Faculty Success

Featured new awards, September 2018:

Advancing Salary Parity in Public and Private Early Childhood Education Environments

Awarded by: The New York Community Trust

Under the direction of Principal Investigator Kristin Morse, Center for New York City Affairs

Brooklyn Public Library Reentry

Awarded by: The Brooklyn Public Library

Under the direction of Principal Investigator Eduardo Staszowski, Design Strategies, Parsons in collaboration with Lara Penin, Transdisciplinary Design, Parsons and John Bruce, Strategic Design and Management, grant housed in the DESIS Lab, Parsons.

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Tishman Center Planning Grant

Awarded by: The NorthLight Foundation

Under the direction of Principal Investigators Ana Baptista and Sujatha Jesudason, Tishman Environment and Design Center.

Video Communication Technologies in Survey Data Collection

Awarded by: National Science Foundation (NSF)

Under the direction of Principal Investigator Michael Schober, Psychology, NSSR in collaboration with Fredrick G. Conrad, The University of Michigan.

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Featured recognition, April 2018:

photo by Yola Monakhov Stockton

Tanya Kalmanovitch, Associate Professor of Music and Arts Entrepreneurship in College of Performing Arts, has been named one of 2018's Grist 50 Fixers. Grist recognizes leaders finding innovative solutions to environmental challenges. Professor Kalmanovitch says:

"I use tools from my work as a musician, an ethnographer, and a historian to examine our intimate relationships to oil and climate change. The centerpiece of my research is the Tar Sands Songbook, a multimedia theatrical performance that uses dramatic storytelling, music and multimedia design to chronicle the human impacts of rapid industrial development and widespread environmental destruction in my hometown of Fort McMurray, Canada. By setting clashing voices into meaningful conversation, I engage audiences in a compelling process of understanding our relationships to oil and the energy we use, the social and scientific dimensions of climate change, and the powerful forces that shape our future."

Featured Award, February 2018:

Associate Professor of Media Studies and Film Michelle Materre was recently recognized for co-curating "One Way or Another: Black Women's Cinema, 1970-1991". Professor Materre says:

"It has indeed been quite an unexpected surprise and honor to be recognized twice in January 2018 for the BAMcinematek program I co-curated in February 2017 with Nellie Killian, "One Way or Another: Black Women Filmmakers 1970 -1991" -- both by the National Society of Film Critics with the Film Heritage Award, as well as by Richard Brody and The New Yorker magazine as “The Best Repertory Series of 2017”. I believe what made the series so special is that audiences walked away with a sense of the depth, breadth and longevity of black women filmmakers’ careers, as well as gaining an appreciation for the unique aesthetic qualities and complexity of the content and style singularly indicative of this body of work. During this period, women filmmakers were typically producing totally on their own, without much support nor resources from institutions nor did grant-making agencies -- indeed getting it produced “one way or another”. Yet, this work lives, thrives and remains quite relevant to today. Undeniably, this series finally brought the work to the audiences for which it was originally intended. "

A huge congratulations to Michelle Materre for being a shining example of faculty success at The New School.

Featured publication, February 2018:

Lana Lin, Associate Professor of Film Theory and Digital Cinema, talks about her new book, Freud's Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer:

Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud was afflicted with oral cancer for sixteen years, over the course of which he had no less than thirty-three surgeries and ten oral prostheses that allowed him to eat, speak, and smoke cigars. Poet Audre Lorde endured breast cancer for fourteen years and eventually died when it metastasized to her liver. Literary and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick suffered from breast cancer for close to two decades before it took her life. Contemporary medical treatment has greatly extended the experience of living with cancer as opposed to dying from it. Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer asks what it means to live with illness for prolonged periods of time.

There have been innumerable books on cancer but relatively few explicitly deal with the psychic dimension of living with illness. For several years I was in training to become a psychoanalyst, so when I myself was diagnosed, I couldn’t help but make a connection. I was especially interested in the unconscious effects of surviving in proximity to mortality. Since Western culture eschews death and dying, how does the unconscious cope with the pressing knowledge of one’s own precarious existence? Not only did psychoanalysis seem the most equipped to handle such a question, but as I dug into my topic I uncovered the extent to which psychoanalysis has always had a death obsession, frequently specifically associated with cancer itself, or the threat of malignancy, the instabilities of subject/object, and self-sabotage.

Each of the figures I investigate is deeply self-reflective, and their illness directly or indirectly informed their creative and critical output. This and my own background as an artist led me to conclude that the prospect of destruction actually engenders a kind of counter impulse, one of reparation, or the need to find or to enact at least a provisional repair of the damage done to one’s sense of self, to enable a temporary restoration of stability.

I am currently making a feature-length film inspired by Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals. I have talked with 25 people, some of whom are current and former cancer patients, at different points in their history with the disease, from being considered essentially “cured” to those with less favorable prognosis. But I can pretty much guarantee, although I didn’t ask any of them, that every one of us thinks about our susceptibility to harm in a much more pronounced way than we had prior to diagnosis, even if we were diagnosed at stage 0. One can carry on quotidian existence, but the new normal never returns to the taken-for-grantedness of the pre-cancer norm.

Featured publication, December 2017:

Mean Men: The Perversion of America’s Self-Made Man

Steve Jobs, Dov Charney, Lance Armstrong, Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump. Each one reached the pinnacle of American success. Is it because they were ambitious visionaries and talented entrepreneurs? Most Americans would say yes to both. But what else do they have in common?

They’re known for being mean.

Though heralded during most of their careers as great leaders, each of these men and many more have also been exposed as toxic, raging, and manipulative. Yet, because America loves a winner, we look past even the most outrageous behavior from our heroes if it generates a gold medal, an Oscar, a windfall IPO, or a political victory. But at what price does our complicity come? And what role does gender play—are only men at this level mean?

Drawing on author Mark Lipton’s extensive experience as adviser to major corporations, start-ups, government agencies, and not-for-profits, Mean Men the book synthesizes decades of psychological research to expose what really drives this subset of America’s leaders. As surprising as it is alarming, the book reveals dark truths about a psychological disorder that rules many of our boardrooms, and challenges the status quo with a more effective humanistic approach to leadership.

Mark will move beyond the findings in his recently released book to discuss those now in our midst who capture the headlines for their egregious behaviors and divided constituencies. Why are so many attracted to these men? What similarities of personality – and personality disorder - do we see behind the diverse exteriors they present? In what ways are we normalizing their behaviors across the American culture?

What, if anything, can we do to reverse this at the individual and cultural levels?

Mark Lipton is professor of management at The Milano School, where he has taught and chaired numerous programs since 1980. For over forty years, he has been a trusted adviser to Fortune 500 corporations, think tanks, philanthropies, not-for-profits, and start-ups.

Featured Grant, December 2017:

NSSR and Parson’s faculty members were awarded a $225,000 Sawyer Seminar Grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation. Sawyer Seminars provide support for research of contemporary developments. Faculty members Miriam Ticktin (Associate Professor and chair of Sociology at NSSR), Victoria Hattam (Professor of Politics at NSSR), Alex Aleinikoff (Director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility), Anthony Dunne, and Fiona Raby (Professors of Design and Social inquiry at Parsons) will lead the seminars at The New School. The Sawyer Seminar grant will help members of The New School community to research “Imaginative Mobilities”; reframing debate on the nature, purpose, and futures of borders. In addition to rethinking borders and the migration of people, the research project will help achieve further collaboration and cross disciplinary work between design and social research.