Identity Archives - Public Seminar

Genocide

The Pulse of Palestinian Identity in New Jersey

Reflections of a genocide survivor

June 24, 2025 • by Anonymous

As a genocide survivor who had relocated to New York from an open-air prison in Gaza in August 2024, I wondered what it would mean to be a Palestinian from the perspective of Palestinian Americans. Was there a space in America that kept them connected with their Palestinian identity? Where was ...

The Pulse of Palestinian Identity in New Jersey

Migration

The Dilemma of a Fragmented Self

Mass migrations, language, and the future of identity

November 9, 2022 • by Ken Hu

How can language create such a convoluted way of experiencing the everyday world? We can explore this phenomenon with two linked concepts: the speech act and the discourse community. ...

Europe & Central Asia

Echoes of War Reach New York

Among those affected are people with both Ukrainian and Russian roots

April 13, 2022 • by Anastasia Shteinert

It is believed that people adapt to everything. I am already fine with New York’s enormous rent prices, loud sirens, and small talks. But I’m not sure I will ever be able to adapt to this monstrous war. ...

Interviews

Dismantling Truths About Emerging Adulthood

A conversation with Rainesford Stauffer: Breaking down the structural challenges behind living your #BestLife

April 12, 2022 • by Rainesford Stauffer and Shivani Somaiya

We need a really radical re-imagining of, not just how we think about young adulthood, but how we move through our lives and where we find value. I would want people to know that this myth of young adulthood is not your individual burden. Doing the best you can within ...

Dismantling Truths About Emerging Adulthood

Media

Jessica Krug and Racial Identity Theft

Past Present Podcast, Episode 246

September 15, 2020 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: George Washington University historian Jessica Krug has been posing as a Black woman for years, and recently outed herself online. Neil referred to Martha Sandweiss’ book, Passing Strange: A Gilded Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line. Natalia ...

Race

black on Black

The digital future of color bias and racism

June 15, 2020 • by Asha Hassan Nooli

Asha Hassan Nooli is a rising sophomore at Lang College, and a first-generation American coming from a Somali background. She is interested in stimulating social reform on a global scale. The essay that follows was Hassan Nooli’s contribution to the New School Dean’s Honor Symposium, an annual celebration of the ...

Psyche

The Reign of One’s Own Desire

An interview with Sheldon George on his book Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity

January 15, 2020 • by Sheldon George and Daniel Gaztambide

Daniel Gaztambide (DG): Would you mind unpacking some of the Lacanian concepts you draw on to understand racism and Black identity, such as jouissance and object a, for a general audience? Sheldon George (SG): Jouissance is often translated from the French as pleasure or enjoyment, but it is most properly an excessive pleasure, a destructive ...

Imaginal Politics

Anarchafeminism

Towards an ontology of the transindividual

December 2, 2019 • by Chiara Bottici

Yet, strikingly enough, in all the literature engaging with intersectionality, there is barely any mention of the feminist tradition of the past that has been claiming exactly the same point for a very long time: anarchist feminism, or as I prefer to call it “anarchAfeminism.” The latter term has been ...

The New School

The Ad Paradox

Writing advertising for a university that doesn’t believe in it

November 21, 2019 • by Ricky Tucker

This year marks The New School’s centennial celebration, a paradigm example of that disparity. For October, ads for our “Learn something New” awareness campaign and The Festival of New, a series of events reflecting on our past, made up the majority of advertising in and around Union Square subway station. ...

Sex & Gender

The Sun is the Size of a Human Foot

An Interview with Andrea Long Chu

October 29, 2019 • by McKenzie Wark

But I think the more proper question is: “Whose foot?” It’s not about the foot not “actually” being the size of the sun. It's the fact that there's necessarily a subjective relation that changes from person to person. So I think the place where truth becomes important is not actually ...

Literature

On the Feeling of Anti-Semitism

When Being Jewish Becomes a Liability

October 26, 2019 • by David Stromberg

Whatever you are, it always turns out to be the wrong kind.––Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (1956) The essay below is the third part of a series and is most profitably read in sequence after parts one and two -- comprising a kind of memoir that participates in a literary genre that has become obscured: ...

Sex & Gender

The Many-handed Hunger of Transsexuality

On T. Fleischmann

October 21, 2019 • by McKenzie Wark

What do we do with what’s left over, with what is in excess of bare life, if we have it? Denounce it as privilege, perhaps. I’m not a particularly moral person. Sure, that’s bad. I’m not very moralistic either. That’s probably good. With what’s left over in my life, I’d ...