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Institute for Critical Social Inquiry
from 2020 NSSR Viewbook
Institute for Critical Social Inquiry
The Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI) is designed to provide advanced graduate students and junior faculty from around the world with the opportunity to spend one week at The New School’s campus working closely with some of the most distinguished thinkers shaping the course of contemporary social inquiry. Each of these scholars teaches a weeklong seminar on a foundational thinker or topic of contemporary concern in a series of hands-on, intensive, and intimate sessions.
ICSI is founded on the premise that responding to current and emergent problems requires developing our collective capacity 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.
ICSI offers participants a unique opportunity to pursue this charge in one of three weeklong seminars designed to cultivate styles of thinking and conceptual vocabularies that address the disparate sites and unequal conditions in which we live. Each morning over the course of a week, seminar attendees participate in a four-hour master class. Afternoon workshops are devoted to an exchange between seminar participants and discussion of their own research projects.
