About the Course
As institutional higher education faces proliferating threats, and as formal learning becomes ever-more instrumental and ever-less convivial, we’ve observed the propagation of alternative schools, study groups, and intentional learning communities. These collectives offer opportunities for liberatory, mutualistic education; for acknowledging the world’s brokenness and imagining its repair or reinvention. This recent activity builds on a long and multifarious legacy of para- or anti-institutional schools. Our Fall 2026 CRC course, “Public Study,” will examine the past, present, and future of popular, alternative, and radical education — particularly as they shape the intellectual, political, and cultural landscape of New York City; and as they’ve intersected with established cultural heritage and educational institutions. We’ll index local resources and address the roles that libraries and archives — both formal and informal — have played, do play, and could play within this pedagogical ecology.
In the months following our final session we’ll work together on a collaborative project — one shaped by our course theme; by our communities’ (particularly METRO members’!) needs; and by your interests, skills, and bandwidth. We’ll consider potential formats: a field guide, atlas, or card catalog of local experimental schools; a speculative curriculum; or some other pedagogical form. From January through June, we’ll meet periodically — individually and as a collective — to plan, refine, produce, and release our project.
Goals
- To survey the forums and formats, motivations and milieux, infrastructures and investments, purposes and possibilities, resources and rewards of NYC metro region alternative schools and study groups — past and present; to situate them within their social, political-economic, technological, and cultural contexts; and to consider their relationships — actual and potential — to formal, traditional educational and cultural institutions (e.g., are they satellites, incubators, symbionts, undercommons, parasites, etc.?)
- To appreciate the breadth of pedagogical practices and media these entities deploy, and the range of knowledge modalities they germinate — while also considering if and how this work is documented and preserved, and whether it should be
- To catalogue and experiment with various approaches to study from across disciplines, fields of practice, and communities; to imagine how we might productively cross-pollinate methods from one field to another, across contexts and collections — or even invent new methods; and to invite others into our exploration
- To imagine, or even activate, possible cross-references and collaborations across mutually supportive public study projects and allied organizations
And these course-specific goals serve the broader goals of the CRC: - To highlight the wealth and variety of knowledge institutions in our metropolitan region — and to demonstrate how New York City can serve as a national and global beacon, an embodiment of the vital importance of trusted public knowledge, of robust investment in cultural institutions, and of mutual aid, solidarity, and coalition-building
- To juxtapose (or cross-reference!) institutions, collections, and ideas — and explore their prismatic refractions
- To discover what new knowledges and creative practices might emerge through integrative thinking and interdisciplinary, inter-institutional collaboration
- To seek commonalities and complementarities — from the individual to the institutional scale — and to build foundations for future partnerships
- To experiment with more humane, creative, principled, and generative models of “making knowledge public” – from idea-germination, through peer review, through the fabrication and distribution of a material artifact or experience
*How are we defining knowledge institutions? Capaciously, in true cross-referenced fashion! Let’s think about what the entire GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums), the education sector, and other civic institutions — the post office! public housing! — could do together.
Your Contributions
We ask you to please make every effort to attend each of our weekly sessions, and to have familiarized yourself with the “assigned” texts (about which more here.)
We initially designed the CRC to minimize the outside-of-class expectations for participants, who are typically balancing full-time jobs and family obligations. Yet our initial cohort, the Misfits, expressed enthusiastic desire for more opportunities to reflect on each excursion afterward, in light of our readings and in relation to their own professional experiences and personal interests. So, we’ll offer the following informal forums for reflection, connection, and sharing additional resources :
- Occasional informal post-fieldwork hangouts
- Group discussion on Zulip (a platform we chose to embody the values central to our work together: privacy, security, accessibility, etc). I’ll pose some discussion questions each week to get us going, but you’re welcome to share any pertinent reflections, relevant (or tangential!) resources, personal announcements, etc.
I also invite you to share photos from our activities and excursions, for potential use in presentations about our work and/or in our final project! Speaking of which…
In the months following our final session we’ll work together, and with support from design professionals, on a collaborative project — one shaped by our course theme; by our communities’ (particularly METRO members’!) needs; and by your interests, skills, and bandwidth. We’ll consider potential formats: a field guide, atlas, or card catalog of local experimental schools; a speculative curriculum; or some other pedagogical form. From January through June, we’ll meet periodically — individually and as a collective — to plan, refine, produce, and release our project.
