Fugitives, Neighbors, Satellites, Parasites: New Schools for Media Study

On March 28, 2026, I shared the closing keynote for the graduate student-led Critical Themes conference in the Master of Art in Media Studies program at The New School. The event — themed “New Constructions” — marked both the revival of this once-annual event after a decade-long hiatus and the 50th anniversary of the program, where I was a faculty member for 15 years, and where I served as director between 2006 and 2009.

(A caveat: I had had major surgery a week prior to the event, and my partner was undergoing aggressive chemotherapy, so life was complicated. I thus improvised my concluding section.)

Fugitives, Neighbors, Satellites, Parasites

[2] I occupied seven different offices during my nearly two decades at The New School. I was a bit of a fugitive, juggling appointments across four divisions of the school — but given the perpetual dynamism of the place, I was hardly alone in this itinerant experience. I started off sitting right beside the copy machine, immediately off an unsecured public stairwell. [3] I once hung up an amazing Chris Ware poster I had procured from his show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. It was gone the next day. I then occupied a corridor you had to walk through to get to the shared faculty space behind. Everyone thought I was the secretary to the folks in the back-office. [4] Later, I enjoyed a windowless office that, despite its hermetic ambiance, offered, for the first time, sufficient wallspace for me to house my entire academic journal and teaching collection, and to install some bulletin boards where I arranged a selection of the ephemera I accumulated throughout place of intense material learning.

But my favorite office was more of a nook. [5] For five years I resided on the 13th floor of 2 West 13th Street. I’m not sure what the space is like now — I know the building’s been renovated — but back in the day, the elevators didn’t go up past twelve. And some of the newer security guards would tell you that the building had only twelve floors. But four of us — three senior men and I — lived up on the Malkovichian 13th floor. To reach us, you had to take one particular set of elevators — the ones in the NE corner of the building, near 5th Avenue — up to the 12th floor, hang a left, then another left in order to take the staircase opposite room 1213 (Annie’s office) up to the 13th floor. Once you were there, you passed through the copy room — my former atelier — to reach our shared office in the back.

While we did occasionally feel rather marginalized in our secret garret, we also took great pleasure in its lack of foot traffic, its calm and quiet. [6] I was fortunate to have the desk along the west wall, and beside that desk a window facing southwest. The predominance of low-rise development in Greenwich Village and the West Village meant that I enjoyed a relatively unobstructed view of Lower Manhattan and New Jersey. I watched One World Trade Center slowly rise to fill a void in the southern skyline. From elsewhere in the city, I watched that void get made about a decade before.

And because we typically taught in the late afternoons and evenings, I saw many fantastically vivid sunsets through that window. I was never able to take a good photo because the wire mesh embedded in the glass always fooled the camera in my iPhone 4; it preferred to focus on the wire, rather than the view through the glass. So, I have quite an extensive collection of blurry sunset photos — and that blur is further marred by an ever-present streak of bird poop on the window’s exterior. I take this as a very "media studies" metaphor for convivial technology and “knowing your tools” and epistemological “depth of field.” The latter principle — knowing the depth and breadth of the context informing our consequential decisions — seems particularly important in this age of upheaval.

My officemates — Peter Haratonik, Kit Laybourne, and Paul Ryan — were all among the founders of the department and of the para-institutions that preceded it. They were full of stories and wisdom and humor. Some of them came to my wedding.

Also present, in spirit, were the building’s earlier inhabitants. [7] A hundred years prior to our departure from that space, in 2014, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People established its original headquarters in the building. W.E.B. DuBois’ The Crisis magazine, and DuBois & Dill Publishing, which he founded with Augustus Granville Dill to promote Black literature and education, were there, too. Other occupants included numerous peace and global aid organizations, the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures and a range of publishers: from W. W. Norton to Prentice-Hall to Allyn & Bacon. A sedimented media history, a layering of media infrastructures.

[8] Also up there on the roof, our poor man’s penthouse pal, was, if memory serves me correctly, a little hut containing The New School’s art collection. I could hardly believe it when I first visited. In case you’re not familiar, [9] The New School has a magnificent collection of 2000 postwar and contemporary works — many of which hang in offices and corridors and elevator lobbies and above people’s desks. We live within the art here. [10] The school’s commitment to the arts began with the 1931 commissioning of significant mural cycles — José Clemente Orozco’s A Call for Revolution and Universal Brotherhood and Thomas Hart Benton’s epic America Today — and was formalized through the establishment of the New School Art Collection in 1960. [11] I first visited back in 2007 to work with the curators to develop an art scavenger hunt for a colleague in Parsons — Eugene Lang College later adapted the exercise for new student orientation — and I was shocked to find such an astounding collection in a hut on the roof.

