FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: DEMOCRACY & EDUCATION: RADICAL THEORIES OF SOCIAL JUSTICE. In this course, students will be introduced to a series of books, essays, debates, artistic works, and activists that have shaped, complicated, or critiqued the idea of “progressive education." In its most basic sense, as it was articulated within the philosophy of John Dewey at the turn of the 20th century at the time of The New School's founding, "progressive education" has always involved a double movement: (1) it has stood for an attempt to diagnose how traditional forms of education reflect and reinforce social and political hierarchy along axes of class, gender, and race; (2) it has attempted to imagine new forms of educational and social institutions that would deconstruct those hierarchies in the name of human emancipation. In tracing this idea of progressive education, we will begin by contextualizing its intellectual origins in the ideas of political liberalism and the Enlightenment. We will then consider how the idea of progressive education might be complicated by socialist, feminist, queer, trans, critical race, anticapitalist, and decolonial traditions. Over the course of the semester, we will examine a series of significant episodes, documents, and artifacts from The New School that are relevant to its own contested history as a self-professed progressive institution, including visiting some politically significant works from its site-specific art collection. Potential authors and artists whose works we will consider include: Sara Ahmed, James Baldwin, W.E.B. DuBois, John Dewey, Andrea Geyer, Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Alfredo Jaar, Glenn Ligon, John Stuart Mill, Charles Mills, Herbert Marcuse, Booker T. Washington, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Ann Snitow.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE CITY. What, if anything, makes New York City and New Yorkers distinctive? In this course, we will critically examine a variety of theories of what it is for something to be a city (as opposed to being some other form of social organization), alongside theories of what it is for NYC to be the City (as opposed to being just one city among many). Our goal will be to explore some of the ways in which NYC represents a distinctive form of life, as well as how this form of life makes it possible for distinctive types of people to come into existence. We will discuss texts that approach the City from a philosophical point of view, as well as a variety of other ways in which the City is represented in words, images, and sound.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: IN THEIR FOOTSTEPS: NEW YORK'S LITERARY LANDSCAPE. This course aims to tap into the storied literary landscape of New York City in order to delve into our own creative writing and close reading practices. As a hybrid exploration/creation lab, we will conduct a multi-tiered engagement with different New York-based authors (both dead and alive) to soak in their habitat. We will partake in short communal readings of texts; visit historical points of reference and relevance; craft individual and group exercises based upon the text and excursions; and workshop them with the goal of leaving with a portfolio of your own New York-centric work. In class and out of class readings will include E.B. White, Ric Burns, Walt Whitman, Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsburg, Patti Smith, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Andy Warhol, James Baldwin, Edith Wharton, Joseph Mitchell, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and many more.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: LITERATURE OF PLACES. Places are spaces imbued with meaning, and thus sites of cultural contest over who defines that meaning, who tells the story of this or that place. We will read poets, novelists, and essayists who put place at the center of their work, whether that place is rural or urban, a small patch of land or a neighborhood, a city square like Times Square or a stretch of water like the Mississippi River. Some works we will read consider natural landscapes, or at least places we think are untouched by humans. Others focus on human-constructed worlds. Some writers urge us to develop a harmonious relationship with place; others understand place as fate; and still others are curious about place as a palimpsest bearing traces of past meanings and stories. Readings may be drawn from such writers as William Shakespeare, Henry David Thoreau, Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, Zadie Smith, Toni Morrison, Annie Dillard, bell hooks, and Colson Whitehead.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: BIOLOGY, ART & SOCIAL JUSTICE. Using a social justice and planetary health framework, we will explore how artists and scientists use interdisciplinary inquiry, creativity, interpretation, and personal expression to propel social change. Drawing on the work of Latin American muralists, Black artist Wangechi Mutu, environmental artist Alexis Rockman, and Visual AIDS artists, we traverse history and imagine a different future. The course is modular, spanning topics such GMOs, urban health, biomedicine, genomics, immortality, and disability justice. Assignments include journal entries, essays, visual narratives, design statements, and an independent project that re-examines how we define ourselves, how we interact with one another, and how we can simultaneously promote science and social justice. We will conduct 3-4 experiments including isolating your own DNA, viewing cell regeneration in the context of a case study focused on the establishment of Henrietta Lacks' cells as a biomedical tool, and the use of microbial pigments for non-toxic painting and dyeing. At the end of the course we will assess how this course and its approach has affected your perception of learning and your ability to interpret and create visual narratives for social change.