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Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Upcoming Classes in NYC

(4.6-star rating across 29 reviews)

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.

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Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

9 classes have spots left

The Task of the Critic: an Introduction to Rosalind Krauss

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY

Uncover the transformative power of poststructuralist, feminist, and psychoanalytic methods in art criticism through an exploration of the writings and ideas of Rosalind Krauss, the influential founder of October journal. Analyze representative artworks alongside her essays, as you delve into the ways in which art objects and movements challenge categorization and reshape aesthetic experience. Discover how Krauss's unique theoretical vocabulary redefines the role of the critic in art historical narratives.

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$335

4 sessions

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Walter Rodney: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 314 7th St, Brooklyn, NY

Explore the radical propositions of Walter Rodney, the guerrilla intellectual, and his groundbreaking work. You'll learn how colonial expropriation shaped Africa's historical course and political structure. Join this course to delve into the themes of development and underdevelopment, African history and diaspora, revolutionary pedagogy, and strategies for Africa's emancipation. Uncover the contemporary relevance of Rodney's ideas on colonialism, imperialism, economic development, and racism.

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$335

4 sessions

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Annie Ernaux: Shame and the Politics of Memory

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY

What does it mean to describe one’s drive to write as a lifelong struggle against loneliness and forgetfulness? Annie Ernaux, whose “courage and clinical acuity” in writing earned her the Nobel prize in 2022, takes the matter of her own working-class milieu as the stuff of literature: her factory worker parents, their lives on either side of WWII, her personal experience of illegal abortion, the ungovernable vicissitudes of sexual desire,...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$335

4 sessions

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Architectural Experiments: Revolutions in Design

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY

“Architecture,” wrote the late critic Michael Sorkin, “is produced at the intersection of art and property, and this is one of the many reasons it so legibly records the history of communal life.” This drawing together of the aesthetic imagination and material relations is also, perhaps, why the radical tradition has looked to architecture to anticipate and dramatize a world that could be otherwise. If the bourgeois revolutions of the nineteenth...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$335

4 sessions

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Reading Jacqueline Rose: Literature, Politics, and Psychoanalysis

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY

Explore the relationship between literature, politics, and psychoanalysis through the thought-provoking works of Jacqueline Rose. Uncover the insights she offers on war, gender, and maternal rage, as we delve into the texts that have shaped her ideas. Join us in this intellectually stimulating journey to challenge conventional notions and ignite change in society.

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$335

4 sessions

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Marxism and Utopia: an Introduction to Ernst Bloch (In-Person)

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY

Explore the enduring relevance of utopian thinking through the work of Ernst Bloch in this thought-provoking course. Delve into his vision of a non-alienated future and examine how art and literature can inspire political transformation. Join us as we challenge the proliferation of dystopian imaginaries and embrace the power of hope, imagination, and anticipation.

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$335

4 sessions

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Proust: Swann’s Way

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

In this course, we will work our way carefully through Swann’s Way, recovering Proust from the clichés and caricatures in order to discover why he continues to be important today. “Well – what remains to be written after that?” wrote Virginia Woolf of Marcel Proust in a 1922 letter. A century after the publication of Swann’s Way, the first volume of the monumental novel, In Search of Lost Time, Proust continues to speak to us as compellingly...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

Introduction to Psychoanalysis

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 15 W 16th St, New York, NY

This course will survey a selection of these theoretical and clinical polemics via a reading of primary and secondary sources from classical Freudian theory, ego psychology, Kleinian, Lacanian, object relations, and contemporary relational approaches. Far from a canon of consistent ideas, the history of psychoanalytic theory is marked by conflict, splits and vicious debates that have important clinical and historical implications. Readings will...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

6 sessions

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A Strange Enlightenment

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

A Strange Enlightenment: The Philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau This intensive course will provide an introduction to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, showing how his thought fits, albeit uncomfortably, within the period of the French Enlightenment. Over four weeks, we will read from each of Rousseau’s “major” texts—Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, On the Social Contract, Émile, and Confessions—as well...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