[12] A few years later I was invited to contribute a chapter to an edited collection about the institution’s fantastic array of commissioned site-specific work. [13] My contribution on Brian Tolle’s Threshhold, from 2006, speaks to how one learns with and from the infrastructure here — so I’m going to play a four-minute video of me reading my chapter in front of Tolle’s piece.

[14] These precarious spatial conditions and serendipitous adjacencies and institutional layerings ultimately proved to be emblematic of, and catalytic for, The New School experience. Amazing things happen in these liminal spaces, in sites of fortuitous convergence. In a 1930 issue of the Journal of Adult Education, Charles Beard, one of the institution’s founders, proclaimed the then-new-ish school’s commitment to “the electric fire of thought.” [15] Later, in a 1960 pamphlet, the school’s first director, Alvin Johnson declared: “Ideas are High Explosives” — especially, in our case, when you shoot them off from the roof.

[16] This principle was again made palpable when I visited the new library in the University Center on its grand opening in 2014: how could you not feel as if you’re in the middle of something exciting when you’re peering over a book or laptop screen and find yourself floating above 5th Avenue. The afternoon light ricochets up toward another landmark, 79 5th Avenue, where Media Studies resided until recently (?) — [17] and where, on the building’s top floor, Thomas Edison recorded his commercial gramophone records from 1906 to 1929.

[18][19][20] Ideas radiate, echo, and explode through time and space along these corridors. In this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year; amidst institutional chaos, AI metastasis, big media implosion, political chaos, climate crisis, and epistemological collapse, and leadership deficit, now seems like an especially good time to stand on principle, to foster the critical faculties and ethical principles central to The New School’s identity. As Mike Pepi proposed last night, there’s opportunity — necessity — to reinvigorate, and perhaps configure, our institutions. In what follows I’ll explore The New School as a case study or object lesson; then examine the importance of — and shapes of — media study in spaces within and adjacent to The New School; then reflect on my own experience, which is largely about institutions and reimagining them.

[21] LEARNING FROM THE NEW SCHOOL’S CONFIGURATIONS 

I needn’t rehearse the full institutional history of The New School – first, because I know most of you here today aren’t from The New School and probably aren’t eager to cathect about the institution’s inspiring-and-widely-romaticized legacies and its contemporary tumult. [22] More importantly, The New School has several skilled historians who’ve already done this work: Peter Rutkoff and William Scott published New School: A History of The New School for Social Research in 1998, and Judith Friedlander, a former New School dean, published A Light in Dark Times: The New School for  Social Research and Its University in Exile with Columbia University Press in 2019. [23] Here at home, we’re incredibly lucky to have historian Julia Foulkes and religious studies scholar Mark Larrimore, who, in collaboration with the New School Archives staff — especially Wendy Scheir, Jenny Swadosh, and, formerly, Liza Harrell-Edge — have taught several classes, written a series of articles for Public Seminar, published a book, created a podcast [24] and an amazingly expansive multi-authored website, and given countless public talks about New School history. There’s no need to repeat the extensive, illuminating, and often sobering work they’ve already done — and I’m not qualified to do it anyway. But I will draw on this existing scholarship and a range of documents from the Archives to highlight a few aspects of the school’s history that exemplify how it imagines itself as a configuration — what shape it takes as an institution — and how it has positioned itself in relation to other institutions and organizations and resources.

[25] You might think, if you read a lot of journalists’ skeets and Substacks, that The New School began with the rise of Nazism and the University in Exile in the 1930s — but its roots are deeper. At Columbia, in 1917, the administration denied tenure to two faculty who expressed their disapproval of the United States’ involvement in World War I. [26] The decision prompted philosophy professor John Dewey and history professors Charles Beard and James Harvey Robinson to protest the decision — and compelled Beard and Robinson, though not Dewey, to resign. The former two joined up with [27] Herbert Croly from The New Republic, who envisioned, in the magazine’s pages in 1918, a new “School for Social Research’”:

an independent school dedicated exclusively to the study of the subject matter of modern society. The curriculum would include anthropology, psychology, modern history, political and commercial geography, international relations and public law, jurisprudence, government administration and public service, economics, finance and statistics, industrial organization, social management and labor organization and administration.