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: THE BODY IN PERFORMANCE ART. The seminar focuses on the human body in performance art. What is performance art? Is everyone a performance artist? What makes it different from experimental theatre, or visual art? We will look at artists whose work concentrates on the body: Cassils, Yana Evans, Niv Acosta, Yoko Ono, among others. Students will go to see performances, read theory and make short performances of their own. The final project is a creative response to a performance artist of their choice.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: WHAT IS "CREATIVE" NONFICTION? What does it mean to be creative with how we tell the truth? How do facts determine our choices, and how do our choices—as writers, documentarians, and artists—shape the facts, in turn? This course will examine the complexities and contradictions of the attempt to represent reality across media including literature, film, image, and song. Through readings, conversation, hands-on workshops, and research-based creative projects, students will have the opportunity to exercise the possibilities of nonfiction in a medium of their choice. Projects may draw on history, science, theory, and experiential practice. Potential texts include works by Catina Bacote, Alison Bechdel, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Saidiya Hartman, Cathy Park Hong, Carmen Maria Machado, Viet Thanh Nguyen, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jayce Salloum, Solmaz Sharif, Justin Torres, Vauhini Vara, and more.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: JOURNALISM ABOUT HIGHER EDUCATION. In this course, we will read (listen to, watch…) reported stories about college. The class will consider these stories both as exemplars of journalistic craft and as real-world accounts that support or challenge preconceptions about higher education. Stories will explore issues such as access, labor, money, and innovation. Sources will include general-interest newspapers, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Open Campus, narrative podcasts, and student press.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: RELIGION OF TREES. Trees have long played a central part in religious and spiritual traditions, from Yggdrasil to the Bodhi tree, from Ethiopian Church Forests to the “dark green” religions of the Anthropocene. Today scientific research is revealing ever more forms and networks of sentience and relationship among trees themselves, and between them and their symbiont species, including humans. This class explores what they might teach us, drawing inspiration from religious studies, traditional ecological knowledge and the new research on trees - as well as New York City's urban forest.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: ON REBELS AND REBELLIONS. To rebel is to disobey one in a position of authority or control. This course looks at different expressions and case studies of rebellion and submission in literature, philosophy, history, and art. While social and political forms of defiance and unrest such as strikes, rioting, revolt, mutiny, uprising, and fully erupted revolutions or wars for independence are the events that usually occur on a massive scale, we focus on examples of disobedience and defiance in the behavioral acts of smaller groups and individuals—civic, moral, and spiritual—among prominent leaders and rank and file participants; in heroes, antiheroes, provocateurs, gadflies, and conformists; in victories, and defeats. Authors in the course may include Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kropotkin, Arendt, Eisenstein, Camus, Bertolucci, among others, and the courageous battles for liberty in our time.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: HUMAN ANIMALS AND SOCIAL THEORY. Have you ever wondered about the role of animals in social and cultural life? Have you been curious about why the film industry creates half-human/half-animal creatures to evoke our fears or fantasies? Or how animals are also workers? This course explores different forms of animals and more-than-human life, engaging in an intellectual journey of human-animal relationships worldwide to explore contemporary social issues. We will read about animals in novels, analyze them in movies, explore them in the city, and connect their life trajectories to social theory and current critical issues. In other words, we will study animal and social theory by making the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Additionally, this seminar introduces other subjects relevant to college life, such as developing critical reading skills, conducting university-level research, learning about field research methods, presenting and communicating ideas in the classroom, and developing social networks to learn and produce knowledge collaboratively.