plantations in Southeast Asia. This work led her to investigate the colonial history of Sumatra to gain an understanding of how colonial labor regimes have informed those of the present and changed the very topography of Indonesia. As her work continued throughout the years, Stoler focused on how racial categories are constructed, how race permeates the contemporary landscape, and the politics surrounding sentiment as a marker of racialized distinctions. Stoler recently began research on the assessment of sentiment in American legal decisions and how race figures in the judgment of “appropriate” sentiment, particularly as it relates to the expression of remorse. Stoler finds her work drawing her closer to the edges of the academy, stating, “I don’t think theory matters unless it is grounded in critical issues that speak to the problems in the world today. And that’s how I think of The New School: It’s not a place where you just do theory— conceptual work should provide leverage for understanding what passes as


CP + CJ

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I.

II.

OVERVIEW

DIALOGUES


CP + CJ

Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism Overview

New York Review of Books. In more recent decades, NSSR has invited outspoken journalists like Christopher Hitchens, Jonathan Schell, and Katha Pollitt to discuss their views with its graduate students in substantive courses. The Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program not only trains students in the traditions of criticism, critical theory, and fine writing but also offers students a variety of studio courses and working experiences that teach them how to design, edit, and distribute journals and books containing intellectually serious work. In addition to surveying traditional forms of book and magazine publishing, students explore the possibilities opened up by new media, such as the Internet, tablet applications, and print-on-demand smallbatch publications. Our curriculum equips students to think critically about book publishing and journalism and their history; to understand the best practices of contemporary reporting and cultural criticism; to appreciate the business aspects of production and distribution; and to work collaboratively in the writing, editing, design, and publication

of texts on a variety of print and digital platforms. Unlike other publishing programs, this course of study teaches students how to edit pieces, how to write better, how to think more clearly and critically—and how to design literary texts. And it goes beyond journalism programs by teaching students how to design a business plan and lay out a cross-platform publication while acquiring a foundation in the history of written communication from the printing press to the Internet. And unlike most design curricula, this program regards design, communication technology, and form making as part of the exchange of ideas.

Degrees Offered The Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program offers the MA degree. Students can complete the program on a full-time or part-time basis in one or two years.

Recent Courses Blogs, Social Media, and News Design and the Future of Publishing The Personal and the Political in Creative Nonfiction Histories of Political Media

Recent Outcomes Gili Ostfield (MA ’18): Editorial Production Associate, New Yorker Miles Pulsford (MA ’18): Writer, Capitol Forum Daniel Geneen (MA ’17): Audience Development and Special Projects Producer, Eater (Vox Media) Natalia Tuero German (MA ’17): Office of the Executive Coordinator and Spokesperson on Sexual Harassment, UN Women Paula Duran (MA ’15): Editor, Audience Team, Washington Post

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Exchange ideas and make new worlds with words. Since its inception, The New School for Social Research has attracted thoughtful journalists and innovative publishers. The founders included Thorstein Veblen, Charles Beard, and John Dewey—authors whose books reached a wide audience. After World War II, The New School helped create and launch the first alternative weekly urban newspaper, the Village Voice. The Graduate Faculty later attracted public intellectuals like Robert Heilbroner and Hannah Arendt, whose work appeared in publications like the New Yorker and the


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DIALOGUE 03

The Intersection of Publishing, Journalism, and Scholarship James Miller Professor of Politics and Liberal Studies

Nietzsche, was the third to be featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. In 2018, Miller edited a new English language edition of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers for Oxford University Press and wrote the provocative Can Democracy Work? A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Miller brings the same multifaceted approach to his role as director of the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program. He partnered with Rachel Rosenfelt and Juliette Cezzar to create a truly interdisciplinary program that brings together journalism, publishing, and design and offers both pre-professional career training and a rigorous graduate education. Miller stresses that students seeking a traditional journalism school need not apply. He wants students who are willing to collaborate, to learn by doing, students who will stretch themselves beyond their comfort zones. Acutely aware of the precarious situation of both the publishing and the journalism industries, Miller views the entrepreneurial spirit of the program as a catalyst to help students seize opportunity from seeming chaos and create entirely new publications and platforms. He notes, “Worlds made by words are crucial building blocks of modern society. New media have certainly transformed how we experience the textual worlds we all inhabit, but printed books and magazines aren’t going to disappear anytime soon.”

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Amid the clutter of Jim Miller’s office is a mind that refuses to be confined by traditional academic disciplines and boundaries. Since his time in graduate school, Miller has brought together areas of study that others might deem disparate. While pursuing an interdisciplinary PhD in History of Ideas, which required him to study social history, sociology, political theory, and philosophy, Miller worked in journalism as an editor at an alternative weekly newspaper. Seeing no reason to abandon either of his interests, Miller continued to publish pieces—some in Rolling Stone, others in the New Republic—after he secured a teaching position at the University of Texas at Austin. On the strength of his New Republic pieces, Newsweek hired Miller as a cultural critic and wooed him away from the academic world. Miller eventually returned, first teaching parttime at Harvard and later joining The New School full-time. Since the publication in 1987 of Democracy Is in the Streets, an account of student radicalism in the Sixties and the first of his books to appear on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, Miller’s goal has been to unite the academic and professional facets of his life and write “intelligent, deeply researched books that are of interest to ordinary readers.” His more philosophical interests led him to write The Passion of Michel Foucault, published in 1992, which explored the idea of living a life beyond good and evil—a work he funded by subsequently writing Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947–1977. His 2011 book, Examined Lives: From Socrates to


DIALOGUE 04

Challenging the Status Quo of Publishing and Journalism: A Conversation with Natasha Lennard [00:00:00] Interviewer: Your work focuses on social justice, criminal justice, legal matters, and anti-fascism efforts—some of the most critical issues of our time. And you’re a regular contributor to respected publications like The Intercept, The Nation, the New Inquiry, and the New York Times’ philosophy blog, The Stone, where you’ve held mainstream media and its narratives up to intense scrutiny. How does this play into your pedagogy as professor in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism [CPCJ] program?

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Natasha Lennard Part-Time Lecturer Contributing Writer, The Intercept

[00:00:38] Natasha Lennard: I think it’s really important that if journalism is going to be taught, it be taught in a way that takes a magnifying glass—or a scalpel—to the way journalism is done today. It’s a crucial time to look seriously at the types of narratives and truths produced in our media landscape and to address the political and cultural work they do in the world. There’s an opportunity in this particular program to impart practical skills and guide students to learn by doing, but there’s also an understanding that in CPCJ, we’re not just trying to train a set of stenographers and robot journalists. We’re trying to engage with students who want to learn critically within the media landscape that they’ll be entering into. There’s an ethical element, too, which makes The New School for Social Research so appealing. [00:03:14] IN: So how do you and your students apply this scrutiny, or “scalpel,” to contemporary media? Is it a theoretical or a more experiential process? [00:03:48] NL: It’s both. CPCJ faculty use the access we have to introduce our students to publishers, editors, writers, and directors in order to interrogate the reporting process. Be it Buzzfeed, the New York Times, or VICE News, we want to give a sense of the current landscape of journalism and rip away any veil of mystery around how it all works. The Fieldwork Seminar in particular is very out and about. Students get to meet people in the industry and talk to them whilst having a


DIALOGUE 04

through line of paying attention to the way different aspects of New York media allow ideas to percolate and inform what is known, slightly embarrassingly, as the “marketplace of ideas.” We learn to follow a concept that can then be made into a book. We try to trace what might stymie the spreading of an idea within the media landscape and what might aid it. It’s an ideas-based way of looking at the practical, material side of the industry.

discussion here as well as a broad training in skills that one needs to become a journalist or to get involved in publishing.

[00:05:14] IN: And what type of projects are your graduate students producing through this process?

[00:06:42] IN: Why is NSSR the right graduate school for a writer or publisher seeking to explore such issues? [00:07:06] NL: NSSR, and The New School as a whole, have an approach to investigation that’s appealing, because it is a critical approach. NSSR has a long history of engaging in critical theory and is committed to challenging the status quo, be that in the philosophical tradition, the anthropological tradition, or media. It’s been appealing to me in terms of engaging with the school in the past, and this is the only place I would want to teach journalism in New York. But again, it’s that critical mindset that seems to underpin the school. Our role as an academic institution has always been that of an insider who isn’t afraid to be critical of the field. I think the thing that’s important is that those—whether students or professors—who are interested in looking critically at what the media does and how it works and how it might inform the sociopolitical can get that

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[00:05:31] NL: Everyone is covering very different subject matter. One student was interested in writing about the way the beauty industry imposes ideas of femininity on the public, a kind of intellectual way of looking at the “beauty market.” Other students were interested in looking at gentrification and how that occurs in the city. But what’s interesting was that even though they were all very different areas of expertise and interest, we all focused on specific ways of approaching and writing journalism.


ECONOMICS

I. OVERVIEW

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II. DIALOGUES


ECONOMICS

Economics Overview

Statistical equilibrium models Political economy of cooperation and coordination Problems of regulating and guiding economic development Measuring the role of race and ethnicity in occupational hierarchies Modeling housing market behavior, income distribution, and wealth concentration

The Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA) conducts research that complements the work of the Department of Economics, with a focus on retirement equity, and offers students opportunities to pursue original research.

Degrees Offered The Department of Economics offers MA, MS, and PhD degrees in Economics and an MA in Global Political Economy and Finance. Students who complete MA and MS requirements with sufficient distinction may be considered for admission to PhD study. In rare cases, the department grants direct PhD admission to applicants who have completed a comparable MA in Economics at another institution.

Recent Courses Political Economy of Southeast Asia Labor Economics 1 Crisis and Austerity Economics of Climate Change Inequality and Varieties of Capitalism

Recent Outcomes Ibrahim Shikaki (PhD ’19): Assistant Professor, Trinity College Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven (PhD ’18): Lecturer, University of York (UK) Katherine Moos (PhD ’17): Assistant Professor, University of Massachusetts– Amherst Jermaine Toney (PhD ’17): Assistant Professor, Rutgers University Degaulle Adili (MA ’16): Vice President of Technology, Nomura Audra Aucoin (MA ’16): Grant Manager, Institute for New Economic Thinking Danielle Kavanagh-Smith (MA ’16): Senior Program Manager, NYC Department of Small Business Services

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Engage in an informed, critical, and passionate investigation of the economic foundations of contemporary society. The Department of Economics at The New School for Social Research (NSSR) offers a graduate program that places Robert Heilbroner’s “worldly philosophy” at the heart of its curriculum. Students learn about a range of economic theories, including Keynesian and post-Keynesian economics; the classical political economy of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx; structuralist and institutionalist approaches to economics; and neoclassical economics. They also acquire a comprehensive understanding of conceptual, mathematical, and statistical modeling techniques used in economic research. Coursework emphasizes the relationship between the history of economic ideas, contemporary economic policy debates, and conflicting interpretations of economic phenomena. Along with completing their coursework, students in the Department of Economics engage in research on topics reflecting their own interests and shaped by their interactions with professors throughout the university. The Department of Economics fosters intellectual inquiry that leads to practical solutions to contemporary problems and poses new questions for study. Recent research topics include:


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DIALOGUE 05

Political Economy Creates a Bond Between Duncan Foley and His Students Duncan Foley Leo Model Professor of Economics

history of ideas and history of economics into his courses. This method allows him to present contending ideas, points of view, and schools of thought, which make for a better intellectual environment for students. Through his and his colleagues’ efforts, the NSSR economics department has become one of the few places in the world that teaches political economy in such a thoughtful and rigorous manner. The reputation of NSSR economics students extends far beyond the campus. Foley notes that visiting professors often remark how much they enjoy teaching at The New School because the students are not intimidated and can carry on a free intellectual dialogue with the faculty. Foley states that prospective students should be intellectually curious, willing to question perceived doctrine and hold rigorous debates. Alumni exemplifying these traits have gone on to hold high-ranking financial positions in foreign countries and thus influence macroeconomic policy. Others have become research directors in labor unions, local and national government, and think tanks, influencing various social policies including pensions, retirement, and discrimination.

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To reach Guggenheim Prize winner Duncan Foley’s office, you must first wade through the students diligently at work outside his door. Foley maintains a oneon-one independent study relationship with his students, helping MA candidates conduct independent research and PhD candidates transform their personal study and paper assignments into thesis research. In addition, Foley has co-authored six published papers with students and recently co-authored a book, the second edition of Growth and Distribution (Harvard University Press, 2019), with two NSSR PhD alumni, now economics professors. The relationships he fosters aren’t a one-way street, however. According to Foley, he learns a great deal from working with his students, particularly on methodological issues. “They often know much more about what they’re studying—for example, the economics of India or the economics of commodity markets—than I do, so I learn indirectly from them.” Foley began his research more than 40 years ago in an attempt to introduce money into non-Marxian general equilibrium theory. After losing interest in economics due to the narrowness of the neoclassical mainstream, Foley began to read more Marx and other classical political economists. This new research sparked his interest in political economy, an interest he has maintained through today as he continues to work on integrating money into the Marxian and Smithian system. Naturally, Foley infuses political economy into his teaching, incorporating a healthy dose of the


DiAlogue 06

A Conversation on Worker Benefits and Pay with Teresa Ghilarducci wisdom and experience can help other workers. Or seniority rights move them into easier physical jobs. Or they get the respect that older people need and deserve in the workplace. But the other possibility is that they’re being put in secondary jobs and in secondary, subordinated positions. Either is possible, as is some place in between. I’m looking at data and other evidence to decide whether older workers are being treated well or poorly and what function they have in the capitalist system.

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Teresa Ghilarducci Irene and Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of Economics and Policy Analysis

[00:00:00.00] Interviewer: Can you describe your general research interests as well as your intellectual trajectory? What are you doing now, and what do you want to do in the future? [00:00:20.24] Teresa Ghilarducci: I have always been interested in jobs, people, pay, and power. In economics that is called labor economics. I aim to change the core curriculum on how to understand wages, unemployment, and compensation— especially paid time off—pensions and health care. I am fascinated with the interaction of workplace employee benefit plans and the larger issues of the government’s responsibility in maintaining the economy and maintaining equity in the labor market. Those topics frame almost all of my research questions. Specifically, I am working on two problems. One is, Will the proletarianization of older workers lower the wages, hours, and working conditions of young and older workers through increased competition? The research question is, What happens when older people have to work more because they don’t have pensions? How will older people working more affect their own bargaining power and the bargaining power of others? The second problem is the way older workers are being used in the economy. We have a number of hunches about how they might be used. One might imagine a happy scenario in which older workers are used in places where their

[00:03:29.21] IN: NSSR has a tradition of interdisciplinary work and heterodox education. How does that apply to the way you teach or the way you conduct research? [00:03:45.11] TG: At other universities, scholars might view the problems of diminished pensions through the lens of individual choice and people not saving enough. But at The New School, we know that an individual is just one part of the explanation of how things work. We recognize that individuals are embedded in groups and groups are sorted into economic classes, and society and politics determine how much influence each class has. So I don’t place the blame for the lack of security for older people with the individual worker; I see the outcome as part of a set of power relationships. That’s very much in the New School tradition. The way NSSR’s traditions inform my teaching is that almost all my students are engaging with some public policy question. They see their work as having to be accountable to their society. I’m grateful to be in the academy, and I have a responsibility to the public for being given this very protected and responsible job. I pass that sentiment on to my students. [00:06:31.16] IN: How would you describe the way you work with graduate students? What would you want to say to prospective students to encourage the right students to want to come here and study?


dialogue 06

[00:11:04.27] IN: What else would you say you would want prospective students to know about studying both here in the economics department and at NSSR as a whole? [00:11:12.28] TG: Students have to be quite firm in managing their own time, in addition to knowing what resources they need. This place has the cultural norms of a lot of European universities—and not just of this century, but of centuries back. That is, if you come to study here, you need to be very motivated and interested in ideas. Students that come here are expected to be well-read, highly critical, and should have a thick skin about being challenged. They have to write every day. So having an identity of a writer is good, even if they come for economics. I would also add it’s important to be upfront about the help you need finding a job and a placement.

