ART
CRITIQUE
EXPERIMENT
-
ART CRITIQUE EXPERIMENT -
The New School of the Anthropocene is an experimental micro-university and counter-nihilism strike.
Since 2022, we’ve offered a radical and affordable alternative to the marketised bureaucracy of corporate higher education.
We strive to create the best postgraduate-level Arts and Humanities course in the world.
Our concern is with fostering intellectual curiosity and testing ideas rather than preparing people to reproduce an extractivist economy that’s brought us to the point of earth and social systems collapse.
Mining the critical-creative seam, we’ve shaped an interdisciplinary ethos and a gathering of academics, practitioners and students forged in conviviality and trust.
Our curriculum is dedicated to addressing biopolitical emergency, climate justice and the entanglements of a more-than-human assembly through the Arts and Humanities: a means of charting a Post-Anthropocene imaginary.
If you believe that the university should be more than a discontentment machine and that the purpose of studying might transcend workforce supply, you’ll find a home at the New School — where education is inseparable from criticality, activism and artistic invention.
In a time of polycrisis, “despair is a luxury,” declares Paul Gilroy. We must diagnose, dream and act!
Over the past five years, NSotA’s curriculum has featured a varied programme of weekly lecture-seminars, which are live-streamed across the earth; online Critical-Creative Seam classes; and intensively-supervised research projects addressing the concerns of social and ecological renewal.
Our teaching base is the fully-accessible Art Workers’ Guild in Bloomsbury. Every seminar is live-streamed or held exclusively on-line, enabling people to study with us from anywhere in the world. The completion of the course is marked by the award of a postgraduate-level Diploma in Environmental Humanities.
We believe that everyone, regardless of personal wealth, has a right to the “Life of the Mind:” Hannah Arendt’s term for the activity of critical reflection and conscience. 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.
The New School actively collaborates with several international partners, including the More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) programme at NYU Law, the Education Climate Coalition, the Hard Art cultural collective, the Stories in Transit refugee project, the Critical Anthropocene Research Group at Concordia University, the House of Annetta in Spitalfields, with whom we jointly host the Built Environment Ecologies (BEE) Diploma summer school on fortnightly Saturdays, and the convenors of Schumacher Society, with whom NSotA is developing a new form of creditation that recognises collective and eco-social critical endeavour.
Other activities include a new publishing imprint, in/kiostro, which launched with an anthology, Decomposition, in Autumn 2026; a quarterly sonic almanac, I Want to Eat the Earth, broadcast on Resonance FM; an annual student-curated art show, which ties-in with the London Design Festival; a forthcoming Anthropocene Podcast; and occasional concerts.
For the 2026-27 academic year, NSotA has introduced a revolutionary postgraduate-level programme, Earth-House Poiesis: Witnessing - Documenting - Storying, taught on a part-time basis.
Full details are available here. We welcome applications from people of all ages, experiences and backgrounds who wish to join us!
“[The New School] is a very important initiative. It’s shocking to think that for the most part college students today still study the same curricula as their parents, even though they are heading for a completely altered world.”