The New School
Curriculum Disruption: October 12-18, 2018
400 Years of Inequality shines a light on centuries of discrimination. During this week, faculty and students across the university are called to set aside work as usual to examine inequality through the lens of their coursework -- and disrupt the ecology of inequality.
In the year ahead, communities of all kinds and all sizes will be planning observances. These will be varied, including concerts, potlucks, exhibitions and plays. Our work at The New School will provide an essential launching pad for this national work.
In 2017, the first curriculum disruption invited faculty, staff and students to this task. People found imaginative ways to look at inequality from many perspectives -- art, science, public policy, and design. Their creative work demonstrated that there is no discipline or subject that has emerged or is practiced free of the ecology in which we all live. Descriptions of some of their efforts can be found here.
The three books proposed here offer many opportunities for reflection:
In the year ahead, communities of all kinds and all sizes will be planning observances. These will be varied, including concerts, potlucks, exhibitions and plays. Our work at The New School will provide an essential launching pad for this national work.
In 2017, the first curriculum disruption invited faculty, staff and students to this task. People found imaginative ways to look at inequality from many perspectives -- art, science, public policy, and design. Their creative work demonstrated that there is no discipline or subject that has emerged or is practiced free of the ecology in which we all live. Descriptions of some of their efforts can be found here.
The three books proposed here offer many opportunities for reflection:
- Read Voices of a People’s History out loud with a class. This offers an opportunity to get acquainted with people we’ve never met but whose efforts at liberation have made our own era possible
- Get to know Ernie Thompson. Through his work as a union and community organizer, he came to believe that coalition was the essential tool for advancing equality and making a better world. His book, Homeboy Came to Orange: A Story of People’s Power, explains how he organized for equality.
- Get the backstory on the Poor People’s Campaign. Reverend William Barber developed the framework of Moral Fusion Coalition in North Carolina and is now taking it to statehouses all across the nation. His book, The Third Reconstruction, is essential reading for our times.