FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: HOW THE TOLIET CHANGED THE WORLD: In this project-based seminar, we focus on the development of the toilet and its impact on sanitation and public health from the earliest biblical accounts to the present day and beyond. Class discussions will draw on news articles, blogs, and selections from scientific papers, and labs will contribute to the instructor's microbiological research investigating the impact of human activity on New York water bodies and ecosystems. We will approach access to toilets as a social justice issue both as a public health threat as well as a threat to public safety, particularly that of women. Students will learn about how toilet design and use differs across our globe according to cultural, economic, and political differences. Lastly, students will learn about current developments in improving sanitation and toilet access and how intrepid and creative individuals are developing ways to make money from poop. Assignments will include weekly reflective blogs, laboratory activities, and a collaborative project to design and market concept toilets that are aesthetically pleasing, affordable for low-income communities, and minimize their impact on planetary health. At the end of the course we will assess how this course has affected your perception of how toilets have impacted humans from the perspectives of public health, social justice, aesthetics and design.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: BLACK MIRROR: This seminar takes the horrors of the dystopian UK television series Black Mirror as a jumping-off point to investigate day-to-day digital culture in the 21st-century. We will research our conflicted relationship with dominant platforms and businesses through the lens of themes including: “fake news” and cybercrime; social media fame, Instagram, emotional labor, and reputation; device addiction, algorithmic control, identity, and anxiety; life logging and digital memory; the dark web, anonymity, and Blockchain; immediacy and digital sex; digital self; defense and government-backed privacy tools; privacy and the privilege of being offline; trolling and cyber bullying; political organizing and resistance. Rather than blaming technologies for our woes, this course will occupy the vibrant space between dystopian and Pollyannaish visions of the future.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: WOMEN OF COLOR FEMINISM: We will begin this course with Audre Lorde's two foundational essays "The Uses of Anger" and "The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," to shape how we understand activist and intellectual "technologies." Framing technology as the practical application of knowledge, we will consider how Women of Color Feminist thought and activism has invented and mobilized a wide range of technologies to produce a huge body of work toward social change. From This Bridge Called My Back to #This Tweet Called My Back, we will trace these technologies primarily in the United States, but looking beyond the United States as well, to consider this vast repertoire of technological innovation and power. Working across media, we will study the work of folks including Lorde, June Jordan, Chela Sandoval, Marci Blackman, Sara Ahmed, Lisa Nakamura, Janet Mock, Sylvia Wynter, Katherine McKittrick, Monica Roberts, BlackGirlDangerous (Mia McKenzie), The Feminist Wire, the Crunk Collective, INCITE!, bell hooks, Gloria Anzuldúa, Cherrí Moraga, Suey Park, #IdleNoMore, Dina Georgis, Shola Lynch and others. The intellectual project of the course will convene around analyses driven by race, class, gender, sex, citizenship and de/colonization. Students will have the opportunity to read closely, to think together, and to produce creative-critical projects based on course materials.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: THE ECONOMICS OF DESIRE, CONSUMPTION, AND HAPPINESS: This seminar will explore the paradox that people buy things that don’t make them happy. We examine the benefits to employers and the market system from household dissatisfaction. The students will critically examine literature on economic psychology, Marxist interpretations of commodity fetishism, new frontiers on brain science, and learn some basics of everyday personal finance about budget managing, planning for the future​ including the real cost and rate of return ​of student debt​. ​We will take field trips to the ​slave museum (African American Burial Grounds -- National Park in Manhattan), the Tenement Museum, and the MOMA, and a consumer store of the class's choice.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY: “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 as it takes place in the work of (mostly) 20th century poets and philosophers. 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: Gertrude Stein, Paul Celan, Claudia Rankine, Maggie Nelson, Fred Moten; philosophers: Nietzsche, Weil, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Deleuze, DuBois, Saint Augustine, Heraclitus.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: THE BODY IN PERFORMANCE ART: What is performance art? Anything done with “style and purpose” according to legendary downtown performance artist Tom Murrin. “In performance art, the artist's medium is the body, and the live actions he or she performs are the work of art,” the Museum of Modern Art writes on its website. Performance within a fine arts context is also known as live art or time based art and is often closely related to social justice. How is it different from theatre or dance? Can web art be considered performance? How does gender, color, and ability inform the body of the performer? We will look at artists such as Karen Finley, John Kelly, Heather Cassils, Kate Durbin, Hari Neff, Ayana Evans, Clifford Owens, Anohni as well as read performance texts and criticism such as Out From Under: Texts By Women Performance Artists (L. Champagne, editor, TCG, 1990) and Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century (Jo Bonney, editor, TCG, 2000). Students are required to attend at least two live art performances, write short responses and write a research paper.