The New School
Undergraduate and Graduate – Spring 2025
This course critically explores and examines the psychology of Buddhist religious experiences across a wide range of scientific disciplines. We focus particular attention on the issue of human consciousness and new research in psychology and neuroscience on Buddhist meditation, mystical experience, and psychedelics. Students will also read seminal Buddhist writings from ancient India and Tibet, as well as more contemporary Buddhist voices from both Asian and non-Asian sources. (Recommended for students with at least one LREL or LPSY course.)
Urban design, Chinese fashion, and creative economies are the primary subjects of this course offered in Chinese, which is intended to support the development of advanced speaking, writing, and critical analysis in Mandarin Chinese. This undergraduate course features the study of Chinese fashion cultures that are transnational and global as well as the study of urban centers throughout China, which have grown into design and creative hubs and hosts of cultural economies. The course embarks on analyzing film/media texts and short readings related to the luxury goods market, urban design, cities in China and cultural Mar-kets. In Chinese. Proficiency: intermediate-high or advanced level of proficiency in Mandarin is required.
This seminar introduces students to some of the most influential interpretations of colonialism (broadly understood) that have been advanced by thinkers in different intellectual-political traditions from across the central core and peripheral fringe. Studying the writings of Anglo-European authors (i.e.: uneven and combined development, imperialism, southern question, global color line, boomerang effect) alongside those of their Latin American, Indian and Pan-African counterparts (i.e.: nationalism, dependency, subaltern, post-colonial, de-colonial feminism) provides an opportunity to explore their many shared and divergent concerns as well as some of the subterranean continuities and discontinuities that have defined the boundaries of the age-old dispute on colonialism. In examining their writings, we focus on how each thinker analyzed the material and symbolic links between colonialism and modernity (i.e.: capitalism, liberal democracy, rational and universal principles), and the way their interpretation of them conditioned their depiction of and the differential hierarchies they established among and between countries, peoples, institutions and practices of the Global North and South. The purpose of this exercise, however, is not to ‘provincialize,’ ‘universalize’ or ‘particularize’ any one aspect or either region, as is commonly done by scholars today. Instead, it is to encourage us to reflect critically on the following two questions (and others closely related to them): A) does the anti-colonial perspective provide a convincing counter-narrative of the emergence and development of modernity (capitalism, liberal democracy, rational and universal principles), and is it capable of challenging the image it has of itself? and B) what are the consequences of relying on a ‘concept-interpretation’ that has been developed to analyze a specific issue or problem that surfaced in a given ‘place-time’ to make sense of a similar but somewhat different socio-political-cultural formation?
Documentary has never been more popular or controversial than it is today. The availability of low-cost, accessible digital media technology has helped foster a renaissance in documentary practice. And as new tools like cell phones, go-pro cameras, and high-end HD equipment expand the technical boundaries of an art form, pressing issues and artistic possibilities command the attention of media makers around the globe. Works selected for screening and discussion will address a broad range of topics from political revolution to personal exploration and offer an equally broad array of formal approaches. Screenings and discussions will focus on work made in the last five years. We will explore the documentary in some of its many guises: such as essay, social advocacy, investigative journalism, (auto)biography, propaganda, narrative, and creative experiment. The course examines ongoing debates over documentary ethics and aesthetics, considering such problems as the use of archival footage, fair use standards, staging and reenactments, self-reflexivity, and hybrid forms that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction. Drawing on the legacy of documentary pioneers and the inspiration of today’s innovators and iconoclasts, this course will explore many of the issues and ideas driving the documentary film today. Invited guests may feature filmmakers, programmers and critics. Past guests have included: Wu Wenguang (China), Jill Godmilow (USA), Bill Viola (USA), Yonghi Yang (Japan/Korea), Nathaniel Dorsky (USA), Agnes Varda (France), Janus Metz (Denmark), Ido Haar (Israel), and Akram Zaatari (Lebanon), among others.
