Decolonizing Psychology: Applications in Research & Clinical Practice

A three-session online conference presented by the department of psychology at The New School for Social Research

Mainstream psychology continues to privilege and promote the interests of the majority, in particular those in Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) countries. The call for a decolonial turn in psychology has gathered momentum over recent years, along with greater reflection on how the field reproduces and reinforces systems ...
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Decolonizing Psychology: Applications in Research & Clinical Practice

Why The New School Will Survive

An imprudent venture in historical context

Ginia Bellafante is not the first reporter at The New York Times to call attention to the serious financial troubles of The New School. Since its founding in 1919, the university has repeatedly faced major budgetary shortfalls, the details of which the Times has faithfully and dramatically recorded. Each time, The ...
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Why The New School Will Survive

The Tenured Radical

A brief character study

------ The tenured radical is a mean creature. No blunder is too small to point out and magnify, no conversation too anodyne to incite accusations of “violence” and “colonization.” To them, there is no difference between The Jakarta Method and a white colleague speaking too much at a faculty meeting. Violence ...
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The Tenured Radical

Teaching Patriotism

Abraham Lincoln’s idea of America

In the midst of a global pandemic and an economic crisis, President Donald Trump recently found time to convene a Committee on Patriotic Education. In principle this was not a bad idea. The great question of course is how will patriotism be taught, and who will be its teachers? Or, as Karl ...
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Teaching Patriotism

Why Does White Fragility Never Break?

The Framing of Racism in Higher Education

------ When I was a graduate student at Emory University in 2018, the law school suspended a professor, Paul Zwier, for using the N-word in class. Zwier’s response to the suspension was strange. Inside Higher Ed reported on a letter in which he said, “I’m not sure whether I used the ...
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Why Does White Fragility Never Break?

COVID-19 Mirror on the Wall—Who’s the Bravest College of Them All?

Moving online and volunteering for vaccine trials this Fall requires a more prudent courage than reopening college campuses for classes and football

––––––– The next time you check the COVID-19 dashboard of your favorite university on your laptop screen, imagine asking: Who’s the bravest of them all? Pretend you’re like the Evil Queen in Snow White, who gazes in a mirror, asking who is the fairest of them all, in order to eliminate ...
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COVID-19 Mirror on the Wall—Who’s the Bravest College of Them All?

Realizing The New School

A downloadable collection of essays documents lessons from the past as a university looks to its future

A century later, the experiment has become an institution, one different in almost every way from the one originally proposed. Psychology and the arts quickly redefined what “social research” could be. The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences and the rise of fascism inspired The New School’s president to establish a ...
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Realizing The New School

Can We Talk About Sex? Please?

A review of Jennifer Hirsch’s and Shamus Khan’s Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus

------------- A decade ago, I was a resident adviser in a residential college at a highly selective university. My colleagues and I used to roll our eyes at the highly legalistic "affirmative consent" model of sexual education that we were asked to teach first-year students. Focused on the idea that sexual ...
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Can We Talk About Sex? Please?

What Does a Virtual Conference Look Like?

Scholars have been grousing about the expense of annual meetings for years. The pandemic is our opportunity to imagine change

----------- Why do we conference? Scholarship, dialogue, and community are all good answers to that question. But as the Covid-19 pandemic remapped our lives and shuttered American institutions last spring, the Society of United States Intellectual History (S-USIH) took stock of our annual meeting plans. Suddenly, answering that question became urgent. We had set ...
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What Does a Virtual Conference Look Like?

Good History Makes the Familiar Strange to Us

Why The 1619 curriculum belongs in our schools

It is almost a foregone conclusion that when new circumstances, and new evidence, force us to evaluate a consensus view of the American past, new and public conflicts erupt. As a history educator, I have seen this all before.  As the culture wars ramped up after 1992, the attempt to craft ...
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Good History Makes the Familiar Strange to Us

The Pandemic Has Revealed the Driving Values of American Higher Education

Universities like UNC are going online for the public good, while other universities persist in reopening for perceived prestige and elite branding

Yet despite the rapidly escalating numbers of COVID-19 cases on campus, this elite private Catholic research university has kept its undergraduates in the dormitories at full capacity, and expressed its intention to reopen its campus again by Labor Day weekend for in-person classes, work, and other activities including Division I ...
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The Pandemic Has Revealed the Driving Values of American Higher Education

Don’t Let Campuses Become Plague Dystopias

College and university presidents should have the courage to halt their reopening

In late May, the President of Notre Dame and Thomist philosopher Fr. John I. Jenkins defended his decision to reopen its campus in terms of the university’s religious and moral values, including the virtue of having soldierly “courage” in the face of death. This, he insisted, was a virtuous Aristotelian “mean” between ...
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Don’t Let Campuses Become Plague Dystopias