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: IN THEIR FOOTSTEPS: TRACKING WRITERS ACROSS NEW YORK'S STORIED LITERARY LANDSCAPE FOR INSPIRATION: This course aims to tap into the storied literary landscape of New York City in order to 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: LATIN AMERICAN MODERNISM: FROM THE 1920S TO THE 1960S: This course examines the emergence and development of Latin American modernisms in their so-called first and second waves. The first one, which unfolded from the 1920s to the 1940s in Brazil, Mexico and Cuba, witnessed the artists’ combination of imported European avant-garde tendencies—such as post-impressionism and Cubism—with local motifs to produce an art that could reflect a national identity. The second wave pertains to the post World War II raise of abstract tendencies in South America, specifically, concrete abstraction in Argentina and Brazil, and op and kinetic art in Venezuela. Artistic modernisms in the region will be studied in connection with the political and cultural context in Latin American countries. This class will enable students to develop their skills in close reading, discussion, research, and writing by engaging with a range of critical and artistic works. As part of this course, we will visit museum's exhibitions and private art galleries that specialize in Latin American art.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: BIOLOGY, ART AND SOCIAL JUSTICE: In this course we will explore how artists and scientists are working together to create news ways of knowing and understanding the world we live in. We will explore how science and art are perceptual practices that involve inquiry, creativity, interpretation, and personal expression. We will analyze articles, artist interviews and exhibits, and scientific summaries focused on new biotechnologies and their impact on food, agriculture, and human identity. Discussions will center on discoveries coming out of the Human Genome Project, environmental studies, and cultural studies and ask us to re-examine how we define who we are and how we interact with one another. Our place in the natural and material world is shifting, and artists and scientists are helping us navigate this new terrain and helping us bring awareness around issues of social justice. We will conduct 4-6 experiments including isolating your own DNA and painting with bacteria. At the end of the course we will assess how this course and its approach has affected your perception of learning and the impact it has had on visual literacy.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: THE SIMULATION GAMES: DEATH, DISEASE, DENIAL, AND DRUGS: In this project-based seminar, we will analyze current scientific and popular literature and generate data using physical and computer simulations to address a variety of contemporary challenges spanning health, environmental conservation, and population dynamics. Topics include restoration of declining animal populations, genetic engineering of mosquitoes to combat infectious agents such as those that cause Malaria and Zika, the manipulation of news feeds to create “alternative facts” that spread via social media, the determination of a therapeutic dose of medicine, and the possibility of a happy ending for the human race following a zombie apocalypse. A major focus of this course will be coding mathematical simulations using free specialized software. We will design algorithms to visualize changes in populations in space and time. Current issues will be approached within a mathematical and biological framework with an aim to identify ways to make a positive impact on our society and the environment.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: POLITICS AND LAUGHTER: Politics is a force that saturates our life almost entirely. Starting with explosive early morning tweets to late in the day reckoning with faulty commutes and other effects of political decisions and policy-making there is seemingly no way we could hide away from politics in case we wanted to. But political life is not made of one piece, and the political being of humanity is only one facet of our being. It is also a phenomenon of our own making, reflecting our best aspirations and achievements, and our worst choices and shortcomings. This course takes Aristotle’s identification of humans as political animals for a helpful companion to explore the dignified and yet laughable side of politics. It introduces laughter as neither a rejection nor abandonment of politics, but as a special way of engaging with it. In the course, we focus on alternative ways of interpreting politics throughout history by dissidents, comedians, contrarians, misfits, and the independent minded. Our chief focus will be literary works culled from different centuries and traditions, but we shall also explore the very rich genres and examples of political laughter shared by literature with philosophy, public discourse, cultural domain, journalism, and specimen of visual and musical art. Working with material from Aesop to Mark Twain, from writers of the absurd to David Sedaris, from Demosthenes to Jon Stewart the goal of the seminar is to allow its participants to arm themselves with the knowledge and skills necessary to experiment with the varieties of original thinking and compassionate imagination driven by a sense of responsible inclusiveness that have traditionally characterized The New School. This course is dedicated to the centennial of the New School.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: PLATO'S REPUBLIC: This course will introduce the student to philosophical questions, and questioning, through a close reading and discussion of Plato’s Republic. A wide range of issues will be on the table, such as the nature of knowledge and art, the relation between society and the person, and the meaning of war; but everything will turn on one basic question: “What is justice?"