[00:18:54.07] IN: I have one last question, about your work with the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis [SCEPA]. I know you have your independent lab, but can you just talk a little bit about your work with the Schwartz Center and whether it influences your teaching or your research? [00:19:06.27] TG: I love my directorship of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis because it’s where faculty can rise up out of their desks, stand on their own two feet, and push their ideas out into the world. It’s a conduit for the theoretical work that may be happening in our department to mainstream policymakers, or to existing advocacy groups. Oxfam needs to know how to reconceptualize the chronic deprivation of want. And through his research to reinterpret poverty rates in developing countries, my colleague Sanjay Reddy has shed new light on what deprivation means. Well, if the work stays on Sanjay Reddy’s desk or in academic articles, it doesn’t have the effect Sanjay Reddy intends. We stand to serve and to help facilitate and communicate our faculty research. [00:20:14.00] IN: And in addition to faculty research, are there also opportunities for students to get involved? [00:20:19.26] TG: Yes. Almost all the policy briefs and papers we are writing in the department and posting in SCEPA as working papers have student co-authors. I haven’t published anything without a student co-author for a long time.

27 THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

[00:07:01.15] TG: I get to know my students, and I listen carefully to what their backgrounds are and what kinds of skills they want to develop. If I have highly quantitative students, I’ll understand they are frustrated because they don’t know how to write. I also have students who read voraciously, but obviously want to be able to manipulate data and learn from the numbers evidence. I have a hypothesis that all students want to be balanced and have one area in their development that they feel needs to be enhanced. That’s where coming from scholarship about labor and human resource development really helps. I can identify gaps in student development and help students bridge those gaps. Any good union or any good unionized firm would do the same thing. I will have students in their first year come with me or go themselves to a hearing or community group to explain economic concepts to the group. Public speaking is a very important aspect of this job. I’ll have students sit with me while I talk to reporters, so that they can understand what kinds of questions reporters ask. I’m a real stickler for writing. Students are often shocked to find they have to buy a $4 copy of Deirdre McCloskey’s Economical Writing or Elements of Style.


GENDer AND SEXUALITY STUDIES

I. OVERVIEW

28


GENDer AND SEXUALITY STUDIES

Gender and Sexuality Studies Overview

Anthropology Economics International Affairs Philosophy Politics Psychology Sociology

The program prepares its students to recognize and respond to questions such as: What is gender? How is sexuality culturally constructed? How do attitudes toward gender affect individual experience, artifact design, artistic production, and modes of social organization? How do we respond to gender-based claims of injustice? What does social justice looks like in a gendered (or postgendered) world? The New School’s location in New York City offers GSS students unparalleled access to renowned research resources, experts, and institutions that include: The Lesbian Herstory Archives The Pat Parker/Vito Russo Center Library of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center Bluestockings bookstore The gay and lesbian and HIV/AIDS archival collections at the New York Public Library

Recent Courses

Media Studies

Gender Politics and History

Creative Writing

Fashion, Identity, and the Body

Fashion Studies

Transnational Queer Identities and Media

Visual Studies

Psychology of Women and Gender

Art and Design History

29 THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

Approach gender and sexuality from a range of disciplinary perspectives. The Graduate Certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies (GSS) is a university-wide 12-credit program that brings together faculty and courses from across The New School. The certificate is designed to foster intellectual collaboration on the study of gender and sexuality among students and faculty representing a variety of disciplines. Students can enroll in the certificate program while pursuing a graduate degree at The New School or enroll directly in the program on a full-time or part-time basis. GSS students can choose courses from a range of disciplines:


HISTORICAL Studies

I. OVERVIEW

30

II. DIALOGUES


HISTORICAL STudies

Historical Studies Overview

relating history to the contemporary world. Equipped with a robust critical apparatus for thinking about the modern world, our graduates pursue a wide variety of careers. Many enter PhD programs at NSSR or in history departments at other top universities. Others pursue careers in teaching, journalism, activism, government service, and other fields.

Degrees Offered Historical Studies offers the MA degree. Students with an MA in Historical Studies, Sociology, or Politics from The New School for Social Research may apply to study in the PhD program in Sociology or in Politics and receive their PhD while adding a specialization in Historical Studies. Students with an MA in History or Politics from another institution may apply for admission directly into the PhD program in Politics with a specialization in Historical Studies.

Recent Courses America’s Empires Historical Roots of Contemporary Populism Slavery, Race, Capital Historiography and Historical Practice Histories of Capitalism Zone Infrastructure: Histories of Finance, Globalization, and Territory

Recent Outcomes Ella Coon (MA ’19): Doctoral Student, Columbia University Deren Ertas (MA ’19): Doctoral Student, Harvard University Aidan Swanson (MA ’17): Head of Research, The New Historia Awis Nari Mranani (MA ’16): News Presenter and Producer, KOMPAS TV Gema Santamaria Balmaceda (PhD Sociology and Historical Studies ’15): Assistant Professor, ITAM

31 THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

Knowledge of history is critical to all human understanding. In keeping with the critical traditions of The New School, the program in Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research (NSSR) conceives of history as a way of thinking, a form of inquiry, and a mode of critique. Inspired by the program’s founders—Helen and Charles Tilly, Joan Scott, Perry Anderson, and Eric Hobsbawm—the faculty share a deep commitment to the historical interrogation of social power. The MA program combines training in history with coursework in the range of disciplines taught at NSSR. Its practice of interdisciplinarity rigorously engages with distinct ways of understanding the world. For historians, as well as our colleagues in other social sciences, The New School offers a special environment for fostering and amplifying interdisciplinary conversations. As members of the vibrant NSSR intellectual community, Historical Studies students and faculty investigate the past in order to address the most pressing questions of the present. Our course offerings cover a wide range of historical periods and world regions, with particular strength in the large-scale transformations of the modern era. Our diverse approaches to historical research reflect the insights of critical social theory. Areas of faculty expertise include the history of capitalism, the history of political violence, history and theory, and public history. Students enrolled in the terminal MA program receive intensive mentoring and collaborate with our faculty on a sustained basis. We prepare our students in the critical assessment of scholarship, the diverse methodologies of historical research, and the imaginative act of


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DIALOGUE 07

Finding Historical Connections Between Multiple Disciplines Federico Finchelstein Professor of History

pieces have focused on authoritarianism, populism, and the candidacy of Donald Trump. Finchelstein encourages this kind of public engagement in his students and teaches a course in which writing op-eds is a requirement. Students who come to study with Finchelstein can expect individualized attention and guidance. He prides himself on providing an intellectual environment in which students can investigate issues of interest to them in terms of their connections with both the academy and the public sphere. He co-edits books with students to help them advance their own research and establish their individual voices. In addition, Finchelstein’s interactions and collaborations with other Historical Studies faculty—including Julia Ott, a prominent intellectual specializing in the history of capitalism; Eli Zaretsky, a world-renowned historian of psychoanalysis; and Jeremy Varon, a scholar of political ideologies and the role of political violence—broaden his perspective, enabling him to give students a multifaceted historical education they would not receive elsewhere.

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Proof that polymaths not only exist but thrive at NSSR, Federico Finchelstein investigates the relationship between history and political theory, specializing in fascism, the Holocaust, genocide, Cold War dictatorships, and human rights violations. A member of a history department steeped in the interdisciplinary tradition, Finchelstein enriches and enhances his own work by collaborating with colleagues in political science, sociology, and philosophy. He now examines the dimensions of 20thcentury political ideology and practice, from fascism to populism, focusing on Argentina. Finchelstein recently published the Spanish-language book El mito del fascismo: De Freud a Borges, which analyzes the antifascist thinking of Sigmund Freud and the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Finchelstein is now working on a significantly enlarged version, with two more chapters on myth, fascism, and history, to be published in English. He also published a book, From Fascism to Populism in History, with the University of California Press in 2017, which has now been translated into several languages. Finchelstein’s extensive historical scholarship does not prevent him from turning his eye and his pen to present-day political concerns. One of the many NSSR professors who can be regarded as public intellectuals, Finchelstein often writes op-ed articles for national publications, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as international ones including major Argentine, Brazilian, and French newspapers. His recent opinion


DIALOGUE 08

Discussing the Past, Present, and Future of Capitalism with Julia Ott

Julia Ott Associate Professor of History 34

[00:00.00] Interviewer: What topics do you research and write about? What led you to be interested in those topics? And where do you see your research moving in the future? [00:00:15] Julia Ott: My interests lie in the history of capitalism. Specifically, I’m interested in capitalism as a historical phenomenon and as a social phenomenon that needs to be explained rather than assumed. My previous published work examines the development of the American financial markets in the 20th century. My current work focuses on the ideas behind the policies that gave rise to the inequality that we live with today. [00:01:08] IN: Now, in interrogating those ideas, do you ever put forth research or papers that challenge the way society does things now, or do you only focus on those ideas from a historical perspective? [00:01:35] JO: I would say that contemporary issues of economic justice inform my historical research. I think it’s important to study history and to know history as we debate the economic circumstances in which we live. An understanding of the past is fundamental to thinking about future possibilities for our economic system. [00:02:21] IN: Can you discuss your teaching methods in the context of NSSR’s history of heterodox pedagogy?

[00:02:37] JO: My approach to teaching in the history department is collaborative with students and informed by their interests and concerns. Within history I draw heavily upon primary sources, and I support students in pursuing their own primary research. As an NSSR professor, I teach students from multiple departments, exposing them to the literatures of many disciplines, but always grounding our work in history. My goal is for students to develop a thorough understanding of how different disciplines approach—both theoretically and empirically—capitalism, to understand it as an analytical concept and as a real-world phenomenon that varies across time and space. [00:04:33] IN: Provide more detail about your past role as leader of the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies. How did the position influence your teaching and research? [00:04:49] JO: The Heilbroner Center was an exciting endeavor for me. Leading the center helped me remain current on innovative trends in theories about capitalism. It kept me upto-date on research about the state of the national and global economies. It exposed me to a wide range of thinking and writing about the future of capitalism. Because the Heilbroner Center’s interests lie in developing both new approaches for studying capitalism empirically and innovative thinking about how to envision and achieve a more just economic future, it’s an exciting place for students. They augment their knowledge and they broaden their perspectives beyond the boundaries of their own discipline or program. Mainly, the Heilbroner Center helps students to think critically about capitalism in a robust and rigorous manner. [00:07:05] IN: What would you tell students interested in studying history here at NSSR, both about the department and about the school as a whole? [00:07:13] JO: I don’t think that there’s any better place for interdisciplinary exposure. Everything we do here is interdisciplinary,


DIALOGUE 08

whether or not it’s a co-taught situation, because students so often enroll in courses outside of their discipline. I don’t think students always realize that when professors are challenged, when they read and engage with new literature outside their disciplines, it keeps the professors engaged, it keeps them on their toes, it sparks new questions and lines of inquiry. We become more effective and more compelling instructors and advisors. It also makes for a more exciting classroom experience when you’re all learning together and nothing can be taken for granted or assumed. Students and faculty constantly generate new insights in this collaborative interdisciplinary atmosphere. It’s very exciting. [00:07:46] IN: What are the characteristics or traits that make for a great graduate student at NSSR?

[00:08:42] JO: I think after the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, people across this country and really around the world were not only dissatisfied with the measures that were taken but were also deeply aware and deeply disappointed that nobody seemed to be able to provide them with any good explanations. So I think there’s a newfound willingness to examine prior assumptions and conventional wisdom about our economic system and really try to reassess what we think we know in a very fundamental way. And a desire to think broadly about what’s possible within a capitalist economy and maybe even about what might lie beyond capitalism and whether, as a society, we should go there. To truly do this work requires theories and philosophies of justice, as well as comparative study across history, regions, and nations all over the world. 35

[00:08:23] IN: Recently there’s been a rise in the study of capitalism, both in the academy and then outside, as not just this monetary thing but as a social and political thing. Do you have any thoughts about why that shift has happened? And if you do, can you talk about that a little bit?

THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

[00:07:56] JO: A willingness and desire to examine their own fundamental assumptions, both as scholars and as citizens.


LIBERAL studies

I. OVERVIEW

36

II. DIALOGUE


LIBERAL studies

Liberal Studies Overview Degrees Offered The Liberal Studies program offers the MA degree. Students who fulfill MA requirements in one of the six PhD-granting departments in the course of completing the MA in Liberal Studies may petition for admission to PhD study in that department. Below are some recent master’s thesis titles that reflect student creativity and interests. Futurism, Fascism, and Henri Bergson’s Philosophy of Time The Aura of the Brand: Nike and Postmodern Capitalism Camp Aesthetics in Andy Warhol

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Biblical Allusions in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra

THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

Design your own interdisciplinary curriculum. The Committee on Liberal Studies brings together students interested in research and writing in the humanities and social sciences. In conjunction with a faculty advisor, students can choose courses that cover historical and contemporary philosophy, intellectual history, literature, the arts, media, critical theory, publishing, and writing. With only two required courses, Liberal Studies gives students the freedom to design a curriculum that best meets their academic interests and career goals. The program is designed for selfdirected students who want to improve the quality of their prose while mastering new modes of serious inquiry, either within an academic context or with the goal of engagement in the wider public sphere. Special attention is paid to the history of Western thought, but courses also explore current developments in global culture(s) and contemporary critical theory. A significant percentage of students seek to build a strong and broad intellectual base before choosing a PhD program in a humanities or social science discipline, whether at The New School for Social Research or elsewhere. Some develop careers in writing, journalism, or publishing; some aim for professions that benefit from a broad knowledge base, such as law, business, curatorial practice, or work with nonprofits. Others simply want a richer engagement with the culture of our times—and times past—independent of any particular professional goal. Students will encounter faculty engaged in critical media theory, like Dominic Pettman, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark, as well as distinguished journalists and creative writers, including Jed Perl, art critic with the New Republic, and Robert Boyers, editor of the literary quarterly Salmagundi.

The Pinochet Case: Universal Jurisdiction and State Sovereignty The Concept of Self-Government in Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln Franz Kafka and Hannah Arendt’s Image of Totalitarianism

Recent Courses Aesthetics: Literature and Arts The Fate of the Novel Pessimism American Dialectics: Art in New York After 1945 Thinking Technology Studies in Radical Aesthetics: The Ideas and Practice of Political Theater

Recent Outcomes Katalin van Harreveld (MA ’18): Researcher and Producer, Radiolab Ginger Dellenbaugh (MA ’17): Doctoral Student, Yale University Laina Dawes (MA ’16): Doctoral Student, Columbia University Sonia Qadir (MA ’16): Legal Advisor, Punjab Commission on the Status of Women


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DIALOGUE 09

Research Without Boundaries Dominic Pettman Professor of Culture and Media

to the next chapter in the ceaselessly unfolding history of ideas. Although the department lacks traditional boundaries, Pettman cautions people not to think of Liberal Studies as a chaotic free-for-all for unfocused students. Rather, he says, it is for motivated students who want a second or third way to research mindfully and rigorously. Students need to be self-directed, but they always have the support and guidance of faculty to help them forge their own path, think clearly about topics, and produce exceptional writing. Pettman describes Liberal Studies as a “boutique program” in which students are matched with faculty and advisors to provide the most rewarding tailored experience possible.