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: SEX AND SOCIAL CHANGE. From national debates concerning reproductive freedom to the viral outrage of #MeToo, the conjunction between “sex” and “politics” seems everywhere in the present to saturate social structures, cultural institutions, and the fabric of our everyday lives. But what exactly is political about sex? In this seminar, we will query how sex has been theorized and practiced by a range of intellectuals, activists, and artists invested in visions of social transformation. What, if anything, does one’s sex have to do with one’s politics? How do big political ideas about democracy, freedom, equality, and revolution articulate to seemingly personal and intimate matters like pleasure, desire, and the erotic? How do racism, capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and cisheteronormativity shape the meanings of sex and sexuality? Throughout, we will pay special attention to the way that various cultural workers have sought to imagine what justice might look (and feel) like when and where sex is concerned. Readings will likely include: Dennis Altman, Heather Berg, Andrea Long Chu, Angela Davis, Silvia Federici, Michel Foucault, Katherine Franke, Kay Gabriel, Jules Gill-Peterson, Saidiya Hartman, Audre Lorde, Catharine MacKinnon, José Esteban Muñoz, Beth Richie, and Monique Wittig, among others.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: TRANS/FORMS: CONSIDERATIONS OF FORM WITH TRANS* ARTISTS AND WRITERS. This seminar explores the ways that trans, genderqueer, and nonbinary artists and writers express form and embodiment in their work, and considers the ways in which this expression invites us to transform and radicalize our own artistic practices. While we are now familiar with the word “trans” as synonymous with transgender identity, the prefix itself offers incredible richness of formal meanings connected to transformation, change, liminality, and ongoing states of being that move beyond historically traditional boundaries. As we engage with the expression of artists who communicate in this state of “beyond,” we will work on both collaborative and individual projects in a joint discussion and workshop format, incorporating and expanding upon our source texts in new, transformative production. Poets, musicians, performance and visual artists we explore may include but are not limited to: Andrea Abi-Karam, Samuel Ace, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Tona Brown, Micha Cárdenas, Ching-In Chen, Vaginal Davis, Meg Day, Jai Dulani, Anaïs Duplan, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Rickey Laurentiis, Billy Tipton, and Wu Tsang.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: THE MAKING OF ECONOMIC SOCIETY. Why did the industrialized world experience a financial collapse and "Great Recession" in the first decade of the 21st century? What accounts for the remarkable rise of the economies of China and India? These are some of the questions that we will address in this first-year seminar in world economic history. Our focus will be on the rise of capitalism and especially the interplay of economic, political and cultural forces in social change. We begin with a discussion of economics and the different ways in which "the economic problem" has been solved at different historical moments. After a consideration of ancient, medieval and feudal economies, we look at the emergence of market economies and then of capitalism. A close analysis of the industrial revolution in Europe sets the stage for the study of capitalism in the 20th century, with its booms and busts of economic activity (including the Great Depression), the rise of the public sector and, finally, the globalization of finance and production. We look briefly at the rise and fall of socialism, and conclude with a consideration of the problems with, and possibilities for, capitalisms in the 21st century.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: PERFORMING POLITICS. Activists have long employed performance to achieve political goals, and performers have created great art in response to political challenges. Performance is everywhere, from the ways in which we experience our gender and racial identities to the versions of ourselves we advertise online. Professional politicians have long realized that style makes more votes than actual policy, and contemporary politics is more tightly crafted than many theatrical productions. This course investigates the relationship between politics and performance. By reading, viewing, and analyzing performance and politics theory and practice, we will explore the ways in which artists have responded to challenging political environments, as we analyze the ways in which politics is performed in the public square.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: WHAT ARE POETS FOR? “There is an old quarrel between poetry and philosophy,” writes Plato in The Republic. And while Plato banned poets from his ideal republic, the relationship between poets and philosophers is ongoing: sometimes as quarrel, but more often as conversation, inspiration, affinity. This course traces this cross-genre conversation in the work of a number of contemporary poets and the philosophers who inspire them. We read philosophers who write with the grace and depth of poets, and poets who enlarge the scope of their investigations with the rigor and analytical clarity of philosophers. Poets are likely to include: Paul Celan, Claudia Rankine, Maggie Nelson, Fred Moten; philosophers: Nietzsche, Weil, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Baldwin, Heraclitus.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: IMPROVISING THE POSSIBLE. Improvisation is all around us. It occurs in a wide range of human activity, from creative practice in the arts to everyday conversations to spontaneous negotiations with one’s environment. Nevertheless, perhaps because of its liveness and unpredictability, improvisation is often difficult to define and analyze. In this course, students draw from recent scholarship on improvisation within the fields of philosophy, anthropology, musicology, as well as dance and performance studies, in order to grapple with the nature of improvisation, and to consider its potential as a meaningful political practice. At various points, the course also turns to jazz and jazz studies, where one finds a vast and rigorous analysis of improvisation, and often an exacting look at race, gender, and the politics of performance. Where does improvisation come from, and where might its power exist? In addition to critical texts, students consider a range of live and recorded performances throughout the semester.