Join us in
September 2025!
​​
"[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."
--Amitav Ghosh
​
​​​
As we head towards our fourth year, NSotA’s experimental curriculum has expanded to include a varied programme of weekly lecture-seminars, which are live-streamed across the earth; small-group, online Critical-Creative Seam classes; and intensively-supervised research projects addressing the concerns of social and ecological renewal, alongside the possibility of international fieldwork with communities under stress. Our teaching base is now the fully-accessible Art Workers’ Guild in Bloomsbury.
​​
We are now welcoming applications from people of all ages, experiences and backgrounds, who might wish to join us either in-place or on-line for the next iteration of the NSotA Diploma in Environmental Humanities for the 2025-26 academic year starting in late September. Apply within!
​​​​​
Full-Fee Scholarships
The New School of the Anthropocene offers free places for its one-year diploma to English-speaking refugees now living in the UK, who've had their current university education interrupted by the wars in Palestine, Sudan, Ukraine, Yemen and elsewhere. This scheme is a collaboration with the Compass Project at Birkbeck College, Counterpoints Arts and Revoke.
​
In September 2024 it was extended to care-experienced people over the age of 18, and to those enduring custodial sentences as a consequence of the criminalisation of protests against the climate emergency.
For more details, please write to convenor@nsota.info or enter your details into the Contact page.
​​
Please note: scholarships are only offered to those who wish to study at NSotA. We do not subsidise wealthy market-state educational bureaucracies!
Art Critique Experiment
The New School of the Anthropocene is an experiment in counter-nihilism. It is a response to the inability and unwillingness of the mainstream university to engage with the condition of social crisis and ecological ruin that characterises the 21st Century. This is our opportunity to chart the new.
​​​​​
The New School offers a radical alternative to the monetisation, marketisation and banalisation of higher education. We are concerned with the exploration of ideas and the principle of intellectual curiosity, rather than preparing people to reproduce the spectacular economy of the business civilisation.
​​
Valuing experimentation through mining the critical-creative seam, we have shaped an interdisciplinary ethos and a non-hierarchical gathering of academics and students forged in conviviality and trust: a means of addressing earth systems collapse and of forging a post-capitalist imaginary. For out of breakdown must come breakthrough.
​​​​
Dr Isabelle McNeill
The NSotA community is shocked and desolate at the news of Isabelle McNeill’s passing on 21st February 2025. The agony of her young family and close friends must be beyond measure and we send them our love and deepest condolences.
​
We regarded Isabelle as a beloved companion and unique source of counsel. She was incomparably wise and compassionate; a woman of unimpeachable integrity and a truly beautiful person. It’s right to say that without her early encouragement and support, not to mention the radical possibilities afforded by her Tactics and Praxis seminar at Trinity Hall, there would be no New School of the Anthropocene. She not only taught and examined for us, but put in a notable administrative shift, too. She was a rare being at Cambridge, not only intellectually adept – her 2012 monograph, Memory and the Moving Image: French Film in the Digital Era, is a model of its kind – but unfailingly loyal, caring and humane towards her students and colleagues, alike.
​
Tracey Martin of NSotA's first cohort writes: "I only met Isabelle once - but her warmth and enthusiasm has stayed with me. Patchwork Thinking made me see that my interest in textiles and sewing could be radical and connected to a way of thinking which is needed in these times. What wonderful talents she had; she drew all her knowledge and skills together to show what a person could be."
​
Three cohorts of New School scholars will have seen Isabelle’s delightful patchwork banner that presides over each Friday gathering. This was her gift to us, unveiled to a soft gasp of wonder among attendees during her seminar at the October Gallery in Autumn 2022. The banner and the precious values that it enshrines will now take on even greater resonance in signifying that we henceforth remain in each other’s presence. Isabelle’s patchwork banner permanently flies.
Agnes Denes standing amid her 1982 public work, “Wheatfield — A Confrontation,” in NYC. (Photo: John McGrall)
NSotA Statement on the War in Palestine
Read here
NSotA Symposium
Thinking through making, regenerating organism earth
​
The NSotA Symposium pairs leading cultural figures from neighbouring fields with the intention of allowing free-ranging conversation, which is loosely tied into the New School's wider educational enquiry.
​
Marina Warner and Rowan Williams
Humane Education and the Democratic Project
'It would be a mistake to believe that the pandemic is a crisis that will end, instead of the perfect warning for what is coming, what I call the new climatic regime. It appears that all the resources of science, humanities and the arts will have to be mobilised once again to shift attention to our shared terrestrial condition.'
Bruno Latour, The Guardian (2021)