Confronting Fundamental Problems of the Human Condition and Pressing Problems of the Day… by any means necessary

Four years of Public Seminar

Now many fine colleagues have joined the project, as we had hoped would happen. Their creative imagination, experience, scholarship and commitment have made it what it is today and what it promises to be tomorrow. Claire Potter and I oversee the operations in adjoining offices, across from The New School ...
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Memory and Kent State

The Past is Always Present on May 4

I fell into the field of communications by default because I took a debate class at Miami from a professor who turned out to be chair of the department. I was an English major looking for an easy minor. No one could have been more surprised than I that the ...
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March for Racial Justice and March for Black Women

Sept. 30, 2017 DC

Black Women First! Black Women First! Shouted several thousand people as they marched up Pennsylvania Ave. from the Capitol on September 30.  They were leading two marches, which started at two different points on Capital Hill before joining to march to the Department of Justice on 10th St. There they planned to turn south to go to ...
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March for Racial Justice and March for Black Women

What Is The Purpose of Incarceration?

Introducing Year Two of an NEH Enduring Questions Course

The question I chose was: "What is the purpose of incarceration?" The course is now in its second year, and this fall I am teaching it online. This is a very different experience from the onsite classroom (something I will write about in subsequent posts), but as part of the ...
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GIDEST: Wetness Everywhere

Water, fluidity, and scarcity

GIDEST is a Mellon-funded research institute based at The New School that incubates transdisciplinary research at the intersection of social theory, art, and design. As well as our faculty, artist-in-residence, and doctoral fellows’ programs, we run a series of biweekly public seminars that feature both prominent and emerging scholars and practitioners. ...
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The Sound of a Thunder

Weatherman and the Music of Late-Life Regrets

Meteorological images of all sorts -- with their implications of inevitability -- found their way into the narratives about the group. “Looks like we’re in for nasty weather,” plucked from Creedence Clearwater Revival went a 1969 headline in the Underground Press about the group. And in a late 1970 communiqué called “New ...
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Adorno’s Freud in the Age of Trump

Part 1

Let us recall Freud's fundamental thesis in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. In this text, Freud presents a general proposition about the process of constitution of collective identities. It is enunciated as follows: "such a primary mass is an amount (Anzahl) of individuals who have placed a single ...
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Global Histories of Capitalism Conference

A Conference at The New School

Our conference aims to address the one-sidedness of the recent European and U.S. historiographic turn to the “history of capitalism” by providing one of the first venues to direct comparative investigations of emergent scholarship on the history of capital in the non-west. Our conference assembles a range of scholars from ...
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Kinneret Lahad Talks Singlehood and Time

An interview about her new book, A Table for One

What are you waiting for? Stop wasting your time. You will die alone. You will miss the train and stay on your own! These are just some of the questions and warnings that single women hear on a daily basis. Single women are constantly being asked whether they are ''still single,'' ...
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Kinneret Lahad Talks Singlehood and Time