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: REPRESENTATIONS OF THE GLOBAL CITY: This course addresses how different institutions, social groups, cultural intellectuals, and key thinkers represent (and therefore both understand and prescribe) the global city, broadly conceived. We will examine these representations from a wide range of sources—written texts but also images, sound, film—to understand how various media reflect, produce, contest, or illuminate social realities about cities under globalization. We consider the work of urban theorists and thinkers, as well as writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers to explore the following questions: how do different urban representations matter? how do we evaluate dominant and alternative representations? what is the relationship between form and content in understanding media? How do different representations shape the way we understand globalization, urban processes, cultural production, and political possibility? Students will examine the continuities, overlaps, and divergences of ideas across these sources to analyze how different intellectual histories and perspectives shape and are shaped by the global city.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: URBAN PROBLEMS, URBAN ACTIONS: This course is a Lang Advising Seminar for students interested in the study of Cities and the array of problems we find in cities as well as possible solutions to such problems. This course is intended to provide you with an introductory understanding of cities and their development over time and space, how to approach the study of cities, how to analyze specific urban problems, and how to creatively think about solutions. In order to be able to do so, students will learn about theoretical approaches to the study of social problems in cities which include but are not limited to functionalism, structuralism including Marxist theory, feminism, as well as deconstruction and postmodernism. Equipped with a theoretical understanding, we examine a number of select urban problems, including the effects of globalization and economic restructuring, racism and residential segregation, gentrification and residential displacement, immigration and its economic impact, and homelessness and extreme poverty in a number of U.S. cities and beyond.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: DOWNTOWN NEW YORK: This seminar will study the musical practices associated with the Downtown Scene in New York, circa 1960 to the present. This foundational period includes the emergence of punk, minimalism, performance art, conceptual art and Fluxus, loft jazz, and experimental rock – all critical genres that helped create New York City as we know it today. We will consider the practical, critical, and aesthetic conditions that led to these movements which still define New York’s cultural economy by examining the tensions between high culture and street culture that propelled Downtown artists and musicians such as Yoko Ono, La Monte Young, Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Nam June Paik, Steve Reich, Phillip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Julius Eastman. We will question how particular musical practices are shaped by cultural, technological, and economic conditions by reading both historical and critical accounts, as well as paying careful attention to audio and visual documentation of both historical and contemporary performance. We will take field trips to performance and recording spaces, archives and museums, and we will attend performances in the Village and Brooklyn. Students will publish their writing assignments on our class website, and create a final project in the form of a film or radio piece about a particular artist or genre.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: LANGUAGE AS ART: This course will survey various uses of language by visual artists from the early 20th century until the present. Starting with art manifestos, we will consider the use of language in drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, live performance, film/video, sound art, body art, conceptual art, artists’ books, and post/internet art through a broad range of art historical and contemporary art discourses as well as through the problem of genre. Each week students will be provided with assignments that challenge them to explore language in their practice across a range of mediums and platforms. Core subjects include: artists uses of typography; artists’ books; language as a sculptural condition; language as a sonic condition; artists’ magazines; the relationship between drawing, painting, and writing; artists’ uses of performance scripts and screenplays; reappropriative and remediative writing; the relationship between visual art and fiction; the relationship between visual art and poetry; artists’ uses of scoring; artists’ uses of prompts, questionnaires, and instructions; the relationship between language arts and feminism.