Public Seminar

At Public Seminar, we are committed to fostering discussions on the crucial issues facing our world today and building a shared global knowledge base. This independent initiative is part of The New School Publishing Initiative and involves contributions from faculty, students, and staff at The New School, along with support from collaborators worldwide. Our primary focus is on promoting the intellectual and cultural aspects of democracy, welcoming a variety of viewpoints. Leveraging our expertise in social sciences, humanities, design, and the arts, we strive to initiate and maintain meaningful conversations. It’s important to note that the opinions shared by our contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of The New School or the Public Seminar editorial team.

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The Blue House - Public Seminar

1 month ago | publicseminar.org | Sarah Schweig

Cover of The Ocean in the Next Room (2025) | Sarah V. Schweig / Milkweed EditionsI’m still here in the city I entered years ago. I’ve been in the city all this time. I don’t look up and around much anymore. I’ve been studying philosophy and having a sonand killing time. I follow my son from roomto room in our two-room rental. While he sleeps,I kill a roach in the bathroom with a broom,and even thoroughly crushed its legs keepmoving. I get up each morning still asleepand keep moving.
Can Poetry Still Unite Us?

1 month ago | publicseminar.org | Carina Filemyr |Sarah Schweig

Still waters run deep (2021) | Foteini Zaglara / CC BY 2.0For Sarah V. Schweig, writing poetry has always been a question of looking for the most truthful way to record things that had seemed otherwise inscrutable or difficult to understand. Her new collection, The Ocean in the Next Room (Milkweed Editions, 2025), peels back the noise of daily life to locate beauty—and with it, a way of making sense of the world.
Ecology and Democracy in a World on Fire

1 month ago | publicseminar.org | Jedediah Purdy

Blackwork Design for Goldsmithwork with Monkey, Birds, and Insects (ca. 1582–1616) | Mathais Beitler / Public DomainThe following text was first presented on April 22, 2025, as a distinguished lecture presented by the Henry H. Arnhold Forum on Global Challenges and the New School for Social Research. I want to trace the outline of an era that has closed. It ran from roughly the end of the Cold War until now, although it’s been in crisis for nearly a decade.
The Khalil Case and the Constitution

2 months ago | publicseminar.org | T. Alexander Aleinikoff |Hiroshi Motomura |Natalia Mehlman Petrzela |Nicole Hemmer

Join hosts T. Alexander Aleinikoff, Hiroshi Motomura, and Cristina M. Rodríguez for a conversation with guest Stephen I. Vladeck about the Mahmoud Khalil Case, deportation power, and the Constitution.
Blasphemy Is a Victimless Crime

2 months ago | publicseminar.org | Luis Jaramillo |Salman Rushdie |Adam Mansbach |Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

Salman Rushdie presents the 2025 Phillips Lecture at The New School In March, acclaimed author Salman Rushdie visited The New School to deliver the 2025 William Phillips lecture, a talk titled “Blasphemy Is a Victimless Crime.” Rushdie, the author of 15 novels, including the Booker Prize–winning Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, and nonfiction books including, most recently, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, spoke about freedom of thought and speech, the rising...
Black Children, White Schools

2 months ago | publicseminar.org | Claire Potter |Sonali Chakravarti |Sophie Lewis |Natasha Lennard

On November 14, 1960, 6-year-old Tessie Prevost woke up and put on one of her prettiest dresses. Like Leona Tate, Gail Etienne, and Ruby Bridges, Tessie was a very special little girl. Along with hundreds of other Black children, the New Orleans Four, as they would forever be known, had taken a test. The test was devised by the Louisiana Pupil Placement Board after Brown v. Board of Education had declared separate but equal schools unconstitutional.
In I’m Still Here, a Mother Refuses to Let a Dictatorship Rewrite Reality

2 months ago | publicseminar.org | Sonali Chakravarti |Federico Finchelstein |Pamela Ballinger |Jacob Walters

Fernanda Torres as Eunice in I’m Still Here | Image: Adrian Teijido / Courtesy of Sony Pictures ClassicsPut on earrings. Go out for ice cream. Swim. Expose the conditions of torture. For Eunice Paiva, the protagonist of 2024 Brazilian film I’m Still Here, the fight against dictatorship has a rhythm. After being interrogated about her association with communists and terrorists, she must now try to find out where her husband is detained and work with a lawyer to get him our.
Enemy Feminisms - Public Seminar

2 months ago | publicseminar.org | Sophie Lewis

Cover of Enemy Feminisms by Haymarket Books (2025)Let’s be brave and swallow our bitter medicine. Feminists across the political spectrum have taken pains to define their troops as chaste and untainted by lust (especially interracial lust); not to mention maternal, i.e., pure, straight, removed from the realm of productive work; and “natural,” that is, not artificial, not “femme,” neither surgically nor chemically enhanced.
Yes, Some of Our Enemies Are Feminists

2 months ago | publicseminar.org | Natasha Lennard |Sophie Lewis

Sub-commandant Mary Allen (center), one of the earliest members of the Women’s Police Service, with four members of her force (1916) | Christina Broom / © National Portrait Gallery, LondonSophie Lewis, feminist scholar and author of Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (Verso, 2022), reckons with Western feminism’s problematic history in her new book Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2025).
Elon Musk’s Cruel Moral Sentiments

2 months ago | publicseminar.org | David Williams |John Stoehr |Justin Joque |Katherine Kelaidis

The Raising of Lazarus (1619) | Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) / Metropolitan Museum of Art / Public DomainElon Musk may or may not be “the world’s richest man” these days, depending on the wildly fluctuating value of his Tesla car company, a target for those protesting Musk’s “move fast, break stuff” approach to downsizing the federal bureaucracy through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).