There are several institutional lessons to be learned here: First, that The New School, in its recent restructuring, is willing to abandon a few of the disciplines core to its original mission. Second, we recognize the unrest at Columbia an inciting force, and The New Republic as what we might today call a “thought partner” to The New School.

[28] “A Proposal for an Independent School of Social Sciences for Men and Women,” a pamphlet published by Marchbanks Press that same year, 1918, reinforced that the founders saw great need to prepare people to work in labor organizations and in city, state, and national government — [29] and to do so through a mix of seminars, special lectures by distinguished scholars, popular lectures for organized labor and public pedagogy, and field work in public administration and commercial environments. The needs of these other civic institutions thus provided inspiration for The New School’s founders. [30] And the explicit mention of women in the pamphlet’s title reflected the founders’ recognition that [31] “the granting of the suffrage to women and the extension of women’s interest into new and important spheres of public life will lead them to seek a better equipment both for power and service.” [32] It’s fitting, then, that half of the school’s organizational committee were women, and the majority of its initial students were, too.

[33] The New School for Social Research was born the following year, 1919 — not in the Village, but in Chelsea: in London Terrace, at 465 West 23rd St, right down the block from The New Republic. We see here a material manifestation of civic alliances — between education, journalism, municipal government, and beyond. [34] In its initial “Announcement,” the school alerted readers that they wouldn’t find the curriculum “arranged under the usual departmental headings… for this tends to obscure the constant connection and interplay of the various interests and activities of mankind.” The classes — from “Modern Industrialism and the Rise of Radical Programs of Social Reconstruction” and “Modern Aspects of Banking” to “Eugenics and Public Health” and “Vocations of Trained Women” — [35] reflected the “reconstruction of old disciplines in the light of the new age and the bending of them all to meet the social purposes of the time.” The reconstruction of disciplinary thinking should be used, the “Proposal” stated, in “the process of reconstruction,” in the “solution of social problems.” New challenges need new ways of knowing. And new schools — in new adjacencies with politically- and ethically-aligned institutions.

While the school would train students to understand budgets and politics and personnel management to prepare them to work in government and business, [36] the founders clearly regarded the school itself as a different kind of institution with different administrative needs. They sought to avoid having a traditional board of trustees, which would rather “defend established thought than… encourage a fundamental reconsideration of long accepted ideals and standards.” They didn’t want a president who would be “pathetically responsible to an uncritical public constituency made up of trustees, parents, alumni, prospective donors and casual newspaper reporters and editors.” [37] Thorstein Vebelen, who would become a member of the school’s first core faculty, argued in his 1918 The Higher Learning in America that “the intrusion of business principles in the universities goes to weaken and retard the pursuit of learning and therefore to defeat the ends for which a university is maintained.” [38] The New School’s visionaries would simply “eliminate presidents and deans and the usual administration retinue and cut the overhead expenses to the minimum.” With minimal expenses and no endowment, it’s perhaps not coincidental, Julia Foulkes argues, that, three years after launch, the school was nearly bankrupt. 

Yet the initial plan was this: the school would instead be run by the faculty and students. [39] The 1918 proposal indicated that this headless school would “secure from the various universities of the country a small corps of selected specialists in the several branches of social science, relieve them from administrative responsibilities, grant them self-government, and set them free to investigate, publish and teach.” These recruits, Croly proposed, would be “already contributing to the advancement of science in their own special fields of study.” Students, too, would be “advanced,” and would thus “not require supervision.” Other educational institutions would not only prepare The New School’s students for advanced study, but would also provide — and, we can presume, train and validate — its faculty, too. Having thus paid their dues and made their names elsewhere, these chosen faculty — mostly men, Julia Foulkes notes — [40] would be “emancipated from suspected obligations to donors, trustees and university management in general. They should have before them the exhortation of Lord Bacon to ‘know their own strength and own weakness both.”