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: DIGITAL MEDIA AND RACE: TECHNICITY, ETHNICITY, EMBODIMENT: Are we becoming post-racial in the digital age? This course questions what constitutes “race” through explorations of the ways that technology affects identity. By turning to examples from new media art, online environments, video games, cyborgs, and the changing role of race in the “natural” body, we will explore the formation and reification of identity through imagined communities and imagined networks, online communities, and social media. This course draws upon critical race theory, critical theories of new media and technology, postcolonial theory, and post humanism to provide a clear and nuanced understanding of race and identity, situating it within the digital culture of our increasingly virtual world. Readings include Nakamura, Omi & Winant, Chun, Foucault, Gilroy, Deleuze, and Haraway.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: WOMXN OF COLOR FEMINISMS: We will begin this course with Audre Lorde's two foundational essays "The Uses of Anger" and "The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," to shape how we understand artist, activist and intellectual "technologies." Framing technology as the practical application of knowledge, we will consider how Womxn of Color Feminist thought and activism has invented and mobilized a wide range of technologies (both literal and theoretical) to produce a huge body of work toward social change. We will specifically focus on how critical theory and analysis of oppression come together and speak through through art, imagery and humor to resist and mobilize. The objective of this course is to engage with foundational texts authored by Womxn of Color in order to examine and address key themes within present-day technologies such as memes, tweets, Instagram handles, blogs, radical art and DIY projects. Our analyses will be driven by an intersectional approach – highlighting the unique positions of race, sex, gender, class and citizenship of the scholars, artists and activists, in relation to our own unique set of identities.

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. The New York school is most often associated with well known and celebrated figures such as poets Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Bernadette Mayer, Amiri Baraka, Alice Notley and Anne Waldman, among others. 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 creative writing options.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: THE ESSAYS OF ZADIE SMITH: Perhaps better known for her novels, Zadie Smith has in recent years come to be known as a master essayist and cultural critic, whose works offer a unique look into the worlds of literature and the arts, technology and the environment, race and identity, and so much more, over the past generation. This advising seminar considers Smith as a voice for our moment, and asks students to take seriously the world they share with Zadie Smith: from Facebook to Get Out, climate change to the experience of joy, Q-Tip to Karl Ove Knausgaard.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: PHOTOGRAPHY IN BLACK AND WHITE: RACE AND THE PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGE: This course allows us an opportunity to think about the ways race is “framed” rather literally—through the lens of a camera. Our interest in race and photography is primarily American in context, dating from the early twentieth century through the present day, and principally photojournalistic and documentary in form. We explore key moments in American history, as well as seminal photos, as we consider the politics and ethics of representation. Through sociological, historical, and journalistic prisms, we examine, for instance, slave and lynching imagery, documentation of immigrant populations, and coverage of the civil rights movement. Ultimately, we progress right to the contemporary moment, with discussion of race and the photographic image in the age of social media. We also consider American coverage of peoples abroad, typically in war-based settings, as we extend our political and social discussions both geographically and conceptually. Throughout we ask, how have photographers reinforced or contested prevailing views of racial identity through the photographic form? And how are viewers influenced by these portrayals of race? Readings include theory and critical essays, as well as journalistic and historical accounts, and of course we will be looking at—and learning to read closely—a lot of photography. Authors may include: Sontag, Sturken, Alam, and Azoulay. Students write response papers and longer essays, will take trips to various galleries and photo institutes, and can produce a visual project of their own.