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When you staff a program with professors from every discipline at The New School for Social Research, rigorous interdisciplinary scholarship is bound to follow. In fact, it confronts you at every turn. As professor of culture and media, Dominic Pettman helps students contextualize the intellectual history of ideas and social thought through a theoretical framework that doesn’t confine those ideas to any particular field or area of study. This approach to teaching completely suits Pettman, an academic who has studied a number of methods and disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. He notes that this approach gives students “who refuse to choose” the ability to decide on an academic direction while also participating in intense intellectual inquiry. With a background in literary theory, philosophy, media theory, and cultural studies, Pettman tackles big questions— What is the human? What is the relationship of the human to technology? What is love? What is beauty? What is power?—and the way those questions are inflected through specific media like books, films, and video games. His latest work asks the metaphysical and political question of what deserves to have a voice, ultimately arguing that society should broaden the population of entities that can have this all-important opportunity. Pettman has also started to research and write about libidinal ecology—the link between sex and the environment—and aims to answer the question, What is the carbon footprint of your libido? He, like the rest of the faculty in the program, continually tries to invent new concepts and produce new models to contribute


DIALOGUE 10

Paul Kottman Discusses Questions Only the Humanities Can Answer [00:02:48] IN: The Internet has made it possible for researchers like you to explore fields outside of their own. How do scholars contend with the vast amount of data available for research?

Paul Kottman Associate Professor of Literary Studies 40

[00:00:00] Interviewer: What led you to the themes explored in your latest book, Love As Human Freedom (Stanford University Press, 2017), in which you examine the ways romantic love expresses human experience? [00:00:15] Paul Kottman: While teaching a summer course in Verona, every day I would walk past the balcony that Shakespeare’s tragic lover Juliet allegedly used. What interested me was its grasp on the tourist imagination, the number of visitors from parts of the world that don’t, so to speak, have the same myth of romantic love as the Shakespearean version. It was the quasiuniversal appeal of the Romeo and Juliet story that got me thinking. Instead of trying to figure out what love is—a fool’s errand—I began by asking, “What does love make sense of?” This question sits alongside the social practices Hegel describes as the most fundamental ways humans across cultures explain themselves to themselves: art, religion, and philosophy. I wondered what it would mean to add sexual love to the list, as a historically shifting, trans-historical way of making sense of human life and the claims of nature. That’s how the book got started. I think there are questions in the humanities for which the mastery of a particular subject matter is necessary but not sufficient to respond. In that sense, it’s not a discipline-based book, although I put a lot of disciplinary work into it.

[00:03:12] PK: In the information-saturated world we live in, there is a tendency to substitute information for knowledge, to think that “if I’m informed, I’m no longer ignorant.” But there is a difference between being informed and knowing, or understanding, something. I can, for example, be informed that there was once such a thing as human sacrifice in various ancient cultures. But that doesn’t answer the questions, What is human sacrifice, actually? What kind of value does it express? Those questions can’t be answered by more information—collecting data doesn’t answer the fundamental questions. What the human sciences, the humanities, can do is foreground that first question: What is a cultural product or social practice, anyway? [00:04:43] IN: Is that perspective typical of Liberal Studies at The New School? [00:04:57] PK: My colleagues and I at Liberal Studies realize that there are important questions to study in a sustained way that aren’t necessarily addressable within a more narrow disciplinary context—questions such as, What is living a free life, and why does it matter? and, When is the coercive violence of the state legitimate? Even classical “political science” questions seem not always to have straightforward, discipline-based answers. What I sometimes call “meaning and value” questions—What do we care about, and why? How do different forms of meaning work, and what do they require of us as interpreters?—are to some extent addressed in the study of literature, film, and so forth. But often the questions overlap fields, not just interdisciplinarily but transdisciplinarily. I think of our program as experimentally working out a set of programmatic answers to these questions at the curricular level.


DIALOGUE 10

[00:07:14] IN: What would you say to a prospective student about the Liberal Studies community?

[00:10:02] IN: In what ways do you want liberal studies scholars at NSSR to be daring in their research? [00:10:27] PK: One of the hardest things for us all is to figure out how to cut through ideological truisms—whatever those might be—in ways that get us to rethink things and ask what they really are, or what they mean. That’s hard to do. But it’s made easier when done collectively. What I always hope for from students, and I imagine they hope for it from me, is that we achieve that conversation together.

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[00:07:31] PK: The virtue of The New School is that the conversation is at a very high level. The kind of “gentlemanly distance” that often characterizes official discussions at some universities—where there’s a hesitance to have a public conversation— doesn’t exist at NSSR. Real conversation is crucial for intellectual life. And I think that students at NSSR find it exhilarating that we actually do talk to one another in seminars and workshops and as faculty. That doesn’t happen everywhere. Also, the international character of The New School is a huge benefit. It’s much harder to retreat into a parochial, limited worldview when you’re confronted on a daily basis with people whose formations are different and who have different questions, backgrounds, and formative texts which they’ve read.


PHILOSOPHY

I. OVERVIEW

II. DIALOGUES

42

FPONew photoshoot


PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy Overview

dissertations, the topics of which have recently included: Ethical modernism and political atrocity The nature of poetry and ethics The ethico-political ground of ancient Greek thinking Religiosity in John Dewey

The Department of Philosophy reflects the interdisciplinary tradition of its original faculty through the research and writing of its members as well as its distinctive collaborative courses.

Degrees Offered The Department of Philosophy offers MA and PhD degrees. Students who complete MA requirements with sufficient distinction may be considered for admission to PhD study. In rare cases, the department grants direct PhD admission to applicants who have completed a comparable MA in Philosophy at another institution. MA students can also complete a concentration in Psychoanalytic Studies.

Recent Courses Philosophy and Images Modern Aesthetics Kant on Freedom and Normativity Embodied Cognition Contemporary Pragmatism

Recent Outcomes Joseph Lemelin (PhD ’18): Berggruen Postdoctoral Fellow, New York University Jordi Graupera (PhD ’17): Postdoctoral Scholar, Princeton University Daniel Esparza (MA ’16): Doctoral Student, Columbia University Eric Godoy (PhD ’15): Assistant Professor, Illinois State University

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Immerse yourself in an atmosphere of exploration and inquiry. The New School for Social Research (NSSR) has always attracted renowned scholars from around the world who foster an engaging and thoughtful environment through their teaching and research. The eminent philosophers who have helped create and sustain an intellectually vibrant department of philosophy include Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Aron Gurwitsch, and Reiner Schürmann. The focus of study in the Department of Philosophy is the history of Western philosophical thought and the European philosophical tradition, particularly contemporary Continental philosophy. The graduate curriculum consists of two components. The first is the study of major figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Spinoza, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Freud, Gadamer, Adorno, Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Derrida. The second is the study of the movements, schools, branches, and ideas associated with those figures. Philosophy at The New School is thus the study of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and pragmatism; political and social thought; ethics, critical theory, and aesthetics; epistemology, metaphysics, and ontology; logic and language; rationality, methodology, and naturalism within the social sciences; truth, nature, culture, beauty, tragedy, and goodness; unconscious and conscious processes; and contingency, necessity, and human freedom. Faculty and students have explored these philosophers and their ideas in depth through research and


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DIALOGUE 11

Thinking and Writing Beyond the Academy: Philosophy and the Real World Simon Critchley Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy

in each student—marks the first step in helping students find their own voice, one unconstrained by popular ideas of the ways in which a student is supposed to write. He works to curb students’ perfectionism by deflating their idea of him. As Critchley shows students early drafts of his work and they see the multiple revision processes he goes through, they begin to understand that everyone needs time to shape his or her ideas, including Critchley. To become Critchley’s student, though, you first have to get through his gauntlet of dissuasion. He feels that one should always try to discourage people from studying philosophy in graduate school and present them with the worst possible outcome. If a prospective student remains interested after being presented with bleak prospects, Critchley feels that one should welcome that student with open arms and do everything to help them. He believes it’s his job to prepare students for lives both within and outside of academics after they graduate, noting that a philosophy education has just as many applications in mainstream society as it does in the academic world.

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Simon Critchley defines who he is and what he thinks by the books he writes. As a writer who prefers to publish with commercial rather than academic presses, he sees his work as both serving the academy and reaching beyond it to connect with other parts of the world. Critchley says that he often can’t explain what he is going to do before he does it. Instead, he spends months reading what interests him until ideas begin to take shape. Only then does he begin writing, keeping the process loose and discovering new avenues along the way. Critchley forged an unusual path to becoming a renowned philosophy professor. Never planning to become an academic, Critchley left school at 16 and played in bands until he entered college at 22. This background has led Critchley to continually try to do things—like writing books or giving lectures—in a new way. His need to explore different directions means he and his work are constantly evolving. The ideas about which Critchley writes inform the ideas he teaches and vice versa. Often lecture notes become the basis for Critchley’s next book. Not one to maintain a rigid relationship with his students, Critchley welcomes their book and music recommendations, which often influence his own writing. His most recent books have covered topics as diverse as David Bowie, soccer, and ancient Greek tragedy. Critchley states that only by truly listening and interacting with students can one discover their interests and thought processes. Critchley’s mission— to uncover the “legitimate strangeness”


DiAlogue 12

Interrogating the Philosophical Canon: A Conversation with Chiara Bottici

Chiara Bottici Associate Professor of Philosophy 46

[00:00:00] Interviewer: What are your intellectual interests? And what led you to be interested in those particular topics? Where do you see your work going in the future? [00:00:20] Chiara Bottici: I would characterize my work as being at the crossroads of critical theory and history of philosophy. And I think that to a large extent this defines our profile as a department. I always say that it’s an irony of our world that in order to do European philosophy, I had to come to The New School, which is on the other side of the Atlantic. But that’s largely true in the sense that it’s really one of the best departments—if not the best—in this country to do European philosophy. Despite its location in the United States, NSSR tries to merge European and American traditions in a truly unique way. Now within this general profile, my work is specifically devoted to the questions of imagination, myth, and memory and the way in which they influence our politics. Behind this lies a more fundamental interest in the problem of political emancipation. To put it bluntly: In a time that is so dominated by images, can we think of a use of images and imagination that actually paves the way for some form of emancipatory politics, as opposed to a repressive one? All my work—whether it’s about myth or about memory or about imagination or images in general—revolves around the questions: Where is the new coming from? What are

our possibilities to get out of a mechanism of domination? What I think is specific to my area of scholarship (and I would say of our department in particular) is the fact that the history of philosophy, which we take pretty seriously, is always done from the perspective of a critical theory of society. So we look at the past, but not with a contemplative attitude toward what has been. We look at the past from the point of view of our being situated in the present and looking at the future. In this sense, a critical theory of society and history of philosophy are two sides of the same coin. We are the result of where we’ve come from, but at the same time, the way in which we look at our past is always situated in the present. When I teach, I always say to students, this is what I am, this is where I stand, and this is why I’m interested in these particular philosophers. Having said that, I’ve also had strong training in the historical method for doing European philosophy, and I do believe that it’s not my task to tell students what they should think. What I always try to provide in classes is the tools for reading texts independently. I’m also very well aware that the choice of a certain author also reflects a certain identity or position in the present. But I always make this awareness explicitly clear. And I would say it’s quite extraordinary how many different readings can come out of the classes. I’m always impressed by how students manage to cultivate views that are so different from what I think, which is a good sign. [00:07:37] IN: What particular philosophers do you study or teach? [00:07:43] CB: I usually teach central figures in the so-called philosophical canon. I think that our students should have the professional tools needed to read philosophical classics. Unfortunately, the canon is largely geared towards white male philosophers. So I try to compensate by also teaching more marginal figures, that is, people who are not usually included in the canon and who can throw a different light


dialogue 12

on the canon itself. Now, for instance, I’m teaching a class on gender and domination where we read not only mostly female philosophers but also texts that not everyone would classify as canonical philosophical texts. We read texts that question the typical way of doing philosophy, texts that parody or reverse the canon.

them as one of the crucial places for understanding the mechanism of domination more in general.

[00:09:54] IN: Can you talk a little bit more about how you help students find their own voice and how you help them work on their own projects?

[00:16:59] CB: I would say that it’s a unique place. NSSR has a strong grounding in the Continental tradition, which is rare in the United States, but it is also a department that tries to combine it with the U.S.-based philosophical tradition. In that respect, the program is unique because it displays an open approach that is hard to find anywhere else. Most of the U.S. graduate philosophy departments are either Continental or analytic, which means more European– or U.S.–oriented. Our department stands out for being truly open to conversations happening on both sides of the divide. I think you also see this openness reflected in NSSR overall. As I said before, it’s a special place, which merges different cultural traditions in a way that is not so easy to find elsewhere. It was not by chance that NSSR began as the University in Exile.

[00:12:17] CB: Most of my students do interdisciplinary work. Since I work at the crossroads of philosophy, social science, and aesthetics, I have a lot of students who are interested in either social science issues or aesthetic problems. I think that philosophy is particularly well equipped to travel across disciplines because of its very nature. So a lot of our students actually work in an interdisciplinary fashion. I have students working on myths and ideology who are using both historical and philosophical tools. I have students working on aesthetics who are artists themselves but still intermix their art practice with philosophical reasoning. I have students working on gender issues, which is one of the most multidisciplinary fields of research one can imagine. If what you’re interested in is the way in which gender and the body are dominated, you must have a multidisciplinary approach to unpack those forms of domination. I have to say that I’m becoming more and more interested in gender issues, as I see

47 THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

[00:10:07] CB: Actually in this sense, I have to say that our students don’t need much help from us. I don’t think students need help finding their own voices and projects. What you need to do is build an environment where they have the tools for doing so in a professionally recognizable way. I provide my students with the technical skills as well as interpretative skills for doing their projects, and then their own voice automatically speaks through. [00:11:38] IN: Can you describe how you work across disciplines within the context of being in the philosophy department and how you encourage students to do work across disciplines if they are interested?

[00:16:30] IN: And what would you tell prospective students about the philosophy department specifically and NSSR as a whole?


POLITICS

I. OVERVIEW

48

II. DIALOGUES


POLITICS

Politics Overview

Degrees Offered The Department of Politics offers MA and PhD degrees. Students who complete MA requirements with sufficient distinction may be considered for admission to PhD study. In rare cases, the department grants direct PhD admission to applicants who have completed a comparable MA in Politics at another institution. Students with an MA in Historical Studies, Sociology, or Politics from The New School for Social Research or an MA in History or Politics from another institution may apply to study in the PhD program in Politics and receive their PhD while adding a specialization in Historical Studies.

Recent Courses Global Political Economy: History and Theory Democracy: Ancient and Modern States and Markets in China Critiques of Capitalism Social Movements Postcolonial and Feminist Theories of International Relations

Recent Outcomes Jan Dutkiewicz (PhD ’18): Caplan Postdoctoral Fellow, Johns Hopkins University Brandon Koenig (PhD ’18): Assistant Professor, Franklin & Marshall College Howell Williams (PhD ’17): Assistant Professor, Western Connecticut State University Alix Jansen (MA ’16): Doctoral Student, University of Toronto Nahema Alexia Marchal (MA ’16): Content Editor, Dow Jones Claudia Sampson (MA ’16): Chief Diversity Officer, NYC Department of Finance Hjalte Lokdam (MA ’14): Doctoral Student, London School of Economics

49 THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

To study politics is to study power. The Department of Politics at The New School for Social Research (NSSR) takes a distinctive approach to the study of politics, emphasizing political theory, political economy, and the challenges of democracy. Courses in American, global, and comparative politics focus on the historical roots of contemporary political forces. Ongoing faculty research looks at topics including grassroots politics in the United States, Russia’s relation to Ukraine, Indian party politics and law, climate change in the Himalayas, migration and deportation in the Pacific and Australia, and the political pressures of civil society in China. The department actively participates in the interdisciplinary intellectual life of NSSR, including the activities of the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies, the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, and the online platform, Public Seminar. Students who go on to doctoral study gain proficiency in two of the four areas of instruction offered by the department: American politics, comparative politics, political theory, and global politics. Students in the Department of Politics also belong to the broader community of The New School for Social Research, which gives them access to a wide array of extracurricular lectures, conferences, and seminars. Interactions with scholars from different regions, with unique perspectives and fresh ideas, make the study of politics at NSSR an academically enriching, personally gratifying experience.