As late capitalist ecological, social, and political crises have intensified, eco-fascism has festered across the world, from India to New Zealand to the United States. Fusing the imperative of climate action with racism, xenophobia, anti-communism, and other reactionary ideologies, eco-fascism’s façade of environmental consciousness makes a particularly dangerous conduit for mounting right-wing reaction. New ecologically- oriented socialist movements have arisen to combat eco-fascism and fascism as a whole. Ecosocialism as an overarching paradigm not only builds upon the successes but also addresses the shortcomings of the past five hundred years of resistance, rebellion, and revolution against the colonia, capitalist, and imperialist world-system. This course invites students to explore the constantly evolving dialectic of eco-fascism and eco-socialism through critical political and economic perspectives that tackle the historical causes of today’s existential ecological crises. Braiding together Marxism, world-systems analysis, decoloniality, ecofeminism, and Indigenous socio-ecology, the course’s interdisciplinary texts and multimedia materials will track how capitalism has 1) robbed and degraded land, labor, and life throughout the world since its inception, 2) relied on state power to carry out this expropriation and denigration, 3) consolidated multi-sited and multi-scalar national, racial, gendered, and sexual hierarchies to justify these processes and stifle opposition to them, and 4) fused key elements of all deleterious trends to defend itself through fascism and eco-fascism. Students will concomitantly assess a range of ecosocialist proposals for their capacity to address the root causes of eco-fascism, including but not limited to democratic economic planning, municipalism and communalism, post- growth and degrowth, and Indigenous and peasant food, land, water, and seed sovereignty.
This reading-intensive course examines the history of journalism practices on the lands that make up mod-ern-day India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and the Maldives. Through a variety of texts, guest Q&As, presentations, screenings, and group discussions, we will consider historical and contemporary topics of concern to press and public in the region, including free speech, censorship, misinformation, internet access, funding models, social media, colonial legacies, and identity-based discrim-ination and violence. We will study Western reporting practices in the region, as well as diasporic South Asian publications and journalists.
With the global ascendancy of neoliberalism, shared (or “equitable”) growth has been in decline, vividly il-lustrated by the post-1980 American case: four decades of wage stagnation and rising wage inequality, high rates of job insecurity, and a growing crisis in the affordability of housing, education and health care for working families. But outcomes such as these have been far from uniform across countries. This course will explore the access of working families in different countries/regions to decent jobs and welfare state bene-fits, framed by some key questions: Can changes in decent-pay jobs, pay inequality, and job security be ex-plained (as in the mainstream economics account) by market forces that raise the demand for cognitive skills, driven by the computerization and globalization of production? If this is the story, why haven’t mar-kets (and public policies) adjusted to eliminate this skill mismatch, and why do national outcomes differ so much? Or is the problem, instead, mainly a reflection of shifts in relative worker bargaining power that differ substantially by nation/region, driven by political choices designed to reduce the size of the welfare state (austerity economics) and promote wage suppression? If this is the story, and the inclusivity, com-plementarity and coherence of institutional regimes are critical to earnings, employment performance and the overall wellbeing of working families (as in the comparative political economy account), which institu-tions matter most, in what combination, and for which workers? And further, if some capitalisms offer more protection (bargaining power) to workers, do we see a tradeoff with employment performance (e.g., the rate of unemployment), or can more egalitarian varieties of capitalism also be complementary with full employment?
“Confucius said: ‘Benevolence is the characteristic element of humanity.’ ‘The benevolent man loves others.’ Who did he love? All men? Nothing of the kind. Did he love the exploiters? It wasn’t exactly that, either. He loved only a part of the exploiters.” (Mao, 1964, Talk on questions of philosophy) “The power of role models is infinite. You should take them as examples in pursuing virtues. Confucius said, ‘When we see men of virtue, we should think of equaling them.’” (Xi, 2014, Foster and practice core socialist values from childhood) Why is the People’s Republic of China ideologically different from the West? To what extent have the recent political developments, including the Hong Kong social unrest, Xi’s third term, and the “Zero Covid Policy” shaped post-pandemic China? Is a democratic future still imaginable? In this course, we aim to answer these questions within broader historical and theoretical contexts, focusing on PRC’s political debates that have profoundly shaped the country’s socio-political transitions from the Maoist era to Xi’s rise to power. We will read the philosophical texts concerning the ideology, legitimacy, and ruling principles of the Communist Party, as well as political-economic analyses of the current system. In particular, we try to understand the regime’s ruptures, contradictions, and unsolved dilemmas. Meanwhile, an investigation of Chinese politics will shed new light on our understanding of questions that equally challenge the West, not least party politics, representativeness, revolutionary movements, etc. In this sense, China is both a subject and a method for the inquiries of this course.