[41:B] Yet, as Foulkes has already warned, the model quickly proved impracticable. She writes: “As the founding faculty abandoned the rudderless school over its first three years, a Director superseded the Organizing Committee. From that time to nearly the end of the 20th century, a small team of administrators was the true backbone.” That director, Alvin Johnson, would create courses in quick time to respond to current events and social needs; find experts to teach them; and promote those courses to a changing, non-degree-seeking roster of students. The part-time faculty didn’t expect continual employment. The institution’s values-driven preference for nimbleness, responsiveness, and frugality ultimately necessitated contingency.

[42] When Hitler came to power, Johnson drew on the contacts he made while editing the Encyclopedia of Social Science — itself a distributed institution — to draw scholars from around the world to the United States. He secured funds from United Oil’s Hiram Halle and the Rockefeller Foundation — institutions of disparate sorts — to provide jobs and visas to nearly 200 refugee scholars, some of whom stayed at The New School, others of whom moved on to other universities. The New School thus served as a magnet, a refuge, a filter, and feeder for those leaving other educational institutions under the shadow of a fascist regime — itself an institution, too.

While The New School became a global hub, it was, from the very beginning, very much rooted in its locale, too. It splintered off from Columbia uptown, then established itself in close proximity to intellectual neighbors in Chelsea, and would then move again further downtown. All along, the founders knew the school would be a New York City institution. [43] The 1918 Proposal declared: “This is the hour for the experiment; and New York is the place, because it is the greatest social science laboratory in the world and of its own force attracts scholars and leaders in educational work.” And the city’s other institutions helped to make the school’s environment such fertile ground.

Those other institutions also allowed The New School to remain lean, to avoid the burden of offering resources and creating facilities required at other, larger, more traditional schools. In his 1918 New Republic article, Croly proposed that “in a city like New York which is so well provided with libraries it could dispense with an expensive equipment of buildings and laboratories.” [44] The school’s 1919 announcement acknowledged a reading room — which contains “the newer books to be used in connection with the courses and the general works of reference” — on the 3rd floor of the 24th Street building. But “the school will not undertake to duplicate the large collections available in the city for research work.” This is still the case: The New School has a limited collection and partners with NYU’s Bobst Library down the street. And this is not uncommon: while research universities often like to distinguish themselves with the size of their library collections and the value of their special collections acquisitions, libraries less enamored with prestige and performative acquisition frequently cultivate shared collections.

[45] The New School was of the city in another way, too: it partnered with civic institutions and sought to prepare students to serve their city. These modes of public engagement are still a defining quality of the institution — as exemplified in the name of the newly-dissolved Schools of Public Engagement Division, and in the prevalence of civic learning and “collaboratory” projects across Parsons and elsewhere. [46] Founding faculty member Charles Beard directed the Bureau of Municipal Research, founded in 1906 as part of the “good government” movement, which aimed to make government more responsive and efficient — and Beard offered classes that engaged with the Bureau. In 1923 Patrick Geddes taught a class on city and regional planning, and Lewis Mumford taught “Architecture in American Civilization.” A few years later, in 1931, the New School moved to its new international style building in the Village, at 66 W 12th Street. [47] There, the new auditorium — in which I’ve taught, and about which my Media Studies colleague Barry Salmon and I wrote as we launched our new “Sound Studies” concentration in 2008 — demonstrated that The New School “understood itself as a public forum.” It was place to be seen in the city — and its critical study of the city continued.

Yet the institution’s own governance and finances remained precarious. It considered a merger with NYU in the 1960s. [48] In 1970, The New School acquired the Parsons School of Design, which was facing bankruptcy itself, but which then became a revenue-generator by the end of the decade. The reliance on underpaid part-time faculty and increasing tuition largely helped make that happen. [49] Still, the school felt compelled to sell its prized Thomas Benton mural in 1983 — to the Met, another institution within this civic ecology — to make some money. [50] The Mannes College of Music then joined the fold in 1989. Amidst these acquisitions, [51] the university’s real estate holdings increased. The New School was an endowment-light institution with an ever-more expansive and expensive footprint.

[52] These constituent parts, the school’s divisions — little institutions within the institution –—existed in uncertain, and occasionally resentful, relationship to one another. Pay and benefits were widely disparate, and the proportions of full-time to part-time faculty varied widely between divisions. President Jonathan Fanton framed the various schools as a federation. His successor, Bob Kerry, then sought to merge that federation into one centralized university. But, as Julia Foulkes writes,

[53] Rarely… is the institution seen as a whole. The three extant histories of The New School barely try — not only because that is a difficult task but because to do so would be to challenge long-held beliefs about the institution.