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DIALOGUE 13

The Power and Passion of Discourse Deva Woodly Associate Professor of Politics

Woodly is quick to note that social media is not a panacea, but it has been a useful tool for movements savvy enough to realize that it is a dynamic means of communication rather than a substitute for old-fashioned face-to-face organizing. Ultimately, Woodly wants her work to help people understand how powerful they are and how to use that power to do good. Passionate students with a keen interest in a particular field or area of study excite Woodly. As a scholar who combines empirical and theoretical methods in her own work, she encourages her students to do the same, by exposing them to the thinkers or data that will add another dimension to their work. Woodly feels that this combination is the very definition of praxis. Interested in knowledge for its uses, she hopes theory and data will help students develop their creative problemsolving capacities and lead them to new kinds of meaning and social change.

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Drawing from political science, economics, sociology, and anthropology, Deva Woodly emphasizes, “I’m a heterodox thinker. My work is interdisciplinary in and of itself.” She aims to move away from the formality of creating an interdisciplinary educational experience and instead naturally and effortlessly expose students to the whole breadth of sources. As she frees herself from traditional siloed thinking, she encourages her students to do the same and strive for rigor as the ultimate standard. When people talk, Deva Woodly listens, and not just to individuals, but to groups, too. She analyzes how people articulate their own situations, how they see the world, and how these discourses circulate online. The examination of the discourses of ordinary people reveals how their words and ideas affect the political sphere and shape our views of what is possible. The cornerstone of Woodly’s work is the question of how individuals come to view their place in various groups and how these groups can mobilize into effective social movements. In her research, she tracks the way movements since the late 20th century have used blogs and social media to create spaces for self-articulation, frame messages to the wider world, and spur individuals to action. Woodly continues to study this topic as a 2019–2020 fellow-in-residence at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.


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DIALOGUE 14

A Sustainable Movement to Interrogate Capitalism Nancy Fraser Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science

movements start and, more important, how they can be sustained over a long period of time. Fraser advocates for an institutionalized structure to maintain movements’ energy and momentum— a view with which many of her students disagree. This disagreement doesn’t dampen the debate, however; it strengthens it by forcing Fraser and her students to ask more questions. For Fraser, NSSR’s passionate and intellectual student body makes the school the only place she could see herself teaching. As a graduate student in New York City in the 1970s, she often attended seminars at NSSR and was struck by the intensity of the scholarship at the school. Years later, when she had the chance to join the faculty, Fraser did not hesitate. She prides herself on being a part of a politics department that stresses theory, conceptual debate, and intellectual critique. The environment forces students to think deeply and critically about how to conceptualize problems. Fraser, in turn, helps her students construct their own voices as writers and thinkers, to convey why a particular problem is of importance to them and how their approaches differ from those of other scholars.

53 THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

Nancy Fraser believes that the way to interrogate a system like capitalism that infiltrates every aspect of modern life is through an interdisciplinary lens. Through her research, she examines three institutions: public power, or the state and legal authority; social reproduction, the unwaged domestic work done in families, neighborhoods, and communities that supports paid wage labor; and sustainable ecological infrastructure, in order to consider the contradictory relationships the first two institutions have to the dominant economy. Never one to work in a vacuum, Fraser says her best ideas arise in an environment of discussion and exchange. She currently writes and presents a series of essays that lay out her critique of capitalism in tandem with notions like the relationship between free wage labor and capitalism’s historic dependence on slavery and colonial subjugation. In addition, Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi coauthored Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (Polity), a book that delves into the strengths and weaknesses of each scholar’s theories on capitalism. Along with NSSR colleague Cinzia Arruzza and Tithi Bhattacharya, she also wrote Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (Verso). Although her ideas rely heavily on a theoretical framework, Fraser reaches beyond the academy to the public at large. She eschews the mainstream political establishment in favor of social movements that grapple with deep societal ills. A participant in and student of the movements of the 1960s, Fraser has always been interested in how


PSYCHOLOGY

I. OVERVIEW

54

II. DIALOGUES


PSYCHOLOGY

Psychology Overview

Degrees Offered The Department of Psychology offers MA and PhD degrees. All psychology students at The New School for Social Research (NSSR) enter through the master’s program. Students matriculated in the psychology master’s program must formally apply to continue study in either the Cognitive, Social, and Developmental PhD program or the Clinical PhD program. There are two MA tracks. The General Psychology MA provides a comprehensive view of the field. This graduate program offers qualified students the option of an intensive research experience, allowing them to work closely with a faculty member on an empirical research project, write an MA thesis based on this project, and defend the thesis in an oral examination. Students with MA degrees from other universities may be eligible for Advanced Standing in the MA program. Advanced Standing is not automatically granted; it is awarded at the discretion of the admission committee and is reserved for students who have sufficient transferable credit and who have achieved excellence in their studies. Eligible students, including those who complete the MA at NSSR and those awarded Advanced Standing, may apply to the Clinical PhD program or the Cognitive, Social, and Developmental Psychology PhD program after at least one semester of study at The New School for Social Research.

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Contribute to a tradition of psychological scholarship sensitive to social, cultural, and political concerns. The Department of Psychology was founded as part of the University in Exile by the pioneering Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer. Over the years, its distinguished faculty has included Leon Festinger, Jerome Bruner, Hans Wallach, Irving Rock, Kurt Goldstein, Serge Moscovici, Solomon Asch, Sándor Ferenczi, and Erich Fromm. At the master’s level, the department offers a program in general psychology that provides students with in-depth training in all the major fields of psychology. After students complete their master’s degree, they can apply to two doctoral programs through a separate application process: the PhD in Cognitive, Social, and Developmental Psychology (CSD) and the PhD in Clinical Psychology. Every attempt is made to promote an interdisciplinary approach to psychological issues and foster interaction between the CSD and Clinical Psychology programs. PhD students are free to work with faculty from either area. While in the program, master’s and doctoral students also have the option of taking classes offered through the Concentration in Mental Health and Substance Abuse Counseling to gain additional training in working with substance use in clinical settings. In addition, MA students can focus on the Global Mental Health subject area.


PSYCHOLOGY

Cognitive, Social, and Developmental Psychology PhD

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The Cognitive, Social, and Developmental Psychology doctoral program emphasizes cultural psychology as a framework within which to understand basic psychological theories and promotes an approach to psychology that is sensitive to sociocultural diversity both within the United States and internationally. Considerable attention is also given to cognitive neuroscience as well as other biologically based perspectives for explaining cognitive and social processes. Overall, the research conducted in the program reflects a broad-based perspective that supports diverse methodological approaches and that encourages interdisciplinary work. The graduate program is based on an apprenticeship model in which students work closely with individual faculty both on collaborative research projects and on their dissertation research. Students concentrate in cognitive, social, or developmental psychology but are welcome to bridge these concentrations with courses, research, and work with faculty.

Clinical Psychology PhD The Clinical Psychology doctoral program follows the scientist-practitioner model of clinical training and is accredited by the American Psychological Association (APA). It combines a psychoanalytic emphasis with cognitive behavioral approaches while emphasizing the importance of pursuing and maintaining integration between scholarship and real-world concerns. The program encourages respect for and understanding of cultural and individual diversity. It also recognizes the importance of understanding the roles of culture and context (both social and historical)

in mediating healthy psychological development, psychopathology, and psychotherapeutic change. In its clinical training, the program is pluralistic, with an emphasis on psychoanalytically informed practice. The Safran Center for Psychological Services and the first-year external practicum provide a solid foundation for students’ clinical experience. From the first year to the end of the program, the practicums are designed to develop competencies and meet training goals. The amount, intensity, and breadth of experience gained each year in the program go well beyond what can be expected from most internship sites.

Recent Courses Social Psychology Body as Metaphor Development and Psychopathology Cognitive Psychology Evidence-Based Treatment Advanced Issues in Substance Abuse Child and Adolescent Global Mental Health Visual Perception and Cognition Field Work in Political and Social Psychology Ethnicity in Clinical Theory and Practice


PSYCHOLOGY

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Psychology—Clinical Kerrin Danskin (PhD ’16): Postdoctoral Fellow, Princeton University Jennifer Doran (PhD ’16): Postdoctoral Fellow, Yale School of Medicine and VA Connecticut Chakira Haddock-Lazala (PhD ’16): Postdoctoral Clinical Fellow, Cambridge Health Alliance–Harvard University

Psychology—Cognitive, Social, and Developmental Tracey Rogovin (PhD ’17): Professor, Kingsborough Community College Matthew Wice (PhD ’17): Postdoctoral Fellow, The New School Aileen Alagh (MA ’16): Assistant Search Planner, Neo@Ogilvy

Serina Persaud (PhD ’16): Postdoctoral Fellow, Columbia University

Eran Barzilai (MA ’16): Mental Health Counselor, St. Ann’s Corner of Harm Reduction

Jenna Slutsky (PhD ’16): Postdoctoral Fellow, New York Presbyterian Hospital, Columbia University Medical Center

Rose Bolella (MA ’16): Youth Development Coordinator, Community Health Action of Staten Island

William Somerville (PhD ’16): Clinical Psychologist, Mental Health Service Corps/ ThriveNYC

Bernadette Gerrity (MA ’16): Junior Trader, Rothfos Corporation

Catherine Boutwell (PhD ’15): Postdoctoral Fellow, Columbia University Medical Center Julia Broder (PhD ’15): Psychologist, SUNY Stony Brook

Rene Holl (PhD ’16): User Experience Lead, Millennium Management Rosemarisa Pezzo (MA ’16): Assistant Trainer and Therapeutic Riding Instructor, Buffalo Therapeutic Riding Center Andria Schmid (MA ’16): Data and Evaluation Associate, Broome Street Academy Charter High School Alissa von Malachowski (MA ’16): Cognitive Remediation Therapist, Columbia University Medical Center

THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

Recent Outcomes


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DIALOGUE 15

Transforming Memory Research Through Interdisciplinary Exchange William Hirst Malcolm B. Smith Professor of Psychology

the surface of the skin,” as he puts it, it is more accurate to say that the mind extends outward into the larger world. Unlike a computer, which stores memory in a static way, human recollection is dynamic and social, simultaneously drawing from and influencing its environment. Understanding this process is important because it is through collective remembering and forgetting that individual and cultural identities are formed and history determined. Seeing how intellectual exchange across disciplines reinvigorated his research, Hirst is an eager proponent of that kind of dialogue. He says that NSSR’s Psychology program in particular has embraced the approach. In the study of cognitive, social, and developmental psychology, the department intentionally recruits scholars whose interests reach beyond the academic setting to encompass larger social issues. “We bring together individuals who are deeply and profoundly engaged in the way in which living in a social world shapes our cognitions.”

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Professor William Hirst explores the opaque folds of the mind. Focusing mainly on human memory, his research offers insights into how people comprehend the world and what cognitive elements shape both individual and collective identity. Hirst studied under Ulric Neisser and George Miller, two giants of cognitive psychology. His early research centered on language and the biological underpinnings of memory. At the heart of his inquiry was an investigation of how the individual mind functions in isolation. Looking back, Hirst admits that this methodology itself was isolated— involving little to no discourse with disciplines beyond cognitive psychology. It was not until he came to NSSR that Hirst began to actively engage with scholars of the humanities and other social sciences. “From an intellectual point of view,” he explains, “The New School was a transformative place in that it allowed me to really think in an interdisciplinary way.” This transformation led Hirst to realize that memory cannot be understood in isolation. Slowly moving away from studying the biology of the brain, he became more interested in the effects of social interaction and context on memory. According to Hirst, remembering is a form of communication. While many of us imagine that the mind “ends at


DIALOGUE 16

Tackling the Escalation and De-escalation of Conflict with Jeremy Ginges

Jeremy Ginges Associate Professor of Psychology 60

[00:00:00] Interviewer: What are the research topics that interest you? How did you become interested in those topics? Where do you see your research going in the future? [00:00:30] Jeremy Ginges: I have two core interests, which function as two sides of the same coin. I study acute conflicts that lead to political violence, like conflicts in the Middle East. I’m interested in the psychology of conflict escalation and what makes some conflicts really difficult to solve. For example, what is it about how we reason and think about intergroup conflicts and intergroup disputes that make them difficult to resolve? I’m also interested in the other side, de-escalating conflict. I think in some ways one side feeds into the other. If I can begin to understand why those conflicts are difficult to resolve, I can then design interventions that might make resolution easier. [00:01:39] IN: Can you give some examples? [00:01:47] JG: For a while I’ve been doing research on the specific types of values people assign to disputed issues in intergroup conflicts. Let’s say there’s a dispute over land, and one side regards that land as being holy. I’ve examined how a spiritual context affects both parties’ reasoning. Through my work, I’ve found in a negotiation over land, people who think of the land as an ordinary material resource are more likely to compromise if

offered something like money. However, if that land is perceived as holy and has spiritual connotations, offering material compensation can backfire, leading to more opposition to compromise. In other words, better deals can yield worse results. Inappropriate compensation can actually escalate a conflict. My work has also examined how one group responds when the opposing side offers a dramatic symbolic concession that does not have tangible real-world value, that is not money or resources, but instead an apology. I have found that can work. Another area of my research examines how we understand the motives for aggression and violence. In work I recently published, we researched ideological conflicts between liberals and conservatives in the United States and violent conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East. Both sides think that their own side’s aggression—violence, in the Middle Eastern case—is motivated by their affection for their own group, while the other side is motivated by hate. These beliefs are incredibly important. The more I believe the other side is motivated by hate for me, the more likely I am to think the conflict is unresolvable, and I am going to reject compromise solutions. An entire series of downstream consequences of this bias exists. In a study we conducted in the United States, we created an intervention where we encouraged people to think more accurately about the opposing side’s motives, and offered people financial prizes for their success. If we can get people to be more accurate about what motivates the other side, even in their awful, despicable behaviors, we can create opportunities for conflict resolution. [00:05:32] IN: NSSR has a history of heterodox, interdisciplinary education. With your research on conflict, do you find yourself interacting with people in the sociology or politics department? And if so, how does that influence both your research and your teaching?


DIALOGUE 16

[00:07:06] JG: The research that we do in our lab is really collaborative, and I often interact with people from different disciplines. I work closely with an anthropologist, and I also collaborate quite frequently with political scientists and neuroscientists. Most of the interdisciplinary influences of NSSR on the work we do in our lab tend to come from students taking courses outside of psychology and bringing those experiences and scholarship into the lab. [00:08:34] IN: How do you approach working with graduate students? Do you co-author papers with them? Do you help them with their research process?

[00:09:58] IN: What would you tell prospective students about the school as a whole and the Psychology program specifically? What would you tell them about working with you? [00:10:29] JG: We’re a small department, but every single member of this department does research that is really interesting, relevant to mainstream psychology, and cutting edge. We find innovative solutions to problems and publish in major journals. If you join my lab, you will be working with me to develop theoretically innovative work that tackles some of the most important practical problems in the world today. We examine a problem like intractable conflict or opposition to resettlement of refugees. To address practical problems, we ask theoretical questions—for example, What don’t we understand about human nature that might help us to address this problem?

[00:12:30] IN: And in your attempt to solve real-world problems, has your research resulted in any type of policy change—be it big or small? [00:12:51] JG: Different members of my team of collaborators have presented our research and results to places like the National Security Council, the White House, and the House of Lords in the United Kingdom, and in briefings with different leaders around the world. We’ve published op-eds about our work in places like the New York Times. Other writers have also featured our work in the New York Times and Newsweek. We’re influencing the discourse. The depth of the effect is difficult to discern. But in the sense of influencing public discourse about the problems, I think we’re having an effect.

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[00:08:57] JG: The way we work here is that it’s really a collaborative process. When first-year master’s students come into my lab, they learn about the different studies that we’re running and begin working on one study with me or with a more senior graduate student. Over time, those students will come up with their own ideas. But in psychology, even when students enter the doctoral phase, everything is going to be collaborative. One of the things that I like about working with graduate students is that I sometimes find myself working on a study I would not have conceived of on my own. You develop this collaborative understanding of one another’s interests, and that combination leads to something new.

We attempt to solve real-world problems. We’re not simply working on abstract ideas. I was recently elected a fellow in the Association of Psychological Science in recognition of sustained outstanding contribution for the work we’re doing in the lab.