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: VISUAL CULTURE: ART AND DESIGN. This seminar introduces students to an academic understanding of the close connection between art and design from antiquity to the present, paying special attention to the politics of design across the dynamics of art (classically defined by “autonomy” and “disinterestedness”) and design (defined by function, form and technology). The course is aimed at training students to develop analytical and critical skills when interpreting the different media and materials that both art and design depend on, as in the practice of sculpture, drawing, painting, photography and film, as well as their applications in architecture, furniture and fashion. Besides art history and the history of design, the course will draw on the disciplinary resources of visual anthropology and ethnographic studies in order to broaden the horizon of the subject to also include non-Western visual cultures of art and design.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: A NATION OF IMMIGRANTS AND BORDER WALLS: THE POLITICS OF IMMIGRATION IN THE US. Why is migration such a contentious and divisive issue? And why is immigration policy reform considered key for the future of the country? This course will examine U.S. migration policies and responses to past and current waves of migration from a demographic, political, economic and cultural perspective; the current issues that define the debate; and the different actors involved in shaping discourse, policies and social action in response to migration flows. Topics include a historical background of U.S. immigration policies and legislation; migration and security post - 9/11; the politics of the U.S.-Mexico border; public perceptions of migrants; the debates over the costs and benefits of immigration; activism and advocacy; and alternative narratives of migration. In addition to the academic bibliography, class materials will include documentaries, films, press articles, literary works, guest speakers and site visits.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: CHINA THROUGH SATIRE. This seminar introduces students to ways in which artists, activists, humorists, and novelists have used different media forms and messaging to challenge and question the powerful and wealthy in China, from within China and from abroad, through networks of satirical practice. We will consider these and other questions: What does political satire and humor do? By making fun of the powerful, do satirists make claims for social justice and greater equality? Does political satire vary across democratic and authoritarian political contexts?

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: POETS AND ARTISTS OF THE NEW YORK SCHOOL. The generation of writers and artists to emerge in the mid-twentieth century in New York City is usually referred to as the New York School. Writers most often associated with this movement are poets such as Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Bernadette Mayer, Amiri Baraka, Alice Notley and Eileen Myles, to name a few. But what do these writers have in common beyond sharing the geography of New York City in their formative years? This course will examine the intersections between poetry and art from this period and consider their ongoing influence on contemporary writing in New York. In addition to reading the writings of several New York School poets and listening and viewing visual and acoustic works by some of the artists and musicians with whom they collaborated, students will explore first-hand how some of New York's downtown neighborhoods shaped the work in question. Assignments for this course include a creative writing option.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: FILM AND LAND. The relationship between film and the land has always been complex. Whether rural or urban, natural or humanmade, land can appear as setting, as a main character, or a resource used and transformed by human activity. Destinations, iconic landmarks, and other sites can capture our attention, while other times land recedes into the background, unnoticed. In this course, students will explore topics such as site specificity, extraction, travelogue, and ecocinema through a wide range of films including genre films (western, horror, and film noir), experimental film, and works of international art cinema. Alongside these screenings, they will read historical and critical texts examining issues of art history, critical geography, and film theory.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: ICONIC EVENTS IN INTERNATIONAL MEDIA. This course examines the media coverage of news events that have attracted large international audiences. These exceptional news events interrupt the flow of time, and provide us with uplifting or traumatic experiences and memories. The course's case studies include the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, Princess Diana's funeral and Prince Harry's recent departure from the Royal family, the Black Lives Matter protests, nuclear and climate disasters, and others. We will examine the events’ journalistic coverage and their global social remembrance.