About the Cohort
We’ve got a fantastic group — 15 participants representing a range of organizations: the Brooklyn Public Library, the Century Association, the New York City Department of Education, the New York Public Library, New York University, the School for Poetic Computation, Trash Club, Triple Canopy, and other arts and design organizations — as well as a variety of independent art, design, writing, and media production practices.
About the Syllabus + Readings
I make every effort to map out our plan before the “semester” begins, so we all know what we’re in for. Yet we might need to make a few small alterations to our schedule: we might host a guest who’s passing through town, I might seek your input on texts or activities that better speak to your needs and interests, I might decide to cut a couple of our readings or substitute new material that’s published over the course of the semester, etc. Any changes will be noted, with plenty of advance notice, on our class website. And any revisions will only maintain or decrease, never increase, your workload!
About Those Reading Lists!
If you’re accustomed to syllabi that consist of little more than a weekly schedule and a list of readings, our website might look a bit – or a lot! – intimidating. Fear not! Most of what you see here is my attempt to provide context and intellectual framing! I explain why I’ve chosen particular texts, and what I hope you’ll gain from reading, watching, or listening to them. I offer tips regarding what to focus on. I pose questions that I hope you’ll keep in mind as you engage. In short, the voluminous text you’ll see under each bullet point is intended to serve as a friendly guide to your weekly preparations. It’ll ideally make your reading more directed and meaningful.
What’s more: I try to assemble lists of varying lengths, intensities, and formats. You won’t be reading four dense academic articles in a single week. On occasion, I’ll encourage you simply to skim or browse or “check out” some resources; in those cases, I mostly want you to know those resources exist, and to appreciate the breadth of what they have to offer so you can potentially return to them later. I’m hoping these materials prove useful for your own research – or inspire a new interest, or introduce you to some cool new stuff, or connect you to a new community! Sometimes, rather than assigning a whole book, I invite you to read a review or an interview with the author. And I occasionally recommend videos or podcasts in lieu of written texts. I invite you to walk or lie on your chaise lounge or sit in a park or ride your Peloton or row a boat while you watch and listen to these materials.
Finally, you don’t have to read any of this stuff. Nobody’s tracking you! Yet I did choose these texts because I find them informative and provocative and exciting — and I think that, collectively, they’ll help us cultivate a prismatic view of each week’s theme. They’ll also prepare us to be engaged, generous guests and hosts to the folks who have kindly agreed to join us each week — and to be intellectually accountable to one another.
Acknowledgements
This course extends from my 2022 “Redesigning the Academy” class, which I taught during my final semester of an 18.5-year career at The New School. That course, in turn, drew inspiration from the progressive histories of both The New School itself and the once-para-institutional media studies program in which I taught for 15 years; as well as various experimental public pedagogy projects — from the Public School to the School for Poetic Computation — to which I contributed. I also learned from the Radical Pedagogies project at Princeton; from Eli Meyerhoff’s, Rachel Buurma’s and Laura Hefferman’s, and Andy Hines’s scholarship; from Matt Gold’s “Knowledge Infrastructures” class at the CUNY Grad Center, Dan Greene’s “The Engaged Intellectual” class at UMD, the Parsons Transdisciplinary Design “Performing Knowledge” studios, Marquard Smith’s “Radical Institution Making” class at University College London, and Rachel Buurma’s and Andy Hines’s “Why College?” class at Swarthmore (I was told that Michelle Murphy taught a class similar to ours at the University of Toronto, too!). I’m inspired by bell hooks’s, Ivan Illich’s, Sara Ahmed’s, Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s, Caroline Woolard’s, and Chloë Bass’s work. More recently, I’ve learned from Laura Nelson’s scholarship and experimental teaching, from Emily Ruth Capper’s writing on Fluxus pedagogy; and from the myriad archivists and librarians stewarding the records of inspiring progressive pedagogical projects of the past.