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DIALOGUE 17

The Link Between Clinical Research and Social Good Miriam Steele Professor of Psychology

Another facet of Steele’s research focuses on body representation and attachment, specifically mothers’ feelings about their bodies and the way in which they transmit these feelings to their toddler daughters. Her research has shown that mothers with a history of secure attachment are able to give more coherent and reflective responses about their bodies than mothers who have insecure attachment states of mind. Steele also found that the toddler girls’ responses to the sight of their own bodies in a mirror were predicted by their mothers’ history of secure attachment. She hopes the findings from the study will reach policymakers and begin to influence the way girls are portrayed in the media, particularly within the mother-child relationship. Steele uses her lab, which she co-directs with Professor Howard Steele, to get students involved in all levels of research. She often has PhD students supervise master’s students, and master’s students supervise undergraduate students, so that the exchange of knowledge isn’t solely from professor to student but from peer to peer as well. Steele notes that the theoretically driven nature of the psychology department is best suited to students who want to challenge themselves to think beyond typical evidence-based clinical psychology to understand concepts at a deeper level.

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Dedicated to research that extends beyond the confines of a lab to reshape our society for the better, Miriam Steele is interested as much in influencing public policy as she is in helping patients and developing knowledge. Steele focuses on both the macro and the micro effects of complex phenomena like childhood trauma and maltreatment and women’s negative attitudes toward their bodies, with the aim of ending cycles of abuse in families and the ripple effects of that abuse throughout society. Steele’s largest research project, called the Group Attachment Based Intervention (GABI), is designed to prevent child maltreatment among socially isolated families living in poverty with children ages zero to three. Conducted in partnership with Montefiore Hospital, the group meets three times a week. The group setting of the intervention is integral to the therapeutic process, as it gives the family members—many of whom have experienced trauma in their past, including physical, sexual, and emotional abuse— the opportunity to interact with likeminded peers in similar circumstances. Built on more than 26 years of research on intergenerational patterns of attachment, GABI has demonstrated that it can help end cycles of child maltreatment. Since the team at Montefiore works so closely with Steele’s lab, students have the rare opportunity to become involved in the clinical work. By collecting assessments of the families, students refine interviewing and observational skills that are relevant to pursuing a career either within or outside academia after graduate school.


DIALOGUE 18

The Complex Treatment of Trauma: A Conversation with Wendy D’Andrea

Wendy D’Andrea Associate Professor of Psychology 64

[00:00:00] Interviewer: What are your research interests? What are you researching now, and what do you see yourself covering in the future? What led you to be interested in those topics? [00:00:20] Wendy D’Andrea: My area of expertise focuses on how early-life adversity, mostly child maltreatment, relates to changes in a variety of domains of functioning, often cognition, attention, social perception, emotions, and emotional awareness, as well as how those changes are facilitated by changes within the nervous system, mostly the autonomic nervous system, including heart rate, sweat gland responses, and the processes that are related to a very fundamental regulation of bodily arousal. Right now the area where I direct most of my focus is within the scenery of discussing trauma. Most of the research in this area concerns people who have extreme agitation, high arousal, high heart rate, hypervigilant presentation. Or it concerns the large portion of people who are completely numb, completely distant, shut down, and unresponsive. I’m very interested in the physiological processes that may facilitate that kind of presentation. If someone experiences a tremendous amount of emotional numbing, what does that mean and what are the effects? The other aspect of this research that interests me connects the emotional side of numbing to bodily numbing, that is, exploring

people not having a good sense of their bodies’ reactivity, their body boundaries, and how the emotional and physical sides are connected. Lately I have spent more time examining how these cognitive, emotional, social, and physiological effects change as a result of therapy—specifically, what therapy processes are related to the changes. Since the field historically has not measured outcome by symptom self-report, I’m looking at these more concrete, objective changes. I’m trying to use other ways of measuring outcome beyond just self-report. [00:03:31] IN: In your work measuring the different outcomes, do you ever propose other therapeutic methods or treatments, or are you solely measuring what happens? Did you ever take a step back and say, “We can see that X has been effective. We should do that with these types of patients more”? [00:03:43] WD: Yes, absolutely. That’s the part of the work that focuses on treatment process, or different techniques that seem to be associated with affecting outcomes. Another facet of this work examines a patient type and investigates what treatment to prescribe to a patient with hyperarousal versus a patient with hypoarousal. The treatment plan may need to be adjusted according to what someone is bringing in terms of his or her cognition and physiology. [00:05:25] IN: How do you approach working with graduate students? I would imagine that graduate students play a big role in your research studies. [00:05:39] WD: I work hard from the beginning of the master’s program to give students for whom I’m their primary advisor the experience that they would have as a PhD student continuing directly from the master’s program and forward. I am generally pretty cautious about being sure that anyone I take in to advise as a master’s student is a good academic fit, and is prepared to be


DIALOGUE 18

[00:07:03] IN: NSSR has historically been a school with a heterodox approach to academics. Can you talk a little bit about how that approach filters into both your teaching and your research here? [00:07:24] WD: Our department is one of the most heterodox in its approach to studying and teaching psychology. In my lab, we’re a combination of heterodox in philosophy and orthodox in method. We do very strict quantitative research that is fairly connected to a positivist tradition. We conduct it in a way that is attentive to deconstructing some of the assumptions around who can be included in research and what conclusions can be drawn from research. For example, in understanding the role of biology and behavior, we’re very, very cautious about saying something is caused by the brain or being overly deterministic. A lot of our work is pretty attentive to issues of representation and research and whose voice gets heard.

[00:09:47] IN: What would you tell prospective students about the Clinical Psychology program and NSSR? [00:09:59] WD: The Clinical Psychology program in particular and NSSR as a whole are really an interesting balance between innovation and a connection to history. In my graduate training, we had a complete disconnection from a lot of what was done before us. At The New School, one area where we excel is our intellectual history and knowing our trajectory. Here we talk about the same idea from multiple perspectives. I work with trauma. There are people in sociology and anthropology and politics and philosophy who are all doing work with trauma. Yet at another university, I wouldn’t know any of them. Our approach is pretty unusual. Additionally, I think most of the faculty here are very open to student ideas and to being shaped by their students. I mentioned earlier that I study cognition, emotion, social behavior, and physiology. That covers a whole lot of territory. That, in part, is because my students’ interests are broad. Most of the faculty here do a lot of integrating across disciplines that otherwise might be disparate. Things that are often not talked about together—politics and cognition or emotion and combat, for example—get brought together here.

65 THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

serious about the work. I also try not to take more students into my lab at the master’s level than I can support continuing into the PhD. Right now, everyone who wanted to pursue a PhD has gotten either into our PhD program or another PhD program from our master’s program. In my work, we have lab meetings—that’s our intellectual church—where we all present our ideas, read about other ideas, and also workshop our papers that we’re trying to produce. Then, we have weekly individual meetings with the grad students. In master’s students’ first year, they work on group projects. Then in their second year in the master’s program, and moving forward into the PhD, students develop their own projects that they have intellectually spearheaded and designed. We have one rule in the lab: Everyone has to present his or her work in a conference at least twice a year. We also try to get each student to co-author a paper by the end of his or her first year in the lab.


SOciology

I. OVERVIEW

66

II. DIALOGUES


SOCIOLOGY

Sociology Overview

Degrees Offered The department offers the MA, MPhil, and PhD in Sociology. Students who complete MA requirements with sufficient distinction may be considered for admission to PhD study. In rare cases, the department grants direct PhD admission to applicants who have completed a comparable MA in Sociology at another institution. Students with an MA in Historical Studies, Sociology, or Politics at The New School for Social Research (NSSR) may apply to study in the PhD program in Sociology and receive their PhD while adding a specialization in Historical Studies.

Fig. 5 Rachel Sherman, Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence (Princeton University Press, 2017)

Recent Courses Consumption, Culture, and Class Post-Democracy: A Survey of the Debate in the Global North and South Fundamentals of Political Sociology State, Culture, Identity Logic of Inquiry Power and Domination in the Middle East Forced Migration: Concepts and Policy

Recent Outcomes Mario Hernandez (PhD ’19): Assistant Professor, Mills College Elizabeth Ziff (PhD ’19): Assistant Professor, University of Indianapolis Maria Cabrera (PhD ’16): Postdoctoral Research Fellow, New York University Vincent Carducci (PhD ’15): Dean of Undergraduate Studies, College for Creative Studies Jana Catalina Glaese (MA ’16): Doctoral Student, New York University Lauren Trigo (MA ’16): Director of Operations Data and Special Programs, NYC Department of Education

67 THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

Begin an investigation of social life. The Department of Sociology offers a distinctive approach that builds on The New School’s historical connections to European social science to develop a tradition of critical inquiry and engage with contemporary debates and academic communities globally. The department focuses on core areas of research that reflect the interests of the faculty: social inequalities; culture and politics; law, rights, and citizenship; historical and comparative sociology; and cities and publics. The graduate program emphasizes theoretically informed ethnographic, historical, and interpretive inquiry into the significant social issues of our times in local, national, and transnational contexts. The ultimate goal is to ensure that students understand the major transformations taking place in modern and postmodern societies and are prepared to devise concrete solutions to challenges posed by these changes.


68


DIALOGUE 19

The Language That Shapes Events Robin Wagner-Pacifici University in Exile Professor of Sociology

Wagner-Pacifici attributes the ease with which she collaborates with other scholars to the interdisciplinary nature of NSSR’s sociology department. Trained in disciplines beyond sociology, including history and political theory, the faculty create an atmosphere of skepticism toward traditional academic boundaries. Wagner-Pacifici notes that while most American sociology departments are U.S.-centric, at NSSR the focus is much more international, because of the demographics of both the faculty and students. Unlike many sociology programs, NSSR’s Department of Sociology also emphasizes qualitative approaches over quantitative ones. Students who come to study with Wagner-Pacifici typically have an interest in social transformation and in theory. The department offers students a strong theoretical grounding and a way of theoretically framing whatever they may empirically study, regardless of the substantive content. WagnerPacifici frames her own approach around discourse analysis, and teaches a discourse class unique in New York City, to ground students in the theories of language, speech, and iconography. She notes, “We are fundamentally in the business of producing knowledge here and encourage students to think of themselves as theoreticians.”

69 THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

Events shape society. But what exactly constitutes an event, and what factors shape it? Through her research, Robin Wagner-Pacifici strives to answer these questions. With a background in comparative literature, Wagner-Pacifici brought a humanistic approach to her graduate studies in sociology, studying the ethnography of speaking and sociolinguistics in order to “read” society by listening to the language surrounding events. First focusing on conflict and violent events, Wagner-Pacifici studied the ways language, images, and symbols shaped those events and mobilized people. Her work has examined different groups and political ideologies to determine whether similar patterns arise despite the differing ideologies and led her to write books on standoffs and military surrender. Wagner-Pacifici’s latest book, What Is an Event? (University of Chicago Press, 2017), presents the idea that events never end, but rather keep changing form and may even undergo a period of hibernation until they are revived when a new group takes interest. In addition to writing this new book, Wagner-Pacifici has also begun computational analysis of texts, including the National Security Strategy Reports of the United States, to analyze relational networks within the documents. This work has sparked her interest in data visualization and in developing partnerships with New School colleagues at Parsons School of Design to help her and her students present their findings in new ways.


DiAlogue 20

A Conversation on the Culture of Service and Inequality with Rachel Sherman

Rachel Sherman Professor of Sociology 70

[00:00:00] Interviewer: What are your general research interests and how did you get started in those areas? Where do you see that research going in the future? [00:00:20] Rachel Sherman: My research interests mostly have to do with social class and culture, primarily in the United States. I’m especially interested in why we accept such high levels of inequality. I use qualitative methods—for example, interviewing and participant observation or ethnography. My first book, which was based on my dissertation, was an ethnographic study of two luxury hotels. In these hotels, there are high levels of obvious face-to-face inequality between workers and guests. So I looked at how both workers and guests negotiated this inequality interactively. I worked in many different jobs in these two hotels and mostly examined how workers managed inequality through their thoughts about and treatment of guests, their feelings about other workers and managers, and the games that they played on the job. I also interviewed managers and people who stay at luxury hotels, to get their perspectives. A relatively consistent aspect of my research has been my interest in service work, which is work that involves interactions between workers and customers. After completing the hotel project, I did some research on the personal concierge industry, in which clients pay personal concierges, or “lifestyle managers,” to complete tasks for them. I found a lot of resistance to the idea

of paying for things that you imagine you should be able to do yourself, or in the case of heterosexual men, that you imagine your wife or female partner should be able to do. So there’s a gendered aspect to what people are willing to pay for, while these concierges try to sell their services in a gender-neutral way. That was a deviation from the kind of social class focus of my previous work, although, of course, the people who tend to hire these services tend to have more money and people who tend to offer them have less. The project that I just published with Princeton University Press, entitled Uneasy Street, comes back to the question of class. But it is different from my earlier work in that it’s looking not so much at work but more at consumption. I have done an in-depth interview study with wealthy and affluent people in New York City and the surrounding suburbs about their consumption choices, such as where they send their kids to school and where they live. I have particularly focused on home renovation because it’s something that people really like to discuss and because this process brings together questions about finances, aesthetics, and family lifestyles. I researched these types of lifestyle decisions partly as a way of examining what it’s like to live with privilege, to have the option to send their children to private school, choose what neighborhood to live in, renovate a home or a second home, and so on. And I’m finding, and the argument of the book is, that living with privilege is not as easy as I think we tend to imagine. Our pop culture images of wealthy people are primarily negative. Supposedly the U.S. is the country of the American Dream and it’s great to have a lot of money and be at the top of the heap. But actually, the people that I’ve interviewed—who are mostly liberal New Yorkers, so maybe there’s something specific to that population—tend to be kind of conflicted about it, for reasons that I think are generalized in popular culture and the media that have to do with moral judgments of wealthy people. We tend to evaluate wealthy people on the basis of individual characteristics. Are they nice to their nanny? Are they nice to a waiter? Are they nice


DiAlogue 20

[00:10:28] IN: Can you describe how you teach students to do ethnographic research? How do you teach students not to have their own cultural biases influence their research? [00:10:56] RS: I don’t teach ethnography in this department right now, but I do teach an interviewing methods course. My approach to teaching both interviewing and ethnography is to have students do their own projects. Students have to come up with a project quickly at the beginning of the semester, and most of the class time is spent workshopping those projects as students work on them in the field outside of class. We do a fair amount of reading, but mostly the students are figuring out what they want to study, whom they need to talk to, developing their interview questions, finding respondents, talking to those respondents, transcribing and coding and analyzing the interviews, and writing a final paper. Some students have continued to develop and

publish from those projects after the class has ended. It’s very gratifying to me to see when that happens. And basically I just think there’s no other way to learn. Methodological issues are much more appropriately and productively dealt with if you’re actually encountering them in your work, as opposed to reading about hypothetical scenarios. I don’t think it’s possible in qualitative research to be “unbiased.” I’m not even sure that’s really desirable or a useful way of thinking about the enterprise. What we have to think about is how we make choices about who to interview and how our particular demographic characteristics—like race, class, age, gender, and so on—influence what we’re finding in that they influence how people respond to us or how we ask questions and interpret answers. It also matters whether we’re new to the field that we’re researching or whether we’ve been in the field for a long time. That can make a big difference. Any position has positive and negative consequences, and we just need to think about those consequences and make explicit choices around them. That’s my philosophy. [00:13:20] IN: Do your research and teaching take a heterodox approach to sociology? What would you tell prospective students about the sociology department at NSSR? [00:13:45] RS: I think our department has a very distinctive position in American sociology because of our emphasis on qualitative, theoretical, and interpretative work, with a strong emphasis on history and culture. As a department, we have a shared interest in political culture, which faculty look at in many different arenas, including law, social movements and the state, discourse analysis, urban life and culture, art and politics, and civil society, as well as my own research on social class and on work. Students who are interested in theory, as well as politics, culture, and history, and in studying those topics using qualitative methods are a good fit for our department.

