New School of the Anthropocene
The New School of the Anthropocene is an experiment in counter-nihilism. Since 2022, we’ve offered a radical and affordable alternative to the marketisation, bureaucratisation and banalisation of corporate higher education. Our curriculum is dedicated to addressing biopolitical emergency, climate justice and the renegotiation of relationships between humans and earth others through the Arts and Humanities. Mining the critical-creative seam, we’ve shaped an interdisciplinary ethos and an international gathering of academics, practitioners and students forged in conviviality and trust.
We conceive of ourselves as a purpose or condition rather than an institution, and have established collaborative associations with the More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) project at NYU Law, the Hard Art collective, the DAANES/Rojava universities and the House of Annetta, with whom we’re planning a Built Environment & Ecology summer school for 2026.
Decolonisation and counter-extractivist forms of knowledge are etched into our curriculum, which reflects a desire to restore the values of intellectual enquiry and creative adventure that characterised university education before it capitulated to neoliberal instrumentalism. The age-range within our heterogenous student community extends from 18 to 79, and qualification-levels range from GCSE to PhD. Learning styles flex accordingly to accommodate their caring and employment responsibilities.
This September a cohort of 55 students joined us for a fourth year of weekly lecture-seminars run from the Art Workers’ Guild in Bloomsbury, which are live-streamed to enable planetary participants to join us from every continent. These are complemented by an on-line programme of evening classes and individual project supervisions, reflecting our belief that all students are to be regarded as researchers. A diploma in Environmental Humanities is awarded rather than a degree: a means of countering an anxious culture of accreditation, which we differentiate from the principle of recognition.
Our pay-what-you-can-afford scheme means that no one with the aptitude and desire to participate need be excluded. We have set aside free places for migrants fleeing conflict across the world and those incarcerated owing to the politicisation of protest against climate breakdown. We have thus far been honoured to host refugees from Niger, Palestine, Ukraine, Cameroon, Congo, Nigeria, Syria, Sudan and Rwanda.
NSotA thus stands as a new self-organising model for higher education that could be speedily replicated and rolled-out regionally. It strives to answer the call for radical enquiry as a prerequisite to cultural renewal and a viable future of co-existence in an otherwise darkening world.