To honor the life and achievements of queer socialist scholar and beloved colleague Jeffrey Escoffier, BISR and Jeffrey’s friends, loved ones, and comrades have collaborated to raise money for and design a specially accessible course dedicated to exploring Jeffrey’s remarkable body of work. In Community and Perversity: an Introduction to Jeffrey Escoffier, taught by BISR […]

Writing in Truthout, Nara Roberta Silva reports on all the reasons why, even after the ruling that will ban Bolsonaro from holding public office (for the next eight years, at least), the threat of right-wing extremism in the Brazilian public life is nowhere near neutralized. Bolsonaro himself, she argues, “is a piece of a larger […]

Writing in LeftEast magazine, Olena Lyubchenko urges a rethinking of the polarizing narrative that juxtaposes the political ideology of Putin’s Russia against Western liberal democracy, private property, and human rights—or risk misunderstanding the invasion of Ukraine as a deviation, rather than a “feature,” of Russia’s “neoliberal regime of accumulation.” And risk misunderstanding capitalism itself: “By […]

On Friday and Saturday, July 14th and 15th, renowned scholars and critics will join Goethe-Institut New York, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, n+1 magazine, and Brooklyn Institute for Social Research for 100 Years Later: the Frankfurt School and the Now — a Symposium. Across a series of panels and learning sessions, we will ask: How can we […]

Writer, critic, and BISR faculty Christine Smallwood joined fellow faculty Abby Kluchin and Patrick Blanchfield on their podcast Ordinary Unhappiness for a free-wheeling discussion of Wilfred Bion’s work on group psychology, including “vibes analysis” and close reading, a brief riff on the unifying power of disliking, and psychoanalysis as “equipment for living.” The trio dig […]

Writing in Jamhoor, Nafis Hasan explores the tangled historical roots of an acute, and increasingly violent, “identity crisis” in Bangladesh—between Bengali and Muslim identifications: “The identity crisis, arising from the scars of the 1947 Partition and carefully nurtured by political parties in the last five decades for political gains, has brought the specter of authoritarianism […]

In the latest issue of Dilettante Army, the editors (among them BISR’s Rebecca Ariel Porte) set out to explore “a coinage” that, on the internet at least, appeared to be “having a moment.” “Wifey”—a designation that generated contributions more or less in protest against it, according to the editors—proved in the end rather hard to […]

Writing in London Review of Books, Sophie Lewis finds the latest from Angela Garbes—Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, a follow-up to her 2018 pregnancy memoir Like a Mother—heavy on communitarianism, or “acts of reciprocity,” but rather light on actual politics: “Garbes seems convinced that mothering’s progressive character is assured. Organized political activity and redistributive […]

Writing in Jacket2 magazine, Sophie Lewis delights in poet Holly Melgard’s latest book Fetal Position, a collection of poetic reflections on various kinds of labor—from student labor to child labor, reproductive labor, and divisions of labor: “Melgard is as dexterous a defamiliarizer of heterosexual culture, especially patriarchal motherhood, as I’ve ever seen.” Then, in Notes […]