71 THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

to other people? Or do we see them as obnoxious, rude, materialistic, and greedy? Culturally, we make these divisions between good and bad rich people. The people that I’ve interviewed are trying to be the good kind. What I’m interested in—and it’s partly these individual people’s conflict, but it’s also the general idea—is that if we as a society differentiate between good rich and bad rich people, that is a way of legitimating inequality. It’s a way of saying, “Yeah, there are bad rich people, but then there are good rich people too,” and that means that it’s OK for those good rich people to be so rich. We don’t have a strong cultural critique of distribution of resources; what we do have is an informal sense of whether people inhabit their privilege appropriately. Of course, that is changing to a certain extent with the emergence of Occupy and the Bernie Sanders campaign, which are articulating strong critiques of unequal distribution. But our ideas about the moral value of wealthy people, I think, remain quite prominent. Now that this project is finished, I’ll probably go back to studying workers and service work in some capacity. I did research on the U.S. labor movement early in my career, and I’m interested in looking again at workers’ movements as well. And I would like to return to doing ethnographic work, because I like it. Interviewing is good too, but I sort of miss that more immersive nature of ethnographic work.


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73

CENTERS AND PUBLICATIONS

THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH


CENTERS AND PUBLICATIONS

Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies

74

The Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism

and promote theoretical and analytic tools that

Studies brings together faculty and students

can help its scholars envision and instantiate

for interdisciplinary conversations around

different and better economies—local and

theoretical approaches to and analytic

global—for the future.

methods for the study of capitalism in its myriad forms. Affiliated faculty and students share a

The Center for Capitalism Studies seeks to devise a common language with which capitalism can be understood, analyzed,

commitment to critical thought, ethical

interpreted, and engaged—with rigor, with

reflection, and real-world relevance in their

precision, and in a manner that is accessible

research fields, which include the history of

to the broadest possible audience. Our

capitalism, economic sociology, international

program supports diverse inquiries into the

political economy, heterodox economics,

major structuring force in contemporary

critical theory, economic anthropology, and

society, posing questions both timeless

science and technology studies. Our graduate

and pressing.

and undergraduate courses examine the basic logic of capitalism (as conceived by a range of

capitalismstudies.org

theorists), its culturally and historically specific

capitalismstudies@newschool.edu

varieties, and its ability to structure our political possibilities and creative endeavors. Through interdisciplinary research and teaching, the Center for Capitalism Studies aims to develop

Fig. 6 Economist Robert Heilbroner at The New School for Social Research.


CENTERS AND PUBLICATIONS

Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis

75

SCEPA collaborates with scholars, nonprofits,

Analysis (SCEPA), created through a generous

and government officials to provide standards-

gift from Irene and Bernard L. Schwartz,

based research on key policy issues to assist

is the economic policy research arm of the

policymakers in creating positive change.

Department of Economics at The New School

The center also partners with nonpartisan

for Social Research (NSSR). SCEPA works to

advocates and foundations to engage the

focus the public economics debate on the

public, opinion leaders, and elected officials in

role government can and should play in the

the discussion of how to create a more stable,

real productive economy—that of business,

equitable, and prosperous economy.

management, and labor—to raise living standards, create economic security, and

economicpolicyresearch.org

help the country attain full employment.

scepa@newschool.edu

The center’s faculty and research associates work from the broad and critical perspectives representative of NSSR’s Department of Economics, including the post-Keynesian, neoclassical, classical, and institutionalist schools of thought.

THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

The Schwartz Center for Economic Policy


CENTERS AND PUBLICATIONS

Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility

76

The Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility

A truly interdisciplinary endeavor, the institute

builds on the intellectual tradition of migration

unites the university’s schools and programs

studies at The New School and provides a space

to address migration and mobility. Critical

for research, policy debate, and discussion

perspectives prepare students and faculty

among activists and artists on global migration

to question political terms such as borders,

and mobility and their economic, political, and

sovereignty, citizenship, and nation-states

psychological consequences and relationship to

and examine global mental health. Faculty and

citizenship and identity.

students from Parsons School of Design bring

The Zolberg Institute is the world’s first

a focus on design, technology, and material

migration center to focus on mobility. The

culture, which helps the institute reassess the

institute—named for the late Aristide Zolberg,

reasons why people move and the traces they

NSSR professor of politics and pioneer in

leave behind. The Milano School of Policy,

immigration politics, studies of ethnicity,

Management, and Environment and the School

and practices of integration—constitutes

of Media Studies employ their own scholarly

a reinvigoration of Zolberg’s International

approaches in innovative forms of public

Center for Migration, Ethnicity and Citizenship,

outreach, including engagements with media

founded in the 1990s. Directed by former

(e.g., Feet in 2 Worlds) and public education

UN Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees

(e.g., Humanities Action Lab). This enables the

T. Alexander Aleinikoff, the institute brings

institute to make sense of current events and

together global scholars with unique talents

tackle new problems more effectively.

and skills to innovatively rethink human mobility and advance debates about

zolberginstitute.org

migration and claims for social justice.

migration@newschool.edu

Fig. 7 The International Center for Migration, Ethnicity and Citizenship (ICMEC), founded by Aristide Zolberg, hosted an event on March 29, 1994, at which former Ambassador to Yugoslavia Warren Zimmerman participated in a lecture titled “The State Department’s Role in U.S. Foreign Policy Making.”


CENTERS AND PUBLICATIONS

Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought

77

Housed in The New School’s University

Mellon Foundation and based in The New

Center, the institute was conceived as

School for Social Research, the Graduate

a university-wide hub for collaborative

Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social

faculty research, interdisciplinary doctoral

Thought (GIDEST) incubates transdisciplinary

dissertations, and innovative scholarly

ethnographic research at the intersection of

practice that draws substantively on

social theory and design and fosters dialogue

ethnographic methodologies and sensibilities.

on related themes across the university.

GIDEST hosts a biweekly seminar to explore

Drawing on the university’s tradition of

works-in-progress presented by scholars

politically engaged, historically grounded,

and practitioners who share the institute’s

and theoretically informed social research,

commitment to innovative, in-depth

as well as its strengths as a center of design

exploration of design, ethnography, and

thinking and practice, the institute annually

social thought.

supports five faculty and five doctoral fellows and provides members of the campus community with a lively and inventive research environment and an interdisciplinary space in which to develop their ideas.

gidest.org GIDEST@newschool.edu

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Funded by a grant from the Andrew W.


CENTERS AND PUBLICATIONS

safran center for Psychological Services

78

The Safran Center for Psychological Services

psychiatric conditions that may affect

is a nonprofit psychological services training

academic performance.

clinic that helps students in the Clinical

The center’s therapy training model

Psychology program at The New School

includes systematic collection of self-report

for Social Research develop the skills and

measures from clients, to be used for routine

competencies essential for success as clinical

monitoring and quality assurance. This model

psychologists. The center provides tailored

meets the new Standards of Accreditation

foundational training in psychotherapy and

(SoA) of the American Psychological

psychodiagnostic assessment to clinical

Association (APA), including curriculum,

doctoral students, who engage in closely

competency evaluation, and supervision

supervised practical application of learned

requirements. The Safran Center has approval

skills while offering low-fee psychological

from the Human Research Protection Program

services to New School students and the

(HRPP) to establish a data repository,

surrounding community.

which can be used for research purposes by

The Safran Center also partners with the New School Counseling Center to assess the

Psychology faculty and students at The New School for Social Research.

eligibility of New School students for various accommodations. In their second year, Clinical Psychology doctoral students take part in a paid practicum in which they are trained in educational and psychodiagnostic assessment of cognitive functioning, learning and developmental disabilities, attention and executive functioning difficulties, and

newschool.edu/nssr/safran


CENTERS AND PUBLICATIONS

Sándor Ferenczi Center

79

The New School’s Ferenczi Center sponsors

work and legacy of Sándor Ferenczi (1873–

lectures, conferences, and workshops relevant

1933), a close associate of Sigmund Freud’s

to Ferenczi’s legacy of clinical innovation and

and an important psychoanalytic pioneer

social and political progressivism, with the

who spent four months lecturing at The New

aim of contributing to the ongoing vitality of

School in 1926. Ferenczi is known for his

psychoanalysis as a cultural, intellectual, and

innovative clinical work, his willingness to

therapeutic discipline. The Ferenczi Center

work with the most difficult of patients, his

is affiliated with the International Ferenczi

socially and politically progressive attitudes,

Foundation and the Sándor Ferenczi Society.

and his promotion of a cultural climate that facilitated interdisciplinary conversation

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between psychoanalysis, the arts, the

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humanities, and the social sciences.

Fig. 8 In 1926, The New School for Social Research offered the first continuing adult education course in psychoanalysis, taught by Freud’s associate Sándor Ferenczi (top row, far right).

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The Sándor Ferenczi Center promotes the


CENTERS AND PUBLICATIONS

Hannah Arendt Center

80

Hannah Arendt, widely acknowledged today as

the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the center

one of the most influential philosophers of the

is now digitizing the vast collection of papers

20th century, taught at The New School as

Arendt bequeathed to the Library of Congress.

University Professor from 1967 until her death

The New School’s library is one of three sites

in 1975.

worldwide that provides online access to the

The Hannah Arendt Center was established

entire archive.

at The New School in spring 2000. The center is dedicated to preserving Arendt’s legacy and fostering the kind of participation in public life she exemplified. With a generous grant from

Fig. 9 Sociologist, philosopher, and political scientist Hannah Arendt lectures at The New School for Social Research.


CENTERS AND PUBLICATIONS

Center for Public Scholarship

81

university and involving The New School and

itself to engendering and promoting freedom

other institutions.

of inquiry—not merely as an intellectual

The center’s multifaceted activities include

exercise but as a lived imperative—and

producing Social Research: An International

to addressing, illuminating, and alleviating

Quarterly, an award-winning journal that has

pressing social problems. These goals are

been mapping the landscape of intellectual

rooted in the earliest history and ideals of The

thought since it was first published by The New

New School. In this spirit, all of our activities

School in 1934; the annual Social Research

and initiatives are intended to foster dialogue

conference series, launched in 1988 (which will

within and beyond the academy and to

expand to include new events to engage experts

enhance public understanding of important

and the public on critical and contested issues

social and political issues. The center draws on

of our times with the intent of influencing public

the strengths of The New School and its faculty

policy); the New University in Exile Consortium,

to shape and inform its programs.

an expanding group of 12 universities and

Under the direction of Dr. Arien Mack, Alfred

colleges committed to assisting scholars at

and Monette Marrow Professor of Psychology

risk; and Endangered Scholars Worldwide, an

and editor of Social Research: An International

activist initiative started in 2008 to respond to

Quarterly since 1970, the center unites a

the wrongful imprisonment of scholars around

number of existing initiatives and draws on

the world.

their demonstrated strengths to develop new programming. It is designed to serve as a

centerforpublicscholarship.org

bridge between the many initiatives at The

cps@newschool.edu

New School consistent with its mission and as a catalyst for new programs both within the

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The Center for Public Scholarship dedicates


CENTERS AND PUBLICATIONS

Center for Attachment Research

82

Directed by Miriam Steele and Howard

families in the Bronx. The immediate goal

Steele, professors of psychology at The

of the intervention is to enhance parental

New School for Social Research (NSSR), the

sensitivity, improve parents’ mental health,

Center for Attachment Research (CAR)

and promote children’s social, emotional,

applies attachment theory to clinical and

and cognitive development, with the aim of

developmental research questions concerning

reducing child behavior problems.

child, parent, and family development. A

Other projects at CAR include research on the

university-based lab, research group, and

intergenerational transmission of body image;

center for training, CAR launches research

research on childhood anxiety at the

initiatives involving students and faculty

“I Have A Dream” Foundation, in collaboration

from NSSR, Parsons School of Design, Eugene

with visiting professor Barbara Hoff; and

Lang College of Liberal Arts, and other units

research on peer play therapy at the Jewish

of The New School, as well as ongoing

Board of Family and Children’s Services’

collaborations with senior consultants and

Relationships for Growth & Learning program,

colleagues in New York and internationally.

in collaboration with colleagues there.

The Center for Attachment Research participates in a range of projects. The

sites.google.com/site/

primary project, supported by funding from

attachmentresearch80/home

and affiliation with Anne Murphy at the Early Child Care Center at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, examines the effectiveness of Group Attachment Based Intervention (GABI) provided to vulnerable


CENTERS AND PUBLICATIONS

Institute for Critical Social Inquiry

83

ICSI offers participants a unique opportunity

is designed to provide advanced graduate

to pursue this charge in one of three weeklong

students and junior faculty from around the

seminars designed to cultivate styles of

world with the opportunity to spend one

thinking and conceptual vocabularies that

week at The New School’s campus working

address the disparate sites and unequal

closely with some of the most distinguished

conditions in which we live. Each morning

thinkers shaping the course of contemporary

over the course of a week, seminar attendees

social inquiry. Each of these scholars teaches

participate in a four-hour master class.

a weeklong seminar on a foundational thinker

Afternoon workshops are devoted to an

or topic of contemporary concern in a series of

exchange between seminar participants and

hands-on, intensive, and intimate sessions.

discussion of their own research projects.

ICSI is founded on the premise that responding to current and emergent problems

criticalsocialinquiry.org

requires developing our collective capacity

icsi@newschool.edu

to formulate new and better questions, rather than relying on the application of alltoo-familiar ready-made theories. In the conditions in which most of us work today, there is seldom the time or the opportunity for in-depth exploration of those modes of inquiry most relevant to our research agendas and developing projects.

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The Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI)


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JANEY PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

84

The ongoing struggles over social justice,

The Janey Program reflects the global

equality, human rights, and political liberty

perspective of The New School for Social

in Latin America resonate deeply at The New

Research and is an important part of Latin

School for Social Research, reflecting many of

American studies in The New School as

the same concerns that led to the founding of

a whole.

the University in Exile in 1933, which continue to inform and energize our work. With generous support from Daniel and Susan Rothenberg, the Janey Program in Latin American Studies provides fellowships for students from Latin America and the Caribbean pursuing graduate studies at The New School, summer fellowships for fieldwork and research in Latin America and the Caribbean, an annual conference, lectures, and occasional visits to The New School by scholars from Latin America.

blogs.newschool.edu/janey-program janeyprogram@newschool.edu


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Transregional Center for Democratic Studies

85

For this reason, TCDS welcomes as partners and

NSSR, the Transregional Center for Democratic

collaborators scholars who are involved in public

Studies (TCDS) creates and implements cross-

life and in efforts to strengthen civil society.

departmental programs aimed at addressing

TCDS’s activities provide a solid link between

special needs and opportunities for research

New York and eastern Europe, a site of ongoing

and graduate or advanced undergraduate

democratic transformation that reveals the

study that can promote better understanding

vulnerability of democracy to illiberal solutions

of the world. TCDS cultivates research on the

and even violence. The center’s initiatives have

increasingly globalized public sphere and the

led to the emergence of extensive scholarly

emergence of autonomous publics and nurtures

networks in the region, bringing young scholars

a new kind of citizen-researcher concerned

and civically committed academics together

with the ways society, embedded in a specific

with NSSR graduate students.

cultural and historical context, debates and seeks solutions to shared problems. The center’s programs (public events,

TCDS’s flagship program is the Democracy & Diversity Institute, held annually in July in Wrocław, Poland. The institute is an

workshops, conferences, and summer institutes

intensive three-week program of study in

conducted in New York City and abroad)

which up to 40 young civic-minded scholars

facilitate study, research, and debates on the

engage through discussion and debate

challenges of democracy and democratization

in a rigorous quest for a deeper and more

and the related issues of development,

nuanced understanding of the challenges to

citizenship, and intercultural conversation

democracy in the contemporary world.

in a globalized world. The programs are also aimed at building bridges between academic

blogs.newschool.edu/tcds

research and the “real” world of democratic

tcds@newschool.edu

practice, where policies and local strategies are designed and civic innovation comes to life.