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: GLOBAL HISTORY OF HEALTH AND MIGRATION: Migration and health are key elements of our past and our present. This seminar explores the key contextual connections between health and migration. There are one billion migrants in the world today but this situation is the latest development of a global history where migration is a factor intrinsically related and affected by health. From the perspective of the history of science, we will examine Global South cases of health vis-à-vis national and transnational migration as well as other cases of global circulation and displacement of people. Special consideration will be given to gender and ethnic issues. Contexts to be explored include religious pilgrimages in Africa and Asia, military crisis and refugee displacements in Europe and Latin America and internal and external migration in the Americas.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: THE LEGACY OF THE WITCH: The witch is having a moment. Film and television are filled with tales of witches and otherworldly women, visual art and literature are plumbing the depths of pagan lore, and runways are replete with occult symbolism. In this cultural climate, the witch is increasingly viewed as a symbol of female power, but she is equally a symbol of female persecution. Many may now embrace the witch identity for political or spiritual reasons, but thousands of women have suffered ostracism, abuse, torture, and death because of their perceived association with witchcraft. This course will analyze the archetype of the witch through a feminist lens and explore the ways femininity has been demonized since the early modern era. Using a variety of historical and contemporary texts, films, and artworks, students will delve into the legacy of the witch as an enduring cultural icon.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE, THE STATE, PRISON, AND THE LAW: Most of us likely agree that there exists in democratic societies a general obligation to obey the law. Yet we also likely believe that we are not obliged to obey laws which we perceive as grossly unjust. This course explores the tension between these commonly held views by examining the theory and practice of civil disobedience and extra-legal protest in a formal democracy such as the United States. It all addresses how the law itself, and broader criminal justice system, can themselves become instruments of injustice. Central questions include: what is the source of the legitimacy of law? How extensive is the obligation to obey the law? How do political dissidents justify acts of extra-legal protest? Does civil disobedience hurt or nourish democracy? How does the state respond to radical dissent, and what happens when the state itself becomes lawless? The course does not seek a comprehensive answer to these questions, but instead aims to develop a sense of how challenging and urgent they are. We will discuss works of political philosophy and legal theory; look critically at the prison system and forms of detainee abuse like torture; profile resistance to racism, war, and immigration and drug laws; and examine -- in ways both personal and political -- our own relationship to the law and morality.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: YOUNG LIVES IN LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND FILM: This course explores the representation of teenagers and young adults in Latin American literature and film from the 19th century to the present. Among the authors and filmmakers who may be studied are Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Alejandro Zambra, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Alfonso Cuarón.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: MONEY, MATERIALISM, AND THE MIND: PSYCHOLOGICAL INSIGHTS INTO MONEY: Money, a fundamental aspect of modern society, has been said to “make the world go ‘round”. At almost any given moment, people are engaged in some sort of monetary transaction – paying rent, selling an old car, putting money away for a rainy day, or simply trying to make ends meet. But how well do we understand our relationship with money? Can money buy happiness, or are the best things in life truly free? How do we determine how much we should pay for something? How do different emotional states affect financial decision making? For those who are struggling, what are the psychological consequences of having too little money? And, for those who can afford to do so, why is it still so difficult to save enough for retirement? In this seminar, we will examine some surprising insights from psychology and behavioral economics to gain a better understanding of money.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: SPIRITUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY: One of the ways we make sense of the trajectory of our lives and of our ultimate questions is by uncovering a narrative of meaning. In this course, we will encounter contrasting contemporary spiritual autobiographies and spiritual memoirs: books and essays (and also documentary film) by writers/artists from diverse backgrounds (African-American, Euro-American, Latina/o, S.E. Asian; Buddhist, Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Mestiza/indigena, Muslim; lesbian, gay, heterosexual, and transgender) who offer rich and moving examples of the attempt to understand the spiritual impulses that have significantly informed their lives. The constellation of themes we will explore though these texts include: ancestors, lineage, tradition, cell memory; secrets/disclosure and passing; the body, sexuality, desire; concepts of God and the sacred; exile, homecoming, turning and returning; suffering, loss, and mortality; forgiveness and freedom; and the role of autobiographical writing as craft and as a process of liberation, broadly construed.

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 Nelson Mandela’s memorial service, Steve Jobs’ death; the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, the Beijing Olympic Games, the September 11 attacks, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and others. We will examine the events’ journalistic coverage and their global social remembrance.