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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
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...
What is Dialectics?
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Dialectical thinking is sometimes unfashionable. But in a world shot through with contradiction and ambiguity—progress or disaster, equality or stratification, technology or nature, market freedom or political freedom, minority identity or class or national community—it’s also irrepressible. What comes out of thinking with and through contradiction? Can dialectics as a method furnish the tools for not only understanding the world, but also,...
American Policing: History, Politics, and Society
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
For many Americans the existence of the police may seem as inevitable as a law of nature. From popular culture to political stump speeches to the oft-invoked impulse to “Call 911,” the idea of public order is widely presented as unimaginable without the existence of police to enforce it. Without the police, this reasoning runs, society itself would cease to exist. But the institution that is American policing has not always existed, let alone...
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Late Style: Music, Transcendence, & Catastrophe
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
How does music reflect the experience of physical decline and the confrontation with death? This question lies behind the notion of late style: the belief in a distinctive musical idiom, of visionary purity or unresolved complexity, achieved by great artists toward the end of their lives. Today the idea has assumed the status of common sense, applied in recent criticism to everyone from Bob Dylan to John Coltrane. We think we understand what lateness...
Mental Health & the Law: Politics, Psychology & Profit
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
What is “mental health” and how has it been shaped by the law? From defining wellness to restricting the rights of the unwell, setting parameters for treatment, and regulating and protecting the pharmaceutical companies that develop and market psychological drugs (often to immense profits), government laws are fundamental to the ways mental health is experienced, perceived, policed, and commodified. But, how did the modern legal regime of mental...
Islamic Ethics: Philosophy, Theology, and Sharia Law
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Throughout the West, Islam is frequently presented as a powerful monolith, a civilizational threat, or an infection in the body politic. However, even a cursory glance at historical and contemporary materials reveals a long historical evolution in Muslim ethical thought and practice, which prompts questions of urgent contemporary relevance and dizzying scope: What is Sharia? Is it a rigid, 7th-century-based law, or an ethical system promoting the...
Radical Theology: an Introduction to Karl Barth
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Karl Barth is the most influential, and perhaps most polemical, Protestant theologian of the twentieth century. Drawing deeply on Søren Kierkegaard’s fervent view of Christianity, Barth starkly criticizes theologians in the tradition of liberal Protestantism. At the same time, he is known as the “Red Pastor” who cares for the interests of his rural, blue-collar parishioners and rejects the collusion of the Christian faith with bourgeois life....
Feeling the Atmosphere: Climate, Affect, and Politics
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Have you felt the weather lately? While not synonymous with weather, climate and our experience of it can’t be wholly captured by concepts, facts, and measures. Climate also has to do with affect, something that’s “in the air” alongside carbon emissions and other particulate matter. Although ordinarily, and vitally, addressed through frameworks of natural and social scientific inquiry—measures of ecological transformations, probabilities...
Kant’s Practical Philosophy: Reason, Morality
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Kant’s Practical Philosophy: Reason, Morality, and Freedom At the epicenter of Immanuel Kant’s broad philosophical project regarding nature, the self, aesthetics, and history is an ultimate concern with morality and the good. How must we re-conceive of our moral obligations to each other in the light of declining religious authority and belief? Can we understand morality on the basis of the nature of human reason alone? For Kant, there is an...
Racecraft: Race, Society, and Superstition
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
“Race is a social construction” is something we commonly hear and say. Yet, biological ideas of race remain firmly rooted in our practices and discourse. Take, for example, the legal and customary categorization of race by phenotype. Or, the growing appeal of genetic testing for ancestry. The reason, according to Karen and Barbara Fields, is racecraft—a constantly reiterated set of practices that misconstrue racism for race. Racecraft is the...
The Origins of the Cosmos: Plato’s Timaeus
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Undoubtedly the most phantasmagoric of Plato’s dialogues, the Timaeus imagines the most perfect cosmos—a fantastically speculative undertaking in which the claims of reason and perfection lead to strange, if not uncanny, worlds. The divine craftsman—the Demiurge—of Plato’s myth fabricates a relentlessly beautiful universe, opening up fundamental questions of Being and Becoming, sameness and difference, soul and body, orderly and wandering...
The Corporation: a Critical Introduction
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
The corporation is the dominant business form of contemporary capitalism, a legal fiction and social organization developed to minimize risk while maximizing surplus value extraction. Embodying a “structure of irresponsibility” through the legal construct of limited liability—which ensures corporate immunity for a dizzying swath of bad acts —corporations today cause, finance, or directly or indirectly profit from near daily human-rights...
Excavations: an Introduction to Archaeology
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Imagine unearthing a long forgotten artifact from the ground and holding it in your hands for the first time, standing under the scorching sun and heat. What can such an object tell us? Archaeology is the scientific attempt to understand the past—and particularly the ancient world—through human materials, geography, and other methods and technologies. Yet, core to the romance of archaeology is the idea of “discovery”—although what the...
Central Banking: Finance, Politics, and Monetary Policy
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
The 2008 financial crisis brought to light the dangers of credit creation happening outside of the regulated banking sector—so-called “shadow banking.” In response to the breakdown of liquidity in financial markets, and more recently in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, central banks around the world came to adopt “unconventional” forms of monetary policy to support the economy. In the U.S. specifically, the interventions...
The Problem of Evil: Augustine, Nietzsche, Arendt
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
The question of evil has long been central to western political thought: from Augustine’s Confessions, in which evil is a perversion of the will, to Nietzsche’s provocative view that the concept of evil arose from negative emotions and weakened human vitality. Since the middle of the 20th century, however, political philosophers and theorists have tried to come to terms with the seemingly unrelenting stream of evil and violence that shapes contemporary...
Introduction to Feminist Theory
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
What does it mean to be a “feminist”? To whom does the designation belong? And what does it entail—in political, economic, and social terms? For ways of experiencing, knowing, and acting in the world? And as a theoretical position in and of itself? Feminism, now broadly deployed in every imaginable sphere of discourse, has accrued over time a remarkable diversity of meanings—epistemological, political, economic, and social—in...
Introduction to Trauma
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
The rhetoric of trauma has saturated the medical, academic, and political spheres in the past two decades, exemplified by the rapid rise of interdisciplinary trauma studies. In contemporary parlance, trauma is qualified as being acute, collective, complex, vicarious, and intergenerational, and is implicated in clinical and political concerns ranging from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to free speech debates. What is trauma, and how does it function...
Edward Said: Culture and Empire
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Unveil the historical roots of racism and racial oppression through the lens of technology in this thought-provoking class. Explore how emerging technologies have shaped modern ideas about race and discover how medical, workplace, and digital media platforms continue to reinforce racial hierarchies. Join us to challenge these paradigms and explore the liberatory potential of technology.
Prison Abolition: Punishment and Freedom
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Explore the historical and societal implications of prisons and punishment in this thought-provoking course. Delve into the work of influential authors such as Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore to challenge the normative behaviors and expectations surrounding incarceration. Discover new perspectives on justice, retribution, and the complex relationship between freedom and imprisonment.
N.K. Jemisin: The Fifth Season
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Explore the transformative power of N.K. Jemisin's epic sci-fi trilogy, as it refracts complex human realities and societal structures through a far-future Earth plagued by catastrophe. Discover the limits of allegory and representation in literature, and delve into the possibilities that speculative fiction offers in understanding our own world. Enhance your understanding with readings from prominent thinkers in this thought-provoking course.
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