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Building on the interdisciplinary tradition of


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Center for Research with Infants and Toddlers

86

The Center for Research with Infants and Toddlers explores the development of conceptual understanding in infants and young children, focusing on how they come to make sense of the social worlds around them. Directed by Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, professor of anthropology and psychology, the lab is broadly concerned with the origins of humans’ highly developed ability to recognize and remember others and reason about them as members of different social groups. It focuses on understanding the nature and scope of the precocious processes that underlie the later-emerging development of social categorization, group-based inference, and moral reasoning, as well as the conceptual

habits that support them. The lab’s research designs are highly interactive and inclusive, attracting students and faculty members from several departments at The New School.

nssrbabylab.com nssrbabylab@gmail.com


CENTERS AND PUBLICATIONS

Husserl Archives

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The archives was established in 1966 in

facilitates research on Edmund Husserl and

memory of the social phenomenologist Alfred

phenomenological philosophy. The archives

Schutz. After fleeing Austria in 1938, Schutz

provides scholars with access to copies of

joined the faculty of the University in Exile

transcriptions of Husserl’s unpublished writings

at The New School in 1939. He taught both

from the Husserl Archives in Leuven, Belgium.

sociology and philosophy and also served as

It also organizes small research groups and

chair of the Department of Philosophy.

seminars that bring together students and scholars from around the world who are

newschool.edu/nssr/husserl

working on topics related to phenomenology.

doddj@newschool.edu

THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

The Husserl Archives promotes and


CENTERS AND PUBLICATIONS

Academic Publications

The scholarly community of The New School for Social Research contributes to the intellectual discourse through a variety of scholarly journals and interactive online platforms. Students assume an active role on the editorial staffs for the publications and frequently write articles and essays (either on their own or in conjunction with professors) as well.

Public Seminar 88

Public Seminar is an online platform reflecting the tradition of critical scholarship and public engagement of the original New School for Social Research (1919) and its University in Exile (1933). Confronting fundamental problems of the human condition and pressing problems of the day using the broad resources of social research, Public Seminar provokes critical and informed discussion through short-form posts, long-form essays, and audio and video pieces. Public Seminar is an extension of The New School’s legendary General Seminar, founded by the original University in Exile scholars. Through this innovative platform, the faculty, students, and alumni of The New School for Social Research, along with colleagues near and far, constitute a public seminar for the 21st century. publicseminar.org

Women in Philosophy Journal Founded in 2005, the Women in Philosophy Journal (WIPJ) is published in association with the People in Support of Women in Philosophy (PSWIP) at The New School for Social Research. Written and edited entirely by graduate students in the Department of Philosophy, WIPJ features selected papers that have been workshopped in PSWIP during the year. WIPJ also sponsors its own colloquia at The New School in association with PSWIP. pdcnet.org/wipj/Women-in-PhilosophyJournal

Constellations Constellations is an international peerreviewed quarterly committed to publishing the best in contemporary political and social theory. With roots in the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory, it brings together a range of perspectives, including those of the Continental and Anglo-American traditions. constellationsjournal.org

Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal is a professional publication that provides contemporary authors with a forum in which to engage with the history of philosophy and its traditions. Past issues have included contributions from HansGeorg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, and Reiner Schürmann. The journal is published twice yearly and is edited and produced by advanced graduate students in the Department of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research. newschool.edu/nssr/GFPJ


CENTERS AND PUBLICATIONS

Constellations

Forthcoming in Constellations Michael Kaplan on “Prohibiting the people: Populism, procedure and the rhetoric of democratic desire”; Tom Malleson on “To each according to their effort? On the ethical significance of hard work”; John Welsh on “The political aesthetic of the British citystate: Class formation through the global city”; Daniel D. Miller on “The mystery of evangelical Trump support?”; Adom Getachew on “The limits of sovereignty as responsibility”; Gulshan Khan “Rereading Habermas’s charge of “performative contradiction” in light of Derrida’s account of the paradoxes of philosophical grounding”; Duarte Rolo on “Psychoanalysis and critical theory: A new quarrel about revisionism?”.

Recent Back Issues

Constellations 25:2 (June 2018) featuring Special Section: The Secular State, Constitution, and Democracy: Engaging with Böckenförde guest edited by Mirjam Künkler, Tine Stein and Jean L. Cohen with contributions by Olivier Jouanjan on “Between Carl Schmitt, the Catholic Church, and Hermann Heller: On the Foundations of Democratic Theory in the Work of Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde”; Jan-Werner Müller on “What the Dictum Really Meant—and What it Could Mean for Us”; Jean L. Cohen on “On the Genealogy and Legitimacy of the Secular State: Böckenförde and the Asadians”; and Mirjam Künkler and Tina Stein on “Carl Schmitt in Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde’s work: Carrying Weimar Constitutional Theory into the Bonn Republic”; On the Concepts of Politics and State with constributions by Antoon Braeckman on “The Hermeneutics of Society: On the State in Lefort’s Political Theory”; and Gerasimos Karavitis on “On the Concept of Politics: A Comparative Reading of Castoriadis and Badiou”; Critique of Capitalist Societies with contributions by Bryant William Sculos on “Demystifying the Capitalistic Mentality: Reconciling Adorno and Fromm on the Psycho-Social Reproduction of Capitalism”; and Chris O’Kane on ““Society Maintains Itself Despite All the Catastrophes that may eventuate”: Critical Theory, Negative Totality, and Crisis”.

Constellations An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory Cosmopolitanism, Art, Politics, and Justice Michal Givoni

VOLUME 25 NO 4 DECEMBER 2018

Constellations 25:3 (September 2018) featuring Economy, Democratic Politics and Rights with Cristina Lafont on “Neoliberal globalization and the international protection of human rights”; Lev Marder on “Rethinking homo economicus in the political sphere”; Gautam Bhatia on “Discursive democracy and the limits of free speech”; Paul Raekstad on “Revolutionary practice and prefigurative politics: A clarification and defense”; Katherine Goktepe on ““Sometimes Imean things somuch I have to act”: Theatrical acting and democracy”; Pierre-Etienne Vandamme on “Voting secrecy and the right to justification”; Philosophy and Critical Theory with M. T. C. Shafer on “The utopian shadow of normative reconstruction”; David T. Schafer on “Pathologies of freedom: Axel Honneth’s unofficial theory of reification”; Naveh Frumer on “Two pictures of injustice: Rainer Forst and the aporia of discursive deontology”; Claudia Leeb on “Rethinking embodied reflective judgment with Adorno and Arendt”; María Emilia Barreyro on “The purest form of communicative power. A reinterpretation of the key to the legitimacy of norms in Habermas’s model of democracy”; Kristina Lepold on “An ideology critique of recognition: Judith Butler in the context of the contemporary debate on recognition”; and Javier Burdman on “Knowledge and the public world: Arendt on science, truth, and politics”.

Rita Elizabeth Risser Francesco Callegaro and Nicola Marcucci

Dividing crowds: In search of a worldly ethics for cosmopolitan publics Civility, art and emancipation on the Arabian Peninsula Europe as a political society: Emile Durkheim, the federalist principle and the ideal of a cosmopolitan justice Deliberation, Inclusion and Democratic Decision-Making

William P. Umphres Veit Bader Trevor Latimer Caleb R. Miller

Beyond good reasons: Solidarity, open texture, and the ethics of deliberation Democratic inclusion in polities and governance arrangements The principle of subsidiarity: A democratic reinterpretation “What is to be done” when there is nothing to do?: Realism and political inequality Postcolonial Theory, Decoloniality and Critical Theory

Ina Kerner Jake M. Bartholomew

Postcolonial theories as global critical theories Decoloniality and decolonizing Critical Theory Modalities of Power

Critical Genealogies Collaboratory J. F. Dorahy Marcio Pereira

Standard forms of power: Biopower and sovereign power in the technology of the US birth certificate, 1903–1935 From the body politic to the politics of the body: The biopolitical theory of Ferenc Fehér and Agnes Heller Machines de travail: Constituent power and the order of labor in Sieyes’s thought Book Reviews

Veith Selk Jakob Huber

On Federico Finchelstein, From Fascism to Populism in History On Christopher Meckstroth, The Struggle for Democracy: Paradoxes of Progress and the Politics of Change Index to Volume 25

VOLUME 25 NO 4 DECEMBER 2018

CONS_25_4_cover_HR 1

12/12/18 9:50 AM

New School Psychology Bulletin

An award-winning international quarterly of the social sciences, Social Research has been mapping the landscape of intellectual inquiry since 1934. Most issues of the journal are theme driven, combining historical analysis, theoretical explanation, and reportage by some of the world’s leading scholars and thinkers.

Launched in 2003, the New School Psychology Bulletin is a semi-annual peer-reviewed research journal created and produced by graduate students at The New School for Social Research. Articles in the bulletin cover ongoing work and collaborations at The New School, including new research, research proposals, research methods projects, and a New School historical psychology series, as well as work from the annual Poster Session.

socres.org

International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society The International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society publishes articles and reviews on issues that arise at the intersections of nations, states, civil society, and global institutions. It is concerned with the interplay of macroscopic and microscopic structures and processes, including changing configurations of ethnic groups, social classes, religions, and personal networks and the impact of new communication technologies and media on public and private life. Interdisciplinary in orientation and international in scope, the journal focuses on the connection between theory and substantive normative concerns and encourages disciplined creativity. springer.com/social+sciences/sociology/ journal/10767/PSE

nspb.net

New School Economic Review The New School Economic Review (NSER) is a student-run journal whose content reflects The New School’s history and traditions and embraces a multidisciplinary and heterodox approach to the social sciences, as espoused by early classical thinkers such as Smith, Ricardo, and Marx. NSER provides professors, practitioners, and students with a forum in which to debate world politics and social affairs, discuss current issues in economics, and share insights from other disciplines. nsereview.org/index.php/NSER

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Social Research


90


DISSERTATIONS

91 THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

Fig. 10 “A Conference on Weimar Germany, 1919–1932: Intellectuals, Culture, and Politics,” held October 29–30, 1971.


Dissertations

Recent Dissertation Titles

Anthropology

Philosophy

Derivative States: Property Rights and Claims-making in a Non-self-governing Territory

Automatism is a Humanism: Cavell, Medium, and Modernism

Discerning Value: Taste as an Economic Fact Gender Structures and Stratification in Prehistoric Northwest and Central-West Europe: 1500 BCE-800 CE

92

Inhabiting One’s Skin: An Ethnography of Body and Color in a North Indian City No Refuge in Return: Interruptions of Home and Care for Veterans on Pine Ridge Return to Sepharad: Citizenship, Conversion, and the Politics of Jewish Inclusion in Spain

Economics Distribution & Growth in PoliticallyContested Economies: Measurement and Applications in Palestine Essays in the History of Economics and Economic Policy during the Interwar Gold Standard Essays on Labor Mobility and Segmentation The Political Economy of Social Impact Bonds Prebisch and Singer in a Global Value Chains World: Essays on Manufacturing and Commodities Terms of Trade Three Essays on the Wage ShareUnemployment Relationship

Family Portraits: Political Theology of the Family In the Spirit of Critique: Critical Theory in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit Irony: Both Dangerous and Necessary Pregnancy Beyond the Natural The Property Relation: Freedom, Right and Recognition in Kant, Fichte and Hegel Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: Theory and Critique in the Marxist and Post-Marxist Traditions

Politics Civis Americanus Sum: Luigi Antonini, the Italian-American Labor Council and the Movement to Reclassify Italian Alien Enemies During World War II The Coercion/Dialogue Paradox in Contentious Dynamics: A Comparative Analysis of MiningRelated Conflicts in Latin American Countries From Mental Disorder to Emotional Data: The Changing Terrain of Sexual Politics Humanity and Its Others: Antislavery, Islam and Humanitarianism in the Nineteenth Century New Dogs, Old Tricks: The Inner Workings of an Attempt at Police Reform in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Politics of Dualism: A Study of Active Labor Market Policies in South Korea Social Movements and Earthbound People: Towards a New Politics of the Earth in the Anthropocene


Dissertations

Psychology—Clinical Attachment Patterns, Masculinity and Body Representations Boredom is Polarizing: The Effects of Boredom on Ideological Extremes Disentangling “Those Times of the Month”: Experiences Managing & Making Sense of Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder The Interplay of Sociocultural Context, Parenting, and Intergenerational Maltreatment in a Sample of Latina Mothers

Psychological Factors Associated with Risk-Taking Behavior among Traders in the Financial Industry Self-Objectification and Menstruation: The Role of Negative Attitudes and Emotions about Menstruation on the Experience of Physical Symptoms Taoist Cognitive Group Therapy

Psychology—Cognitive, Social, and Developmental Assessment of Victim Vulnerability from Voice Eat, Mate, Kill: A Cross-Cultural Examination of Intentional Attribution in Animacy Displays Preverbal Infants’ Expectations about Group Membership and Valenced Social Behaviors

Waiting to be Bored: A Case for Anticipatory Boredom with Physiological and Other Correlates

Sociology Adjoining Glass Castles: Privacy and Publicity in Corporate Social Media Almost Sovereign: Independence and Indeterminacy in the New Republic of Kosovo Bushwick’s Bohemia: Art and Revitalization in Gentrifying Brooklyn Digital Dissidence and Internet Law: Mapping the Political Process of the Gezi Resistance and its Legal Aftermath Internationalization Alive: International Student Experiences, Higher Education Policy and the Imagination of Brazil in the Global Knowledge Economy Japan’s Unamended Constitution: The Legacy of An Imposed Pacifist Sovereignty Mnemonic Playgrounds for Mobilization: A Radical Turn in the Construction of Public Memory in Post-Dictatorship Chile

93 THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

Master of Your Domain? On the Relationship Between Trauma, the Body, and the Sense of Agency

Speech Production and the Language Neural Network: The Critical Role of White Matter as Evidenced by the Study of Early-Onset Multiple Sclerosis


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UNIVERSITY INFORMATION

THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH


UNIVERSITY INFORMATION

Graduate Minors and Academic Resources

96

Graduate Minors In keeping with our commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship and collaboration, The New School now offers graduate minors. These structured study pathways immerse you in disciplines outside of your primary field, expose you to alternative modes of research and practice, and broaden your skills and career options. NSSR master’s and doctoral students have the option of completing a graduate minor in a closely related field, such as capitalism studies or political economy, or exploring other subjects and emerging interdisciplinary issues, such as design studies, migration studies, and impact entrepreneurship. newschool.edu/graduate-minors

Libraries The New School operates three libraries— the List Center Library, University Center Library, and Performing Arts Library— which are open to all university students. The Research Library Consortium of South Manhattan In addition to offering the resources of its own libraries, The New School is a member of the Research Library Association of South Manhattan. Other consortium members are New York University, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and the New York Library of Interior Design. This association is one of the largest interuniversity library consortia in the country—NYU’s Elmer Holmes Bobst Library alone houses more than three million volumes. Most holdings of the consortium libraries are listed in BobCat, a user-friendly online catalog that can be accessed over the Internet or by direct dial-in. All of the libraries provide information resource training and orientations for students, normally at the

beginning of each semester. New School students also have reading access to materials at the nearby Cardozo Law School of Yeshiva University. Through membership in the Metropolitan Reference and Research Library Agency, students have access to more than 300 other libraries in the New York City area. For more information about university libraries and consortium privileges, visit the website at library.newschool.edu. Academic Computing University Academic Computing currently operates three general-access facilities for students. Each facility offers a wide variety of software, such as word processing, spreadsheet, database, email, graphics, and statistical packages. Students using the centers are supported by a fulltime staff and assisted by lab aides. Training seminars and documentation are available on supported software and hardware. Each facility is fully networked and offers access to the Internet.