This course will introduce the key and historically important aspects of the film image, its construction, and what makes it unique. We will study different film forms and styles with a particular focus on the mise-en-scène, camera work, editing techniques, and sound. The course emphasizes how each of these are used to create distinctive works of film art. The course will also examine how and where the film image connects to other art forms, such as painting, design, fashion, and architecture. We will consider the guiding principles of films from a range of countries, historical periods, national cinematic traditions, and modes of production. These will include, but are not limited to, films from the Classical Hollywood Studio era, the cinemas of Japan, India, Iran, Africa, post-revolutionary Russia, and avant-garde and experimental modes. The basis of the course will be learning skills for close looking and listening. Following identification of the sensuous aspects of the film image, we will move to analysis and argument, using description to support / corroborate. Thus, the course will give students a language with which to describe and analyze the film image as the first step to constructing a considered argument. These skills will be transferable to the study and discussion of images in general.
This course examines the postwar and contemporary dispute over the liberal, popular, and authoritarian aspects of populism in several countries of the central core (USA, Britain, France, Italy) and the peripheral fringe (Argentina, India), as exemplified in landmark works by several insightful scholars: Seymour M. Lipset, Margaret Canovan, Nadia Urbinati, Pierre Rosanvallon, Gino Germani, Guillermo O’Donnell, Ernesto Laclau, and Partha Chatterjee. Some of them rely on abstract truths and decontextualized concepts to depict populism as a mirror-like reflection of them; others construe it as a practical response to changing historical contingencies; and still others combine key elements from each to make sense of populism. Our course offers an alternative to these ‘theoreticist’ and ‘historicist’ accounts of populism based on the primacy and centrality of the following ethical-political traditions: functionalism, skepticism, anti-totalitarianism, liberal socialism, a-synchronic modernization, delegative democracy, post-marxian hegemony, and biopolitical governmentality. Following the Cold War, scholars identified with one of these traditions sometimes disagreed with like-minded thinkers that differed in their conception of populism due in large part to their divergent way of analyzing political life, with the following two approaches predominating among them: rationalism vs. judgment. Combining these modes of analyzing political life with the tradition-centered perspective on populism provides a more differentiated, nuanced, and convincing framework for making sense of the current debate which has become increasingly predictable, rigid, and stale.
This course examines political and cultural propaganda and its symbolism before, during and after the Cold War. Significant focus will be placed on American ideology, or “Americanism” — which has been represented through various media such as: advertising, press, television, film, and now through the (still) relatively novel forum of social media. Concentrating on Donald Trump’s presidency, his divisive cultural campaign “Make America Great Again,” and his twitter-agenda (governed by @realDonalTrump) we will survey the 2016 U.S. campaign election coverage and ask: is the Trump presidency a media creation? Comparing the U.S. elections with other campaigns from around the world, we will further investigate the role of social media and how it has enhanced political propaganda and public relation strategies. Ultimately, we will determine how new technologies are delivering political and ideological messages without the constraint of borders or time. Finally, we will broaden our scope to focus on the propaganda of the two former and current most prominent global rivals —the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia. We will reflect on how their respective propaganda strategies and tactics have been translated, transformed, and recycled in totalitarian North Korea, communist China, The Middle East and some fundamentalist militant groups.
Recent events in world politics place us in a transformative moment. The war in Ukraine, the return of Taliban in Afghanistan, declining U.S. power, emerging markets in Africa, and the rise of Russia, China and India as global players, have shifted us to a new era of “multi-alignment” – where different countries and cultural communities pursue their own interests in contrast, and often in conflict, with established world orders. What is the role of new media technologies, global media networks and growth of local cultural industries in this time of radical change? How does media and culture impact power relations in international affairs? What are the new contexts and codes of conduct in international communication? This course is an inquiry into the role of media and culture as an instrument of power, and a vital site in the political life of states and societies – both at home and abroad. Major themes of study will include popular culture and political processes; cultural sovereignty; post/modernity; nationalism; and cultural rights. Theory will be connected to professional practice in terms of providing students with a vocabulary and analysis of the role and impact of cultural industries in contemporary international relations – and the possibilities therein. We will discuss and analyze different mediums, including television news, talk shows and entertainment programming, newspaper op-eds and political cartoons, blogs, mobile telephony, etc. The course will use audio-visual and print materials relevant to class discussions and assigned reading topics. Students are free to develop their individual interest in specific mediums within the scope of class readings, discussions and assignments.
Political crises often lead to powerful and provocative images and stories. This course looks at cinema and media from and about some of the world’s most contentious political hotspots, including Southeast Asia, Afghanistan and Iran, Israel and the Arab world, and the U.S.A. Surveying both fiction and documentary works, the course will interrogate concepts of national memory, propaganda, colonialism, and “the war film” along with theories of trauma, ideology, class, race, gender, and “the Other.” The course will also examine whether images and stories can lead to social and political change. Combining historical and aesthetic approaches, the class will survey films concerning WWII (Triumph of the Will), the war in Vietnam (Hearts and Minds), the Israeli/Palestinian conflict (Paradise Now; Waltz with Bashir) and U.S. films and media such as The Parallax View, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Get Out, among others.
