The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research is a recent initiative founded by an interdisciplinary collective of graduate students at Columbia University. The Institute provides liberal arts educational opportunities to the local community. In January, the Institute began offering classes to the public, as well as a Podcast series, a blog, and a journal, and they are in the midst of their first fundraising campaign in support of their ~Archive project. Information about the fundraising campaign can be found at their Kickstarter page.
Their mission statement reads:
The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research provides liberal arts educational opportunities to local communities. At the same time, it provides material and intellectual support and space for young scholars to teach, write, research, publish and, put simply, work.
Although consciously modeled after the famous Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany – especially in its heyday under the directorship of Max Horkheimer – we are not all scholars in that tradition, nor is any intellectual, literary or artistic tradition unwelcome in our Institute.
As we honor and build upon their extraordinary contributions to human thought and social commitments, we strive to engage the worlds of philosophy, literature, science, the arts and social sciences with the world at large and people everywhere. At a time when the price of traditional higher education reaches ever higher, even as support for scholars and scholarship has substantially diminished, we are committed to the idea that to learn, teach, study, write and think is labor worth doing both for its own sake and for the sake of communities and citizens who are active, engaged, and alive."
Recent media coverage of BISR can be found here and here.
With thanks to Michael Brent, a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Columbia, who brought this initiative to our attention.
Recent Comments