Online Resources MyNewSchool, the university’s customizable Web portal, uses a single secure sign-on to provide access to an array of online tools and information: Blackboard Online Learning; Self Service, where you can find student academic and financial information; webmail; library resources; personal and campus announcements; information about events; and much more. Campus-wide wireless Internet access on a secure network allows students to check email, download files, and surf the Web anytime. Students also have access to New School library e-resources, which allow them to find a particular journal, magazine, newspaper, or report in the library’s periodical databases


UNIVERSITY INFORMATION

quickly and easily and to search remotely for the holdings of the three New School libraries and the consortium libraries.

Career and Alumni Services The Center for Graduate Career and Professional Development is a resource for graduate students and graduate alumni, providing information about the demands and requirements of the academic and the nonacademic job markets to both master’s- and doctoral-level students. The center provides assistance with all aspects of the job search process, from writing employment application materials such as curricula vitae, résumés, teaching and research statements, and cover and follow-up letters to negotiating terms of employment and salary. Center staff members also assist students with application materials needed to apply for fellowships or other advanced degree programs. Throughout the academic year, the center conducts workshops that focus on different aspects of the job search process, hosts workshops and seminars that address specific professional development skills, and sponsors speakers and events relevant to employment outside of academia.

Participating Schools Columbia University, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Columbia University, Teachers College CUNY, The Graduate Center Fordham University, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences New York University, The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Princeton University Rutgers University, The Graduate School– New Brunswick Stony Brook University, The Graduate School

97 THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

The New School for Social Research Dean’s Office: Academic Affairs Academic Affairs promotes academic community within the school by supporting student activities and organizations and providing academic and career services. It administers fellowships, assistantships, prizes, and other financial awards designated specifically for graduate students of The New School for Social Research. Academic Affairs also oversees academic advising, academic policies, and graduation procedures.

Inter-University Doctoral Consortium The New School for Social Research is a member of the Inter-University Doctoral Consortium (IUDC), along with the schools listed below. Students in approved doctoral programs at these institutions have the opportunity to take courses at any other participating institution after securing the approval of their academic advisor and home school IUDC coordinator, the course instructor, and the host school’s IUDC coordinator. Students must be in a doctoral track, and the course taken may not be identical to courses offered at the home institution. Inter-university cross-registration forms, guidelines, and procedures are available in the Office of Academic Affairs and Scholarships. Students register and pay tuition at their home institutions for all courses offered through the consortium, but there may be special fees payable to the host institution. Students cross-registered in the consortium can use the libraries of a host institution while enrolled in its courses. Summer consortium courses are not available to New School for Social Research students.


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The Office of Admission and Application Procedures The Office of Admission of The New School for Social Research (NSSR) assists prospective applicants with the graduate application process. The admission staff is available to answer your questions weekdays, 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. You are invited to contact us: Telephone: 800.523.5411 (toll free) or 212.229.5600 Email: socialresearchadmit@ newschool.edu

98

To expedite your application, The New School for Social Research uses an online system. To access the system, go to newschool.edu/nssr/admission and select the “Apply Now” link.

Required Materials The following materials are required for application to The New School for Social Research: • $50 nonrefundable application fee • Completed application form

• GRE scores are required of U.S. citizens and permanent residents who have earned a bachelor’s degree in the last five years. • A TOEFL, IELTS, or PTE score is not required for applicants whose primary language is English or who have earned a four-year degree from a U.S. college/ university or from a university where English is the primary language of instruction.

All materials must be received before an application can be considered complete. Only completed applications are reviewed.

Application Deadlines NSSR has a rolling admissions policy, but please note the following deadlines. Fall Semester (September): January 7 is the final deadline for consideration for fellowships and certain special scholarships. Spring Semester (MA admissions only): October 15 is the priority deadline for consideration for scholarships.

• Current résumé

Academic Information and Advising

• Transcripts from all postsecondary institutions attended

You can download and print the current NSSR catalog from the NSSR Academic Affairs webpage (newschool.edu/nssr/ academic-affairs).

• Two letters of recommendation • Personal essay describing your academic and intellectual interests, your progress, and achievements that have contributed to your decision to apply for postgraduate study (500–750 words) • Academic writing sample of 10–20 pages double-spaced (a more substantial sample is required for PhD applications) • Students interested in Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism may submit as their writing sample substantive newspaper, journal, or blog articles that display their critical thinking and writing abilities.

You can also view current courses offered at NSSR at courses.newschool.edu. In addition to the admission staff, student admission advisors are available to answer questions about courses, research possibilities, and life at The New School. The New School for Social Research Office of Admission 79 Fifth Avenue, 5th floor New York, NY 10003 800.523.5411 or 212.229.5630

For more information, visit us online at newschool.edu/nssr.


UNIVERSITY INFORMATION

Faculty Information

Anthropology Abou Farman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology PhD, The Graduate Center, CUNY Lawrence Hirschfeld, Professor of Anthropology and Psychology PhD, Columbia University Nicolas Langlitz, Associate Professor of Anthropology PhD, University of California at Berkeley

Creative Publishing and Critical Journalis Jonathan Baskin, Associate Director PhD, University of Chicago Maya Binyam, Part-Time Lecturer BA, Yale University Juliette Cezzar, Assistant Professor of Communication Design, School of Art, Media, and Technology, Parsons School of Design MFA, Yale University 99

Natasha Lennard, Part-Time Lecturer MSc, Columbia University

Shannon Mattern, Professor of Anthropology PhD, New York University

James Miller, Professor of Politics and Liberal Studies PhD, Brandeis University

Hugh Raffles, Professor of Anthropology DFES, Yale University

Claire Potter, Professor of History, Schools of Public Engagement PhD, New York University

Janet Roitman, Professor of Anthropology PhD, University of Pennsylvania

Hugh Raffles, Professor of Anthropology DFES, Yale University

Ann Laura Stoler, Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies PhD, Columbia University

Jesse Seegers, Part-Time Lecturer MArch, Princeton University

Miriam Ticktin, Associate Professor of Anthropology PhD, Stanford University and École des hautes études en sciences sociales

Ying Chen, Assistant Professor of Economics PhD, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Economics

Paulo dos Santos, Assistant Professor of Economics PhD, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

Benjamin Lee, Professor of Anthropology and Philosophy PhD, Johns Hopkins University


UNIVERSITY INFORMATION

Faculty Information, continued

Duncan Foley, Leo Model Professor of Economics PhD, Yale University

Steering Committee

Teresa Ghilarducci, Irene and Bernard L. Schwartz Chair in Economics and Policy Analysis PhD, University of California at Berkeley

University

Clara Mattei, Assistant Professor of Economics PhD, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies and Université de Strasbourg

100

William Milberg, Professor of Economics (currently serving as Dean) PhD, Rutgers University

Elaine Abelson, Associate Professor of History and Urban Studies PhD, American History, New York

Margot Bouman, Assistant Professor of Visual Culture, Parsons School of Design PhD, Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester Hazel Clark, Professor of Design Studies and Fashion Studies, Parsons School of Design PhD, History of Design, University of Brighton

Sanjay Reddy, Associate Professor of Economics PhD, Harvard University

Alice Crary, University Distinguished Professor PhD, Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh

Willi Semmler, Arnhold Professor of International Cooperation and Development PhD, Free University of Berlin

Miriam Ticktin, Associate Professor of Anthropology PhD, Anthropology, Stanford University and École des hautes études en sciences sociales

Mark Setterfield, Professor of Economics PhD, Dalhousie University Anwar Shaikh, Professor of Economics PhD, Columbia University

Gender and Sexuality Studies Director Lisa Rubin, Associate Professor of Psychology PhD, Clinical Psychology, Arizona State University

Historical Studies Elaine Abelson, Associate Professor of History PhD, American History, New York University Federico Finchelstein, Professor of History PhD, Cornell University Oz Frankel, Associate Professor of History PhD, University of California at Berkeley Aaron Jakes, Assistant Professor of History PhD, New York University


UNIVERSITY INFORMATION

Natalia Mehlman-Petrzela, Associate Professor of History PhD, Stanford University Julia Ott, Associate Professor of History PhD, Yale University Emma Park, Assistant Professor of of History PhD, University of Michigan Claire Potter, Professor of History, Schools of Public Engagement PhD, New York University

Jeremy Varon, Professor of History PhD, Cornell University Eli Zaretsky, Professor of History PhD, University of Maryland

Liberal Studies Alice Crary, University Distinguished Professor PhD, Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh

Paul Kottman, Associate Professor of Literary Studies, Eugene Lang College PhD, University of California at Berkeley Elzbieta Matynia, Professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies PhD, University of Warsaw Inessa Medzhibovskaya, Associate Professor of Literary Studies, Eugene Lang College PhD, Princeton University James Miller, Professor of Politics and Liberal Studies PhD, Brandeis University Gustav Peebles, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Schools of Public Engagement PhD, University of Chicago Dominic Pettman, Professor of Culture and Media, Eugene Lang College PhD, University of Melbourne Hugh Raffles, Professor of Anthropology DFES, Yale University

Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy PhD, University of Essex

Eugene Thacker, Professor of Media Studies, Schools of Public Engagement PhD, Rutgers University

Stefania de Kenessey, Professor of Music, Eugene Lang College PhD, Princeton University

Gina Luria Walker, Professor of Women’s Studies, Schools of Public Engagement PhD, New York University

Oz Frankel, Associate Professor of History PhD, University of California at Berkeley

McKenzie Wark, Professor of Culture and Media, Eugene Lang College PhD, Murdoch University

101 THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

Ann Laura Stoler, Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies PhD, Columbia University

Elizabeth Kendall, Associate Professor of Literary Studies, Eugene Lang College MAT, Harvard Graduate School of Education


UNIVERSITY INFORMATION

Faculty Information, continued

Philosophy Zed Adams, Associate Professor of Philosophy PhD, University of Chicago Cinzia Arruzza, Associate Professor of Philosophy PhD, University of Rome Tor Vergata J. M. Bernstein, University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy PhD, University of Edinburgh

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Richard J. Bernstein, Vera List Professor of Philosophy PhD, Yale University Omri Boehm, Associate Professor of Philosophy PhD, Yale University Chiara Bottici, Associate Professor of Philosophy PhD, European University Institute, Florence Alice Crary, University Distinguished Professor PhD, University of Pittsburgh Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy PhD, University of Essex James Dodd, Professor of Philosophy PhD, Boston University Nancy Fraser, Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science PhD, City University of New York Dmitri Nikulin, Professor of Philosophy PhD, Institute for Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Daniel Rodriguez-Navas, Assistant Professor of Philosophy PhD, University of Chicago

Politics Alex Aleinikoff, University Professor JD, Yale Law School Quentin Bruneau, Assistant Professor of Politics DPhil, University of Oxford Sandipto Dasgupta, Assistant Professor of Politics PhD, Columbia University Nancy Fraser, Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science PhD, City University of New York Mark Frazier, Professor of Politics PhD, University of California at Berkeley Victoria Hattam, Professor of Politics PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Andreas Kalyvas, Associate Professor of Politics PhD, Columbia University Anne McNevin, Associate Professor of Politics PhD, Australian National University James Miller, Professor of Politics and Liberal Studies PhD, Brandeis University Jessica Pisano, Associate Professor of Politics PhD, Yale University David Plotke, Professor of Politics


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PhD, University of California at Berkeley Sanjay Ruparelia, Associate Professor of Politics PhD, University of Cambridge

Lisa Rubin, Associate Professor of Psychology PhD, Arizona State University

Deva Woodly, Associate Professor of Politics PhD, University of Chicago

Michael Schober, Professor and Vice Provost for Research PhD, Stanford University

Rafi Youatt, Associate Professor of Politics PhD, University of Chicago

Howard Steele, Professor of Psychology PhD, University College, London

Psychology

Miriam Steele, Professor of Psychology PhD, University College, London

Richelle Allen, Assistant Professor of Psychology PhD, The New School for Research

Wendy D’Andrea, Associate Professor of Psychology PhD, University of Michigan Katrina Fincher, Assistant Professor of Psychology PhD, University of Pennsylvania Jeremy Ginges, Associate Professor of Psychology PhD, Tel Aviv University Lawrence Hirschfeld, Professor of Anthropology and Psychology PhD, Columbia University William Hirst, Malcolm B. Smith Professor of Psychology PhD, Cornell University Arien Mack, Alfred J. and Monette C. Marrow Professor of Psychology PhD, Yeshiva University Joan Miller, Professor of Psychology PhD, University of Chicago

Benjamin van Buren, Assistant Professor of Psychology PhD, Yale University

Sociology Alex Aleinikoff, University Professor JD, Yale Law School Andrew Arato, Dorothy Hart Hirshon Professor of Political and Social Theory PhD, University of Chicago Benoit Challand, Associate Professor of Sociology PhD, European University Institute Carlos Forment, Associate Professor of Sociology PhD, Harvard University Jeffrey Goldfarb, Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology PhD, University of Chicago Eiko Ikegami, Walter A. Eberstadt Professor of Sociology and History PhD, Harvard University

103 THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

Adam Brown, Associate Professor of Psychology PhD, The New School for Social Research

McWelling Todman, Associate Professor of Clinical Practice PhD, The New School for Social Research


UNIVERSITY INFORMATION

Faculty Information, continued

Emeriti Elzbieta Matynia, Professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies PhD, University of Warsaw Virag Molnar, Associate Professor of Sociology PhD, Princeton University Rachel Sherman, Professor of Sociology PhD, University of California at Berkeley Julia Sonnevend, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Communications PhD, Columbia University

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Robin Wagner-Pacifici, University in Exile Professor of Sociology PhD, University of Pennsylvania Terry Williams, Professor of Sociology PhD, City University of New York

Edward Nell, Professor Emeritus and Malcolm B. Smith Professor of Economics DPhil, University of Oxford Herbert Schlesinger, Professor Emeritus and Senior Lecturer in Psychology PhD, University of Kansas David Shapiro, Professor Emeritus and Senior Lecturer in Psychology PhD, University of Southern California Lance Taylor, Professor Emeritus and Arnhold Professor of International Cooperation and Development PhD, Harvard University


Membership and Accreditation The New School is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. MSCHE is a regional accreditor and federally recognized body. The New School has been accredited by MSCHE since 1960. All degree programs at the New York City campus of The New School are registered by the New York State Department of Education. The New School is a nonprofit university. For full information on the university’s accreditation, visit newschool.edu/provost/accreditation. The information published here represents the plans of the university at the time of publication and does not constitute an irrevocable contract between the student and The New School. The university reserves the right to change without notice any matter contained in this publication, including but not limited to tuition, fees, policies, degrees, programs, names of

programs, course offerings, academic activities, academic requirements, facilities, faculty, and administrators. Payment of tuition or attendance at any classes shall constitute a student’s acceptance of the administration’s rights as set forth above. The New School is an Affirmative Action/ Equal Opportunity Institution. For important information including student rights, campus safety statistics, and tuition and fees, visit newschool.edu/your-right-to-know. Published 2019 by The New School. Produced by Marketing and Communication, The New School. This brochure is printed on 100 percent postconsumer recycled paper with UV inks that conserve energy and material and do not release VOCs into the atmosphere— reflecting the university’s embrace of environmental responsibility.

018–2019 academic year. 2 2017–2018 academic year. Does not include non–New School aid or loans. 3 U.S. News & World Report (2018). 4 Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings (2018). 5 U.S. News & World Report (2018). 1

2

Photo credits: David Barron, Michael DiVito, James Ewing, Andrew Friedman, Jonathan Grassi, Don Hamerman, Hulton Archive, Alejandro Jaramillo, Victor Jeffreys II, Spencer Kohn, Library of Congress, Matthew Mathews, Fred W. McDarrah, Jacob Arthur Pritchard, Sarah Rocco, John Sanden/Sandenwolff, Martin Seck, Matthew Septimus, Michael Kirby Smith, Matthew Sussman, Phillip Van Nostrand, Urmila Venkatesh, Ai Weiwei



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As we celebrate our Centennial, The New School remains committed to being a university where world-renowned colleges come together to seek out new ways to create a more just, more beautiful, and better-designed world. Learn more about our colleges and programs: Parsons School of Design Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts College of Performing Arts The New School for Social Research Schools of Public Engagement

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