The Festival of New

This course introduces students to ways to approach, understand, and improve cities focusing on New York City and other large metropolitan areas around the world. The first part familiarizes students with ways to approach cities, their historic development, their shifting and expanding urban landscapes, and the complex social and cultural life unfolding in them. The second part applies these concepts in order to examine several contemporary urban problems including increasing urban inequality, urban poverty and homelessness, xenophobia and racism, increasing surveillance and social control, and infrastructural problems, all of which hint to bigger economic, social, and political problems in cities. The course concludes with a critical examination of current urban policy and planning and ideas about urban reform.

Play. Thinking of the word, one might envision images of children running around in a playground, puppies wrestling, or teenagers concentrating on hitting their targets in a first-person shooter—activities that seem frivolous and removed from the serious business of life. But what if instead we looked beyond these images to what play really involves: improvisation, creative problem-solving, strategy, empathy, subverting social norms, and systems-thinking. In fact, play is the natural way people learn. These are just a few of the ways play helps us re-imagine the world. Perhaps play is more serious than we think. In this class students look at play and how games—or, in other words, machines that generate play—model the world and let people try out new strategies. The course includes playing games, deconstructing them, modifying them, and making them to reflect the world, social issues, and experiences that are fun and profound, serious and playful. By the end of the semester, students will have a deeper understanding of how games work, and through playing and making them, how the world works too.

As the world faces a global climate crisis and widespread social and political unrest, Indigenous peoples are leading efforts to defend the land, air, and water on which we all depend. These struggles are part of longstanding Indigenous resistance to colonial occupation, land dispossession, and state violence, including violence against women. Yet many institutions, including schools and universities, continue to erase Indigenous knowledge and resistance efforts—contributing to ongoing epistemic violence and furthering an agenda of assimilation that privileges anthropocentric and Eurocentric knowledge systems and forms of social organization. The coloniality of power and knowledge persists. What would it mean to center Indigenous knowledge, history, and social movements at The New School, as it celebrates 100 years as “a dynamic center of scholars, artists, and activists”? How might such a change shift the way we look at climate and environmental justice, colonial violence, state building, migration and border control, design strategies, racial justice, capitalism, and radical social and global transformation? How would it influence our hiring practices, the focus of our research projects, our methodology, our pedagogical goals and strategies, the choice of texts in our syllabi?

Professors Leonardo Figueroa and Jaskiran Dhillon take up these critical questions and discuss the urgency of decolonization and the politics of knowledge production at The New School and beyond.

We are living in a time of extreme inequality of income, wealth, and opportunity, much as the U.S. was experiencing a century ago during the first Gilded Age.
 
The concentration of wealth has reached a pinnacle, with three billionaires owning as much wealth as the bottom half of US households combined. The racial wealth divide is growing, with the median white household holding 41 times the wealth of the median black household. These grotesque inequalities undermine every aspect of our lives, including our physical health, environment, social connectedness, democracy, civic life, and economic health and vibrancy.

What will it take to reverse engineer these trends to build a more radically equal and regenerative society? How do we decolonize our concept of wealth –and disrupt the societal stories and narratives of deservedness that justify and perpetuate these inequalities? What is a vision of a radically more equitable society look like? What are the pathways forward?

Stephanie Szitanyi and Melissa T. Brown discuss Szitanyi's new book, Gender Trouble in the U.S. Military, and gender inclusion in our armed forces over the past century. Join the conversation about governmental policy shifts—permitting openly LGBT persons to serve and women to engage in combat, contending with military sexual assault—and consequences including the impact on prevailing concepts of masculinity. Applying feminist perspectives to the analysis of visual, textual, archival, and cultural materials, Szitanyi argues that despite military policy changes and (re)gendering processes, officials have attempted to counteract shifts, uphold the institution’s hetero-male privilege, and promote the masculine warrior version of masculinity.

Staff on Race Presents: Race at The New School with Tim Wise and Thelma Armstrong is a discussion and panel that excavates and puts into context the history of racially charged events affecting staff, students, and faculty here at The New School. Presented by the committee for Staff on Race, and in conjunction with 400 Years of Inequality and The New School Archives and Libraries, this program includes a reveal of the Race at The New School Timeline, an evocation of the university as a space for healing, and a critical conversation with heralded authorities on race in America moderated by New School faculty and African-American Studies scholar, Tracyann Williams. The program will conclude with a poignant dance performance of the Cotton Series, choreographed by New School alumna, Havanna Fisher.