May 5th
2–5pm EDT
Meets 4 Times
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
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Embark on a riveting exploration of trust, deceit, and existential uncertainty in Herman Melville’s masterpiece. Join us as we dissect The Confidence-Man, delving into its satire of capitalist modernity and probing questions of faith, knowledge, and societal norms.
May 5th
2–5pm EDT
Meets 4 Times
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Delve into the profound intersections of race, class, and capitalism in a thought-provoking exploration of contemporary radical movements. Join us for an in-depth examination of Cedric Robinson’s concept of racial capitalism and its implications for understanding modernity, nationalism, and Black Radicalism.
May 7th
6:30–9:30pm EDT
Meets 4 Times
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Embark on a captivating exploration of Mesopotamian civilization through archaeology and material culture. Join us as we delve into the origins, structures, and legacy of this ancient society, unraveling its significance amidst historical interpretations and contemporary geopolitical contexts.
May 8th
6:30–9:30pm EDT
Meets 4 Times
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Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Unlock the enchanting world of fairy tales as we explore their subversive power and timeless allure. Join us for an illuminating journey through canonical tales and contemporary retellings, alongside insightful analysis from leading theorists.
May 9th
6:30–9:30pm EDT
Meets 4 Times
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Delve into the complex terrain of pregnancy politics, exploring gestational labor, abortion rights, and reproductive justice. Join us for a deep dive into theoretical frameworks, historical perspectives, and contemporary debates surrounding the manufacture of human fetuses.
May 12th
2–5pm EDT
Meets 4 Times
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Uncover the entwined history of psychoanalysis and state power in a captivating exploration of repression tactics. Join us as we delve into the intersections of Freudian theory with military strategy, urban policing, and guerrilla warfare.
May 12th
2–5pm EDT
Meets 4 Times
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Explore the contours of economic democracy in this thought-provoking course. Delve into its implications, challenges, and potential alternatives to capitalism. From theoretical discussions to real-world examples, uncover the complexities of democratizing production and consumption in today's global economy.
May 21st
6:30–9:30pm EDT
Meets 4 Times
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 247 West 37th St, New York, NY
How can we, as finite beings, grasp the concept of infinity? Yet humans have been contemplating infinity for millennia, whether inspired by nature, philosophy, spirituality—or mathematics. This course is a historical and conceptual approach to the latter realm, the mathematics of infinity. Our topics will include the ancient Greeks’ discovery of irrational numbers and Zeno’s paradoxes; Aristotle’s distinction between “actual infinity”...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
The Worst of All Possible Worlds: an Introduction to Schopenhauer Arthur Schopenhauer is a true oddity in the history of philosophy. Although a great metaphysical systematizer in the tradition of Leibniz and Hegel, Schopenhauer posed a worldview entirely antithetical to the “optimism” characteristic of traditional Western philosophizing. Whereas for Leibniz ours is “the best of all possible worlds,” Schopenhauer insisted that we are “not...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
In the mid-nineteenth century, a young Karl Marx wrote, in the form of a published open letter to Arnold Ruge: “But if the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions for all time is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly what we have to accomplish in the present—I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing, ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions,...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
The archetypal novel of high modernism, James Joyce’s Ulysses attempts to synthesize the life of a city, the afterlives of previous literary styles, and the entirety of the Western canon as it stood in the early twentieth century. Since its original publication when it was serialized in the Little Review from March 1918 to March 1920, Ulysses has churned up debates about obscenity, obscurity, gender, sexuality, censorship,...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Delve into the explosive history of mining, from labor conflicts to environmental devastation, in this interdisciplinary course that examines mining's cultural status and political uses. Explore its ties to capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, and uncover its role in shaping modern urban life.
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
The Iliad stands at the start of most histories of western literature, even as it remains enduringly strange—often, it seems, at odds with the very tradition it has been taken to inaugurate. In our course, we will attempt to recapture some of the strangeness and some of the continuing relevance of the Iliad. We will closely read and discuss the entirety of the poem, with especial attention to the following themes: the...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
At age 37, Richard Wagner—composer, exile, and failed revolutionary—set to work on the project that would consume the next 25 years of his life. By its completion, it had grown into arguably the most ambitious artwork of the 19th century: the monumental cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, a fifteen-hour operatic tetralogy of unprecedented scope and complexity, narrating the history of the world from its birth to its destruction. The cycle was...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 172 Mulberry St, New York, NY
Anthropology is at once a contested and vital field of study and inquiry. Still hotly debated is a basic question: what is the scope of anthropological inquiry? Modern anthropologists no longer divide the world, as their 19th-century forebears did, into a sociological “West” and an anthropological “rest of the world,” its “backwardness” waiting to be understood. Yet, expanding the anthropological field of view to the whole of the globe...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 275 Madison Ave, New York, NY
Financialization is a term that is used ubiquitously to tell a specific story about the way the economy has developed over the past 35 years. In that time, it has come to refer to a number of separate (though mutually compatible) trends: the decline of the manufacturing sector and the growing importance of financial activities as a share of corporate profit, even for non-financial firms; the growth of the financial sector relative to the rest of...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 119 N 11th St, Brooklyn, NY
The French philosopher Michel Foucault claimed that “truth isn’t outside power,” the “reward of free spirits,” nor, as Immanuel Kant imagined two centuries earlier, “the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves.” Rather, truth is produced by power—a generalized condition outside of which no one stands—and shaped by different “knowledge regimes” in which societies accept certain things to be true. Instead...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 75 Broad St, New York, NY
Why do we want what we want? The critique of capitalism is very often associated – by both proponents and antagonists – with a critique of consumerism which, in turn, is treated as a pathology of individual desire. People should stop shopping; people should eschew goods; people should want less; people should police their own desires (or, if they fail, have them policed by others.) The problem, in a word, is desire. But there is a long tradition...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 30 Irving Pl, New York, NY
Sometime in the early 1930’s, Heidegger’s thought is supposed to have undergone a change. His philosophical project shifted from the “fundamental ontology” of his early work Being and Time—foundational to the development of wartime and post-war “existentialism”—to what he would come to describe as Seinsgeschichte—a “history of being.” Heidegger was interested in understanding how the meaning of being, what it means...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
How are we to understand loneliness today? It appears that we are facing a mass epidemic of loneliness—one perhaps exacerbated by virological pandemic of COVID-19. Britain has appointed a Minister of Loneliness to counter rising rates of isolation. Approximately 20-43 percent of American adults over the age of 60 experience “frequent or intense loneliness.” And, it is clear from medical research that loneliness has significant health impacts:...
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