The New Centre for Research & Practice
4417 Broadmoor Ave SE
Grand Rapids, MI 49503
Board of Directors: Julieta Aranda (e-flux), Paul Levi Bryant (Collin College), Lucca Fraser (Jan van Eyck Academie), Michaeleen Kelly (Aquinas College), Suhail Malik (Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College/Goldsmiths University of London), and Laura Wexler (Yale University/FemTechNet).
Organizing Committee: Jason Adams (Grand Valley State University), Mohammad Salemy (dadabase.ca/access Gallery) and Tony Yanick (University of Glasgow).
The New Centre for Research & Practice, a new international web-based higher education institution, has launched its graduate-level certificate programs and curricula for fall 2014. Visit the website to learn more about approaching seminars on #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Urbanomic/Verve, 2014); emergency government & decisionist political theory after Ferguson; the neo-rationalist critique of speculative philosophy; on The Democracy of Objects (Open Humanities Press, 2011); on the here and now of curatorial practice; on the method of theory-fiction and the New Weird; and on gender, technology & xenofeminism.
To start our inaugural year, we have also launched a 90-day membership drive, which will enable us to offer affordable graduate-level seminars, provide access to our archived materials, and plan our summer school. To learn about membership and support a unique higher education institute, become a Member or Friend of The New Centre.
Programs
Critical Philosophy
The Critical Philosophy program is devoted to developing philosophy adequate to the problems and questions posed by the 21st century. The rise of the Anthropocene, which threatens global catastrophe, developments in physics, neurology, and biology; transformations in global capitalism; and the way in which the military, media, and economic systems are now intertwined and exceed the boundaries of nation-states have all generated new conceptual challenges for philosophy. These transformations have posed a set of questions about the nature of reality, knowledge, and ethics that cannot fully be addressed by the resources of traditional philosophy alone and require new philosophical concepts.
Social & Political Thought
The Social & Political Thought program is designed to intensify students’ capacities for comprehending and disturbing power relations as they exist today, in the increasingly undemocratic, markedly unequal, globalized world of the early 21st century. The seminars proceed by way of juxtaposition, generating divergent readings of the classic texts of political theory through a historically informed and future-oriented encounter with more recent social & political thinking.
Curatorial Practice
The Curatorial Practice program is one of the only international curricula responding to the challenges that cultural and economic globalization as well as planetary tele-computation have together created for the production and distribution of contemporary art and knowledge in the 21st century. The program engages with the field from a critical standpoint by encouraging students to question the institutional assumptions about the role of curators with a focus on the epistemological and social ramifications of exhibitions, their surrounding activities, and their political economy.
Transdisciplinary Research & Practice
The Transdisciplinary Research & Practice program aims to explore the interfaces between the arts, sciences, and vernacular knowledge by engaging with strategies that capture complexity, cultivate new ecologies of knowledge, and affect individual and collective transformations. This program offers seminars that cannot fit into a discipline-specific program, but are at once between, across, and beyond all disciplines. Students in the program are provided with theoretical and practical support to enhance and realize issue-based transdisciplinary projects.
Seminars
September 22–October 1
“#Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader I“
Instructors: Mohammad Salemy & Jason Adams
October 5–12
“Emergency Government: The Political Theory of Decisionism”
Instructor: Jason Adams
October 9–30
“Reintroduction to Metaphysics I: The Speculative Return”
Instructor: Peter Wolfendale
October 19–November 9
“The Anarchy of Objects I: Objects and Regimes of Attraction”
Instructor: Levi Bryant
October 28–November 18
“Curatorial Practice I: Here & Now”
Instructor: Mohammad Salemy
Novemeber 17–December 8
“Hyperstition & The New Weird I: Entities and Worlds/Genres and Climates”
Instructors: Ben Woodard and Tony Yanick
November 21–December 12
“Towards Xenofeminism: Gender, Technology, and Reason in the 21st Century”
Instructors: Laboria Cuboniks (Lucca Fraser, Amy Ireland, & Helen Hester)
November 23–December 14
“#Accelerate:The Accelerationist Reader II”
Instructors: Mohammad Salemy & Jason Adams
2014 fall seminars are accessible online here.
