Records of Planetary Suicide

This post is part of the Gender and Domination Course in OOPS. As Beatriz (now Paul) Preciado keenly points out in “The Principle of the Auto-Guinea Pig,” the centralization of information into human memory, stone, paper, and, recently, digitally readable circuits carved into silicon chips, subjects information to an ineradicable vulnerability. ...
Read More
Records of Planetary Suicide

Social Interaction: Where the action is!

Trying to understand the major problems of our times, or enduring problems of the human condition? Consider very carefully social interaction: the theme of this OOPS course. Classical sociology, the sociology of the founders of the academic discipline of the late 19th and early 20th century, offered competing visions of ...
Read More
Social Interaction: Where the action is!

What Could History Have Been?

Imagining new approaches to the humanities

“What could history have been?” The question asks how events might have turned out otherwise, if only X had happened instead of Y. What if JFK hadn’t been assassinated? What if Hitler had? The official term for this kind of what-if thinking is “counterfactual history,” and it covers anything from ...

Read More
What Could History Have Been?

Remembering Jerome Bruner

Jerome Bruner, the George Herbert Meade Professor of Psychology at the New School for Social Research from 1981 until 1991, died June 5th at the age of 100. Jerry spent his century engaged in life fully. Not only was he one of the most influential figures in psychology, ...

Read More
Remembering Jerome Bruner

Democracy Then and Now

Elzbieta Matynia's reflections on one of the great projects of The New School for Social Research, marking the twentieth five years of the Democracy and Diversity Institute in Poland. We worked together on this even before the Institute was established, working with independent intellectuals, academics and activists in the Democracy ...
Read More
Democracy Then and Now

Gianni Vattimo Interview

Gianni Vattimo is considered to be among the most important living European philosophers, alongside Charles Taylor, and Jürgen Habermas.  Known for his interpretation of Nietzsche's and Heidegger's philosophies, he also developed a postmodern theory he calls "weak thought," meant to question the hard objectivity of claims in religion, politics, and ...

Read More
Gianni Vattimo Interview

The Importance of Losing ‘Virginity’

I first questioned the concept of virginity’s validity when I was eighteen. I had just watched a Laci Green video entitled ‘Let’s Lose Virginity,’ and it depicted ‘virginity’ as a harmful myth created to oppress women. Reading Simone De Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex,’ a text that demonstrates why the myth ...
Read More
The Importance of Losing ‘Virginity’