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Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
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The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, established in 2011, offers liberal arts education and research opportunities to local communities while supporting young scholars. With a mission to engage various intellectual traditions, the institute aims to provide accessible education and foster active, engaged citizens.
7 classes have spots left
Lab Meat: Science, Climate, and Cellular Agriculture
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
What sort of burger costs $325,000? One that’s grown entirely in a cell culture laboratory—like the five-ounce “artificial” burger unveiled by researcher Mark Post in 2013, its 20,000 muscle strands grown individually in dishes. Since then, the field of cellular agriculture (commonly referred to as lab meat) has taken off, with lofty promises of ethical meat that will render factory farming obsolete and help fight the climate crisis....
Walking and Philosophy: Thinking in Motion
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
How does an activity as simple as walking become emblematic of an age—or a school of philosophy? From the wandering peripatetic of ancient Greece to the paradigmatic urban wanderer of 19th century Europe—the flâneur, a boulevard stroller immersed in the throng of human traffic—philosophers have been walking and thinking, alone or in among the crowd, amidst an asymmetrical organization of gazes, at once observing and being observed. The freedom—of...
Gershom Scholem: Mysticism & the Philosophy of History
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Friend to Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, and Leo Strauss, Gershom Scholem may be the best known scholar of Jewish Studies in the 20th century. Above all he is associated with launching the modern academic study of Jewish mysticism. However, Scholem’s study of mysticism was only part of his much broader, and far more engaged and systematic thinking, about questions of contemporary politics and the Jewish historical condition. An...
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Ethnopornography: Race, Erotics, and Domination
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Early anthropology had a sex problem. By day it studied kinship—how legitimately procreative sex produces a society—collected intimate items, and photographed naked subjects; by night, it hung around corners, pestered and menaced its way into intimate spaces. These early anthropologists were not alone. Their settler peers developed obsessions in schoolgirls and purchased wives, in erotic genres of parlor photography, in romantic rape literature,...
Heidegger/Arendt: Philosophy, Influence, and Being
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger’s love affair is perhaps the most well-known, if not notorious, in modern Western letters. But, putting the more intimate aspects aside, how can we understand the intellectual connection, sometimes ardent, sometimes ambivalent, sometimes hostile that tied the two together for the majority of their adult lives—even after Heidegger’s turn to Nazism? In this course we will explore the affinities and differences...
Becoming Cyborg: Science and Science-Fiction
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Feminist science studies scholar Donna Haraway writes: “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are all cyborgs.” Haraway goes on to argue in her canonical essay, “A Manifesto For Cyborgs,” that to be a cyborg means to live in a world without tidy origin stories or innocent wholeness. Instead, it is about partial connections, complex...
From Capitalist Realism to Acid Communism
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
From Capitalist Realism to Acid Communism: an Introduction to Mark Fisher Most of the writings of the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher began their life not as academic papers or monographs or fully wrought essays but as blog posts, online responses, and even internet comments. These writings—including those that would be later collected into his some of his most famous texts—reflect one of the most unique theoretical voices of the early 21st...
Don Quixote: Into the World of the Book
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote is, perhaps above all else, a book about books. The title character’s voracious consumption of books of chivalry drives him mad, leading him to interpret windmills as giants, common inns as majestic castles, and prostitutes as highborn damsels. In addition to the medieval romances that Don Quixote reads, a variety of texts in different forms populate the narrative: Arabic manuscripts, short stories...
Philosophy of Mind: Thinking and Consciousness
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
What is the relationship between the mind and the brain? Is the mind a reducible, physical system, or is there anything more to consciousness? It’s often taken for granted that the human mind is a kind of computer (and that, similarly, computers can “think,” know, and learn much as humans do). In more classical thought, the mind was frequently regarded as independent of the body, a thing associated with an incorporeal “soul.” But how seriously...
Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Ovid begins his Metamorphoses, “My soul would speak of bodies changed into new forms,” and it is the great theme of physical transformation that unites the poem’s many myths: humans becomes animals and plants, and vice versa; humans becomes stones and constellations; and humans change their sex. No poem from antiquity has so influenced Western European literature and art. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dante creatively raided Ovid’s tales...