Whether it be the war in Ukraine, pandemics, climate change, debt crisis or SDGs, debates in international affairs often focus on interventions and their adequacy. But before reaching the stage of intervention, a range of expert knowledge has already been wielded to characterize problems in selective ways, identify solutions and determine who should take action. This course interrogates expert knowledge and especially the political economy underlying its production. We will examine the intersection of political, economic and epistemic power in global governance to illuminate how entrenched historical – often colonial – legacies and hierarchies shape contemporary policies. We will read case studies on a variety of different topics in international affairs including international economic policy, climate change, disaster management, and global health. In each instance, we will ask how some knowledge becomes authoritative and gets translated into policy, while other knowledge gets sidelined. We will pay particular attention to seemingly objective processes of measurement to reveal how matters of metrics and data reflect power structures and orientations of institutions. In each instance, we will also consider how extant knowledge structures can be challenged, and how alternatives can be introduced.
Global pop cultural conceptions of the topics and tropes of science fiction film have largely been defined by the Hollywood SF blockbusters that have saturated international markets. With some notable exceptions (i.e., anime), Hollywood’s emphasis on big budget special effects has rendered the genre less adaptable to other spaces and modes of production. But fascinating science fiction films have been made across Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. In this course, we will explore the global reach of science fiction, screening films from Russia, Kenya, Argentina, South Africa, France, Mexico, Nigeria, India, Japan, and the Philippines. While a few of the films thematize space travel and planets in a literal sense, the term “planetary” functions primarily as a speculative lens through which to consider how different logics of space and place—from regional, national, trans-national, and global to inner- and outer- space—might enable us to think creatively about today’s ecological crises and colliding worlds. Student work includes weekly screenings, seminars, and Canvas posts, a variety of readings (from short stories to philosophy), and a significant final project. [Tracks C, M, S]
In this course, we will explore the relationship between environment, estrangement, and pathos in philosophical, cultural, and aesthetic terms. Starting with questions of cosmic scale – what Friedrich Nietzsche once termed “humanity’s place in the universe” – we will turn to novels, poems, and films that respond to existential alienation, entropic decline, imminent catastrophe, and the sense of a general melancholia pervading the natural world. We will touch upon a wide range of traditions, from the wilderness poetry of ancient China to contemporary “cli-fi,” from the desert hermits of ancient Egypt to fin-de-siècle decadence, from Romanticism’s poetics of nature to modern “weird fiction.” Along the way we will address topics such as the threat of extinction, “ecological grief,” “collapsology,” and other affects associated with the Anthropocene. Readings will likely include fiction by Kōbō Abe, J.G. Ballard, Aase Berg, Algernon Blackwood, Rachel Carson, Liu Cixin, Camille Flammerion, Anna Kavan, Izumi Kyōka, Stanislaw Lem, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Vladimir Sorokin, and others. While this is a graduate class, we have a handful of seats for undergraduates in their final year (i.e., seniors). Permission to register is necessary in this case. For consideration, kindly fill out this form: https://tinyurl.com/mvm2stuu
In this seminar we will explore the lives and histories of secondhand clothing. As our pre-worn and discarded clothes travel through time, and often across various countries around the world, they enter new uses: Being re-worn they take on new value when they become part of a new wearer’s life who invests these ‘old’ clothes with their own meaning. They also turn into new commodities, resold in a range of retail venues that assign them meanings such as ‘rags,’ ‘thrift,’ or ‘vintage.’ Rising to the rank of ‘collector’s item’ their function as a garment may even be put on hold, when old clothes make it into museum spaces. Yet, while historically clothes were of such high value that they served as currency, the overproduction of today’s fashion has an unprecedented environmental impact with so many clothes ending up as landfill. In this seminar we will explore this shifting value of clothing and fashion and ask how discarded clothes get revived, re-styled or re-designed, inhabited and invested with new meanings. Case-studies lead us into various historic and cultural contexts: from the reselling of secondhand clothes in nineteenth century China, connections between clothing waste and ‘charity’, reappropriations of military uniforms including in colonial contexts, secondhand clothes as symbols of resistance or individual style, for example in counter-hegemonic or youth contexts where they get entangled with politics around class, gender, race, place or nationality.