[54] Belief about progressivism, social justice, and sanctuary are belied by the institution’s labor politics. And the university division that popularly embodies those values, Foulkes says, has long “come to depend on the frank exploitation of part-time labor,” mostly in other divisions, “to support its values of academic freedom.” Foulkes continues:

[55] A constant refrain in recent years has been that The New School has become more like a conventional university in its attention to degree students and broader full-time faculty base. A more comprehensive view of the history of our institution within higher education might suggest the opposite: other institutions have become more like what The New School has always been — dependent on contingent labor, driven by administrators, and with faculty investment concentrated in its graduate schools.

[56] [57] [58] The New School has so much potential — it’s what draws all these amazing people here, my favorite people, my lifelong friends — because they believe in the mission, even if it isn’t operationalized by the administration. We must critique it… because we love it and believe in it, and we wish our leaders did, too.

[59] UNDERSTANDING MEDIA  

Communication, broadly conceived, was integral to the founders’ initial vision. [60] Croly, in his 1918 New Republic article, proposed that our nation “must pay far more attention to the way in which ideas are and should be propagated.” The school could “undertake an intensive study of the psychology of opinion and conviction, of the existing methods of spreading opinions and of the way in which those methods should be changed in order to safeguard and to promote vitality of public opinion.” The New School could equip students “to become effective disseminators of ideas,” communicators trained to “penetrate the minds and the hearts of people with ideas, and who in doing so could inculcate conviction without dogmatism and toleration without infirmity of purpose.” [61] This call of course preceded the proliferation of propaganda and public opinion research in the 1930s and 40s — including the emergence of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, which Beard himself helped to organize, at Columbia in 1937.

[62] In 1926 The New School offered its first film course, Terry Ramsaye’s “Art of the Motion Picture.” The year 1934 brought [63] a photography course from Berenice Abbott, and, [64] in 1956, John Cage’s “Experimental Composition.” [65] I got asked about this course so often, I wrote a blog post about it. By the 1970s, progressive cross-media production and pedagogy endeavors were happening in New York, but equally exciting stuff was taking place elsewhere around the country. [66] Medieval literature scholar Gerry O’Grady created the Rice Media Center in Houston, with oil money from the de Menil, prominent art philanthropists. “In a hybrid position between academic program and independent operation” — a noteworthy institutional orientation — the Media Center opened in February of 1970, offering the first photography and film courses at Rice, as well as photography exhibitions, film screenings, and lectures open to the public.” O’Grady then moved to Buffalo, where he helped to germinate three different kinds of media institutions.

[67] As the ZKM, the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, explained in their 2006-7 exhibition about Buffalo’s legendary media studies:

In 1973, [O’Grady] founded and directed Media Study/Buffalo, and both the Center for Media Study and the Educational Communications Center at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The first provided access to equipment, workshops and exhibition programs to all of Buffalo’s citizens, the second recruited creative artists and scholars to teach students in his new academic degree programs, and the third, composed of 100 media professionals, supported services to all 128 departments of the University. The Center for Media Study made Buffalo the focus in film theory, the practice of avant-garde and documentary film- and video-making, in computer-generated image-making, and in pedagogy.

The academic Center for Media Study’s purview was relatively unique for its time in ranging “from photographic image to slide installation, from music performance to film and video performance, from film to film installation, from videotape to video environment, from computer graphics to interactive installation” — and in blending theory and practice. Its faculty included an assortment of notable structuralist film and video artists: Hollis Frampton, Tony Conrad, and Paul Sharits, documentary filmmaker James Blue, video artists Steina and Woody Vasulka, and Peter Weibel. The Educational Communications Center wasn’t only about providing university A/V services; it also included management of the public radio station and an educational cable tv station, and the foreign language lab.

[68] Media Study / Buffalo, meanwhile, was a “free-standing public not-for-profit institution, independent from the University,” that served as a “regional community development center that provided access to equipment, workshops” and exhibitions; and hosted programs featuring independent media on local and national television. [69] New School faculty member Deidre Boyle has documented parallel programs around the country — from Downtown Community Television Center, founded in 1972 in New York; to Videopolist in Chicago and Pacific Coast Community Video in Santa Barbara.