McCarthyism: American Politics and the Paranoid Style
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Senator Joseph McCarthy’s name is enshrined in the American lexicon to symbolize a style of paranoia and fear that goes far beyond his original red-baiting. Just as the path to McCarthyism was in fact paved decades earlier—as conservative factions deployed both ideological and state violence in their early fights against organized labor—the McCarthyist manner of politics has found new acolytes in the Trump era. From references to “outside...
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Full Course Title: Jürgen Habermas: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Is a public sphere possible? Our social and political life is marked by deep divisions: The social fabric is fraying. Economic and political polarization are on the rise. Many citizens feel their voices are not heard in arenas from the government to the marketplace. Yet many of our public institutions depend on a space in which we come together as equals to...
Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
At Antonio Gramsci’s 1928 trial, the prosecutor famously demanded, “we must stop this brain working for twenty years!” Despite being imprisoned in rather brutal conditions by Mussolini’s fascist government, this goal was not achieved. Gramsci would produce, in the notes, scraps, fragments, commentaries, and essays, that constitute his so-called prison notebooks, his most famous thinking. Although the work covers tremendous ground—from...
The Abyss I am Made Of: an Intro to Clarice Lispector
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
The Abyss I am Made Of: an Introduction to Clarice Lispector Compared over the course of her life to Marlene Dietrich, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, a sphinx, a she-wolf, a “foreigner on earth,” and a hurricane, the Jewish Brazilian Clarice Lispector, born to Ukrainian parents who fled to Brazil from interwar pogroms, made an indelible stamp on the literature of her adopted homeland—and...
Philosophy of History
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Does history have a direction, a purpose, or an end goal? Can we deduce general historical patterns from studying the past? Is it naïve to hope and work for a better future? From the Enlightenment to the twenty-first century, liberal, Marxist, positivist, and post-structuralist thinkers have offered radically different responses to these fundamental questions related to the philosophy of history. This course will survey these attempts to grapple...
Convalescence: Sickness, Society, and Resignation
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
In a world that is itself sick—with the irascible demands of production that continuously propagate new forms of exploitation—and that in turn sickens its inhabitants, what kind of response is retreat? In Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, a young scion of the bourgeoisie undergoes an unexpectedly protracted rest cure in a cloistered Swiss sanitorium, while the outside world is igniting for war. In Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk, nearly a century later,...
Neoliberalism and Identity
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
From the Black Lives Matter movement to the push for Trans-inclusive language, the claim to visibility, recognition, and protection by marginalized groups is at the forefront of our contemporary understandings of politics and culture. At the level of representation, a once lily-white and heteronormative cultural and political field is now populated by a wide diversity of peoples. And contrary to the dismissals of more simple-minded critics, increased...
What it Means to See: Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Fascinated by its uncanny power and difference, both Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag dealt continuously with the nature and meaning of photography throughout their writing lives. Their engagement culminated in two works, published just a few years apart, which continue to tower over contemporary photographic theory: Sontag’s On Photography and Barthes’s Camera Lucida. Beyond their immersion in post-war French theory, both writers shared a view...
Center and Periphery: Marxism and Postcolonial Theory
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Marxism and anti-colonialism were once deeply intertwined in national liberation and other movements, from Vietnam to Angola to Algeria and beyond. However, by the end of the 20th century, Marxist and other socialist thought often seemed dated in a world with a waning Soviet bloc and an emerging neoliberal consensus. Postcolonial theory, itself often in conversation with Marxist thought, offered new understandings of liberation and emancipation....
Jean Paul Sartre: Being and Nothingness
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
For Jean-Paul Sartre, the fundamental philosophical problem of the modern age was how to respond to Friedrich Nietzsche’s dictum: god is dead, and so is, as a consequence, traditional western conceptions of morality, justice, and truth itself. In the cafes of occupied and post-war Paris, Sartre and his cohort of fellow existentialists attempted to meet Nietzsche’s challenge: to reimagine the basis of morality and value in a godless world. Very...
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