About the CRC

What participants can expect

Cohort-Based Learning

Each week for ten weeks, participants will have the chance to connect with one another and to explore local knowledge institutions and collections. Together, we’ll engage with critical literature and creative work on the class’s theme, participate in discussions, host guest speakers, and take part in field trips and workshops. And across the following months, we’ll make something together!

Embodied Learning and Site Visits

Because we’ll be centering embodied experiences of material spaces and engaging with physical materials, most of our sessions will be hosted in-person. These sessions will involve discussions at local libraries and field trips to other sites around New York City. We’ll enjoy exhibition walk-throughs, behind-the-scenes tours of various knowledge institutions, visits to artists’ and design studios, and a range of other out-and-about learning experiences. The instructor will finalize specific sites as course plans solidify. Participants will need to arrange their own transportation. We’ll aim to ensure that all sites are accessible and close to public transit, and we’ll adjust our meeting times to accommodate logistics. We’ll also integrate a few zoom-based discussion sections to plan for and develop our collaborative project. And we may invite you to join us for optional, more time-intensive expeditions on occasional weekends.

Outside-of-Class Expectations and Invitations

We’ll ask you to complete readings, screenings, listening activities, and short exercises — a workload commensurate with that of a humane, accommodating humanities graduate course — each week. Most course materials will be provided in digital form, although you’re welcome to borrow or purchase materials that you’d like to access or own in hard copy. We’ll also invite all participants to contribute to our class project (about which more below).

To offer opportunities to reflect on our site visits, we’ll host optional, casual after-class meet-ups every few weeks — most likely at bars or cafes near our field sites. We also welcome reflections and resource-sharing on our class Zulip— a privacy- and security-centered platform we chose because it embodies our course ethos.

Class Project

After the weekly sessions conclude, we’ll work together — with guidance from expert designers and producers — to create a publicly accessible class project: a publication, an event, a digital tool, a mini-exhibition, or another means of sharing our work and inviting engagement. Our work will ideally have broad resonance and invite creative experimentation, but our primary obligation is to create new knowledge and experiences that will be of value to the hundreds of knowledge institutions that constitute METRO’s membership.

The specific parameters of each class’s project will be shaped by the course’s theme; by our communities’ needs; and by participants’ interests, skills, and bandwidth. Regardless, everyone should expect to contribute to a few collaboratively scheduled planning and development workshops, to engage in editorial consultations, to contribute to a collaborative and constructive peer-review process, and to pitch in for the project’s production and release. All projects will be scaled to allow for completion within six months. Please see our individual course descriptions for more details about class-specific projects.

Cross-Cohort Interaction

Read testimonials from past participants.