[70] A few years ago Anthology Film Archives, here in New York, featured Buffalo’s Film-makers series of 30-minute programs — produced in cooperation with WNED-Channel 17 in Buffalo — featuring underground, experimental, and art cinema. Surprisingly, in the 60s and 70s, there were other public television stations doing similar work: the Television Laboratory at Thirteen/WNET in New York; the National Center for Experiments in Television, which grew out of KQED in San Francisco; and the New Television Workshop at WGBH in Boston. [71] Representative from many of these programs gathered at SUNY Albany in 1974, when Grady coordinated the “Educational Communication Centers and the Television Arts” conference, which sought to explore the video arts and related technology, as well as the way college and university communication centers could serve local non-institutionally-affiliated artists and broader communities.

[72] As O’Grady wrote in a 1969 article:

I would like to delimit media studies to mean the exploration of the creation, the aesthetics, and the psychological, social, and environmental impact of the art forms of photography, cinematography, videography, radio, recordings, and tapes within the broad framework of general education in the humanities. I would call media studies the “new humanities.”

O’Grady’s conception rhymed with that of his colleague in New York, [73] John Culkin, a Jesuit priest who wrote a dissertation on film study at Harvard, then left the priesthood to found [74] the Center for Understanding Media, in 1969. Two years later, he declared that [75] “media study is an integrated approach to the study of literature, drama, the fine arts and the new forms of communication (film, television, radio, photography). It is the arts and humanities in a new key.” [76] He started a masters program through the Center at Antioch College, then moved that program to The New School in 1975. And it’s that program’s 50th anniversary that we celebrate this year.

Culkin’s Center, like O’Grady’s, sought to “use both theoretical and practical strategies to explore what is proper to each medium and to relate this knowledge to the development of a comprehensive field theory of the forms of human communication.” And its Masters program sought to serve teachers, librarians, instructional media specialists, community leaders – and to help them become media “generalists” by exploring various production skills, critical frameworks, situating them within the arts and humanities, and developing curricula and teaching materials. [77] Early courses included “Psychology and Physiology of the Senses,” “Media and the Future,” and “Studies with Sound,” taught by sound archivist and designer Tony Schwartz, who hosted Around New York from 1946 to 1976 on WNYC.

[78] As with The New School, its new home, the Center “consider[ed] New York City to be its campus”; while the Center itself had facilities at 230 W 13th Street, and 75 Horatio Street, and in Mamaroneck, Culkin noted that “all the art and media resources are here[, in New York] — theaters, museums, TV and film studios, workshops, opera, dance and all the people and institutions associated with them.” As with The New School, the Center had its own library but also assured applicants that “library privileges have been worked out with a number of organizations in the city.” Again, the Center depends upon other institutions across the city for vital services and resources. [79] But, similarly, its relationship was reciprocal: it coordinated the film portion of the Artists-in-Schools Program for the National Endowment for the Arts, conducted an annual Young People’s Film and Radio Festival on PBS, sponsored a number of children’s media and training programs, and operated and inflatable theater. [80] I think inflatables are another helpful model to think about configurations in relation to formal institutions.

[81] The Center morphed into a program, a department, then a school — different institutional configurations with different degrees of autonomy, reporting structures, funding flows, and so forth. [82] Carol Wilder, the Department of Media Studies’ former dean, and Peter Haratonik, among the Center’s founding faculty, chronicled the presence of film across this institutional evolution in a 2019 piece in Public Seminar. [83] Peter — who was a key figure in the Center for Understanding Media — and I also explored the history and future models of media study in a 2008 class, on the occasion of one of countless “Media Studies Task Forces.” [84] And when many of the founding faculty and early program administrators bequeathed their files to the New School Archives in 2013, I taught a class, in collaboration with the Archives staff, to invite students to process and exhibit those newly collaged histories.

[85] And here’s where I’ll break or breach off from the Institutional Histories to talk a bit more about my own experiences of institutional navigation and experimentation with institutional form. During my 18.5 years at The New School, I taught across four divisions and held administrative appointments in three of them. I also research and teach about institutions: knowledge institutions, civic institutions, urban institutions that get entangled with commercial tech.