Trans Theory

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

In 2014, popular media declared a critical moment in trans activism and mainstream representation—a “transgender tipping point,” as the TIME Magazine feature on Laverne Cox put it. While this Gladwellian phrase oversimplifies an ongoing struggle, something is happening, not only in American media but also in the American academy. The last two years saw the inaugural issue of the journal Transgender Studies...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

Moby-Dick: Reading the White Whale

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

We now think of Moby-Dick as the canonical American novel. During Melville’s lifetime, however, his “wicked book,” as he called it in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, was a popular failure. The book sank into obscurity along with Melville’s reputation until  20th-century readers recovered the novel and refashioned it as a neglected masterpiece.  Nominally the story of a monomaniacal sea captain’s pursuit of revenge...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

European Avant-Gardes: Art, Theory, Practice

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

In the movement from pre-World War I to post-World War I avant-gardes, the problem of how to make and respond to art beyond the limits of beauty preoccupied the architects of European movements from Dada to Surrealism to German Expressionism to Russian Constructivism to Italian Futurism. With reference to the rich material cultures produced by these artistic factions, this course asks two related questions: “What is an avant-garde?” and “What...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

Another Country: James Baldwin’s New York

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

New York is a city immortalized many times over in word, image, and sound; it wears many faces, each as alluring as the last. This course focuses on Another Country, James Baldwin’s most vivid portrait of his hometown. The book was notoriously difficult for Baldwin to finish, occupying his imagination from the late 1940s until 1961, even as he traveled from France to Switzerland and Turkey, producing acclaimed essays, plays and other novels...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

The Case of Kafka, Brod, and Benjamin

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

The Writer, the Executor, and the Critic: The Case of Kafka, Brod, and Benjamin Are artists saints? Franz Kafka famously asked his friend Max Brod—a popular critic in his own day—to burn all of his papers after his death. This included the vast majority of Kafka’s work, as he had published only a handful of stories in his own lifetime. Brod did not oblige. Instead, he began the publication of Kafka’s writings and later composed a popular...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

What Is the Political?

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

From classical philosophy to contemporary conversation, politics is often assumed to be an extension of morality, an application of principles, or an obvious fact of identity or social position. But what makes something specifically political? Is there something about “the political” that distinguishes it from any number of related areas of inquiry such as economics, morality, or even aesthetics?  In this class we’ll explore these questions...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

A novel of cruelty, poisoned love, ruthless necessity, intergenerational vendettas, memory and revenge, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights remains an opulent enigma. First published under the male pseudonym, Ellis Bell, the book puzzled and repulsed its initial readers, who castigated it for immorality but reluctantly acknowledged its inscrutable power.  In a preface to the novel, Charlotte Brontë attempted to vindicate her sister by arguing...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

American Modernism and the Radical Thirties

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

This course seeks to understand what were the possibilities (and limits) of radical political and cultural transformation in the United States between 1929 and 1941.  Most of the readings will focus on New York City, but imagining a national culture and international solidarity will also be important themes. The readings for the course, which include fiction, poetry, memoir, reportage, history, and film, are oriented around the concept...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

The Long Shadow of the Great War

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

In May 1916, as the senseless slaughter of Verdun entered its fourth month and the Allied powers prepared for the Battle of the Somme, François Georges-Picot and Sir Mark Sykes concluded a secret agreement to divide the Ottoman Empire into British and French territories. That the spoils of war would be imperial acquisitions was self-evident to the two countries, which had long competed for influence in the Eastern Mediterranean. What was less obvious...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

Games and Warfare

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

In this class we will explore both sides of this dialectic. How—from the grid of the Go board to the coordinate plane of the strategy role-playing game—is war as a means to control territory and resources played through games? In what ways, from mathematical game theory to the shifting battlefields of the 21st century, is strategic thinking grounded in the logical processes of games? And how are these processes translated into material terms...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

Love is a Weapon

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

In this course we look closely at Gandhi’s South Africa years—a time of both racial warfare, and great love and friendship—to understand the source of the philosophies and practices that would later inspire many currents of the civil rights movement in the United States. While many analyses of Gandhi and his thought focus on ideas and influences from Braminical and Jain sources, this course will focus on the South African moment and this archive...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
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