This year’s death seminar will focus on the afterlife. Anthropology along with other social science research conducted from a secular perspective has mainly treated engagements with the afterlife as epistemological oddity, ontological conundrum, or political ruse. Eschewing these positions, this class will once and for all answer all questions regarding the afterlife. Just kidding. But we will pay attention to the new ways in which the afterlife as a political category and an affective as well as sensory orientation is becoming theorized and practiced through post-human, post-secular and decolonial approaches. What is it to inhabit the afterlife today as an appropriate ethical response to this era of upheavals, social and planetary? How can it be thought and how is it being done? Through what senses, practices and politics are afterlives engaged and what are our forms of exchange with the dead? What can this bring to politics in terminal times? Reading ethnography, history and theory, we will consider such themes as: life and ethics in the shadow of extermination and extinction; technoscientific resurrection projects and ecogrief; revenants and ghosts that make their politics known, sometimes in protest, sometimes in court; the rise of mediums in post-Mao China, and spirits and ancestors in afrodiasporic practices of co-presencing; transhumanist immortality projects and digital avatars as responses to the secular question of personhood and consciousness; the hypercommodification of the dead in capitalist supermarkets and the image economy; and other forms of problematic, creative and political exchange with the dead.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 did not bring forth a world of liberal democracies as many had hoped. On the contrary, the collapse helped facilitate the rise of China and the growth of authoritarian, religious or nationalist populism in India, the Middle East, Turkey, Russia and Eastern Europe. Latin America became in many ways a world center for the Left. The US and Europe lost their role as models, a decline apparent in novels, film and other cultural products. We will explore this history through reading such authors as Fukuyama, Hobsbawms, Caldwell,Wallerstein and WILDERSON
This course will give you practical ways to deepen your sense of pulse and rhythm, as well as methods to become comfortable with any rhythmic challenge. Using rhythm languages from several cultures, we explore how to negotiate odd meters, incorporate deep breathing thru overtone singing and learn rhythm compositions from South India. Students will periodically use their principle instrument or voice to try out the concepts we learn. Each week the class will receive a handout covering new material and the assignment for the next class.
The principal text of this tutorial course is the Daoist classic Zhuangzi. The course will develop a close exegetical reading of the text in its entirety, and situate it within the philosophical context of the Warring States period in ancient China (481-221 BCE).
External Programs
Programs offered by educational institutions in China.
| School | Location | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Peking University | Beijing | Exchange Program offered by Guanghua School of Management |
| Harbin Institute of Technology | Harbin | University Exchange Program |
| Fudan University | Shanghai | University Exchange Program |
| Nanjing University | Nanjing | University Exchange Program |
| Chongqing University | Chongqing | University Exchange Program |
| Nankai University | Tianjin | University Exchange Program |
| Beijing Foreign Studies University | Beijing | Exchange Program offered by School of Chinese Language and Literature |
| Sichuan University | Chengdu | University Exchange Program |
| Tsinghua University | Beijing | University Exchange Program |
| Xiamen University | Xiamen, Fujian | University Exchange Program |
| Central University of Finance and Economics | Beijing | University Exchange Program |
| School | Location | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Peking University | Beijing | Yenching Academy |
| Tsinghua University | Beijing | Schwarzman Scholars |
| Beijing Normal University | Beijing | Master’s program |
| Zhejiang University | Hangzhou | Master’s program in Entrepreneurship and Global Leadership |
| Fudan University | Shanghai | Master’s program |
| National Chengchi University | Taipei, Taiwan | Master’s program |
| Hopkins-Nanjing Center | Nanjing | Master’s program |
| Shanghai Jiaotong University | Shanghai | Master’s program |
| The Communications University of China | Beijing | Cross-cultural Studies |
| University of Science and Technology of China | Hefei, Anhui | USTC Scholarship Program |
| Jinan University | Guangzhou | Master’s program |
| Wuhan University | Wuhan | Master’s program |
| School | Location | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Beijing Normal University | Beijing | PhD program |
| The Communication University of China | Beijing | Cross-cultural Studies |
| Tsinghua University – Yan Mathematical Sciences Center | Beijing | PhD program |
| Tsinghua-UC Berkeley Shenzhen Institute | Shenzhen | PhD program |
| School | Location | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Tsinghua University | Beijing | Shuimu Tsinghua Scholar Program |
| Peking University University – IIASA | Beijing, Laxenburg | IIASA Postdoctoral Program |
| Westlake Institute for Advanced Study | Hangzhou | Applied and Advanced Science |
| Zhejiang University | Hangzhou | Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences |