New School Of The Anthropocene

The New School of the Anthropocene is a radical and affordable experiment in interdisciplinary higher education for the digital era in collaborative association with October Gallery in London. We are an ensemble of experienced academics from the higher educational world who, in the company of diverse artists and practitioners, wish to restore the values of intellectual adventure, free exchange and creative risk that formerly characterised an arts education in the UK and beyond. 

The New School is registered with Companies House as a Community Interest Company and is run cooperatively. We think of ourselves as a purpose or condition, rather than an institution, open to collaboration and gathering. Our curriculum is dedicated to addressing ecological recovery and social renewal through the arts. Learning styles flex to accommodate the domestic and employment responsibilities of our students. The age-range within this heterogenous community extends from 18 to 75 and qualification-levels range from GCSE to PhD. We regard our participants as researchers from the start and they co-design their work with an emphasis on critical intervention fused with creative process. The collaborative work of the body – learning, for example, about food resilience at Calthorpe Community Garden and rainforest restoration in Puerto Rico - is assigned equal prominence to more conventional university-level activities such as textual analysis, philosophical discussion and filmmaking. 

We opened our doors to a first yearly cohort of 26 students in September 2022. They have joined us for 28 weekly Anthropocene Seminars led by the likes of Marina Warner, Robert Macfarlane, Gargi Bhattacharyya, Adam Broomberg, Ann Pettifor, Assemble Studio, Michael Mansfield, Robin Kirkpatrick, Esther Teichmann, Anthony Sattin, Chris Petit and Mark Nelson (Biosphere 2), whose work covers the entire range of subjects falling within the framework of the Environmental Humanities. These vigorously participatory sessions are prefaced by a movement class and are run in-person and streamed on-line to enable our planetarians to join us from Tajikistan, Egypt, US, Niger, Ireland, Scotland and France. Our teachers are gathered within an ever-extending Ensemble, not an exclusive faculty, and are paid at UCU-recommended rates for their contributions. 

All NSotA students also work on a research project that is individually supervised and benefits from five meetings a year with at least two Ensemble members. This contributes towards a Diploma in Environmental Humanities, rather than a degree: a means of countering an anxious culture of accreditation, which we differentiate from the principle of recognition. Our students instead carry forward a supervised portfolio of their critical and creative work accomplished over the year as testament to their development. 

While seeking to maintain a genuinely inter-generational student body, our recruitment continues to prioritise applicants from those with no prior experience of university. Our pay-what-you-can-afford scheme means that our students typically pay between 0.5% and 5% of the average cost of a UK postgraduate degree and enjoy double the number of contact teaching hours. This means that no one with the aptitude and desire to participate need be excluded. We have also set aside free places for forced migrants fleeing conflict across the world, which are awarded in association with Revoke and Birkbeck College’s Compass Project.

The New School is to be simultaneously regarded as an applied research project that explores how an agile, self-organising model for higher education might be effectively constituted. Its processes have been fully archived with the intention of creating an open-source toolkit for educators who might seek to emulate this prototype and co-establish a sisterhood of corresponding initiatives. We are a contributing partner of the Academia Biospherica Alliance, which from 2024 will offer on-site educational programmes under the auspices of October Gallery’s parent organisation, the Institute of Ecotechnics, across the five main earth biomes of mountains, oceans, forests, desert grasslands and cities in locations such as Puerto Rico, Brazil, Argentina, Iraq, Italy, Catalonia and Egypt. 

This reflects our expressly collaborative ethos, as manifested further in our participation within the Ecoversities Alliance and Faculty for a Future, alongside established associations with Embassy Cultural House (London, Ontario), the London Review of Books and Birkbeck College Library, where our students enjoy borrowing rights, and prospective academic partnerships with the Central European University and Global Centre for Advanced Studies. We are also in the process of gaining recognition as a UNESCO Futures Literacy Laboratory. Our public launch in November 2021 was marked by a symposium on the future of the university in relation to biopolitical emergency, timed to coincide with COP26. It features recorded dialogues with leading thinkers available to view on our website: www.nsota.org. 

In February 2023 the New School hosted a seminar jointly with Birkbeck’s Institute for Social Research to announce the relaunch of the Stories in Transit project founded by Marina Warner with the intention of initiating a collective research project for NSotA students. This will form a central component of a continuing second year active engagement with the present cohort following the end of the academic year in June, which is currently under collective discussion. 

From September 2023 our first-year cohort size will be increased to 40 students drawn from the UK and around the world. The programme will be augmented by small-group creativity classes as a means of building a collaborative environment and preparing scholars for the intensity of their project work. NSotA's debut cohort established an additional self-organised reading group, meeting on-line on Sunday afternoons with the purpose of extending discussions broached in previous Anthropocene Seminars. For the next academic year this will be formally incorporated into the curriculum. Long-term plans include the founding of a research agency with D-Fuse intending to explore innovative multi-modal representations of biocidal emergency in civic spaces.

We are keenly aware that today’s university system is outmoded, sclerotic and wasteful; yoked to punishing systems of debt finance and managerial bureaucracy; and falling short in its responsibility to nurture future generations as confident participants within the complex universe in which we are all embedded. In proposing an affordable interdisciplinary education, the New School of the Anthropocene seeks to rejuvenate the core values of an adventurous education that are under sustained threat across the world. In so doing, it represents a genuine alternative for those who consider experimentation across the critical-creative seam to be the prerequisite to personal resilience and cultural renewal.