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Conversation
The New School of the Anthropocene: a conversation with Michael Hrebeniak
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Abstract
What kind of ‘higher education’ is suitable for our age of polycrisis—accelerating climate change, economic turbulence, and global authoritarianism? Can universities unshackle themselves from the chains of financialisation, managerialism, and technocracy? Can care, imagination, collectivity, and autonomy be taught and learnt? In this conversation, Dr Michael Hrebeniak—founder of the New School of the Anthropocene—talks about his experiment in ‘counter-nihilism’. NSotA was founded as a ‘micro-university’ with a curriculum dedicated to addressing biopolitical emergency, climate justice, and the entanglements of a more-than-human assembly through the Arts and Humanities. Here, students and teachers collaborate and self-organise to acquire the skills necessary to be citizen-custodians of our planet.
Keywords
Anthropocenepolycrisishigher educationmicro-universityexperimentalismMichael, I’m going to start by introducing you. You are Associate Professor of Film Poetics at UCL, but our conversation today is really about your founding and stewardship of one of the more radical experiments in the British higher education landscape in recent years. I want to take you back a few years, and a conversation we had in the Magdalene College Cambridge garden, when you first brought up the idea of a New School of the Anthropocene1 to me. Tell us a little bit about the origins of that idea.
I remember the afternoon well. My thoughts about the New School were seeded in the student uprisings in advance of the 2012 higher education settlement in Britain following the Browne Review, and in particular, in the student occupations going on in Cambridge and across the whole of the country. I found these to be deeply impressive. For eleven days a group occupied the Old Combination Room in Cambridge featuring perhaps the largest surviving Morris & Co. rug in the world, which stands as an augury for where NSotA would eventually be located. Several hundred young people were acting entirely selflessly under the banner of Cambridge Defend Education, because they were standing for future generations. I looked on as a member of the English Faculty. Many colleagues were very supportive of the student action, but didn’t want to get in their way. We formed a support group instead, because we knew that they would probably face danger as a consequence of their actions.
I was struck by the speed, the imagination, the generosity and the efficiency of the collective decision-making. They had teach-ins. They were cooking for each other. They led dance classes. There were musical performances. I thought this was really exciting, unquestionably the most fertile, potent and adventurous political formation I’d seen. A student said to one of my colleagues, ‘I don’t want to be rude, but we’ve worked out we don’t need you any more.’ She wasn’t being disrespectful, but she was talking about education, and the fact that they could organise their own classes. I thought this might seed a new model of working in education, which might strip down the baggage of this cheapening term, ‘Uni experience’, which has less to do with education and more with an infantilising lifestyle-package serviced by colossal debt, where life is something that’s done to you, for all the ubiquitous guff in undergraduate prospectuses promising self-optimisation.
I wondered if there was a way of recovering the fact that the purpose of a college or university is to teach students and spark them into autonomy, And that’s it. You can do something cheaply, efficiently, imaginatively and flexibly. You can work in a collaborative way. You may be able to rebuild that condition of trust and companionship that has all but disappeared now from the industrial university. Of course, I’m now talking about something that took place fifteen years ago; it’s only become worse, but it was obvious even then that we’d be facing irreversible levels of bureaucratic dysfunctionality, crude accreditationism and intellectual impoverishment from a revolution in the service of a market ideology. The analysis in the London Review of Books of what was going on then was also very astute. My ideas also came from that. Speaking of the LRB—this is a very long answer, Pablo.
No, we like long answers.
Okay; do stop me as necessary. In September 2014, Marina Warner wrote a piece in the LRB called ‘Why I Quit’, which nearly every academic I’ve met seems to have read. It was about how she could no longer tolerate the bureaucracy, the coercive managerialism, and the lack of dignity and respect accorded to academics and students in the contemporary university. I wrote to her. She didn’t know who I was but kindly met me for coffee in the LRB cafe. I said to her, ‘Have you thought about parallel formations or ``para-sites", where we can work to recover and rejuvenate what it means to be teach and learn in mutually supportive environments?’ Eight years later and 500 yards away from that cafe, she led the eighth seminar of the New School’s first year, which was rather lovely, having recorded a dialogue with Rowan Williams for our public launch the previous year.
All institutions have a meta-narrative: for Cambridge and I suspect Oxford, it’s power, to a degree that separates them from the other UK universities that consider themselves elite. I become increasingly conscious that the Collegiate University was self-referentially absorbed by its own constituent mythology, one that’s inextricably associated with the mission to reproduce the agents and forms of cultural authority across the world, which it’s done effectively for eight centuries. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the atmosphere to me felt permanently clenched and, as far as I could see, the University resembled a sclerotic central bureaucracy rooted in business ‘values’, by definition hostile to progressive change and to participatory decision-making. It wasn’t what I entered higher education for as a mature student in the late-1980s, which was to address the intersecting biopolitical shocks across the ecology and capital that we now call the polycrisis. While much work from Cambridge students was humbling in its accomplishment and ambition, I came to the understanding that any productive or progressive engagement with this model of the university was all but impossible.
I had, of course, other models of innovative forms of educational organisations in mind. I was thinking of Black Mountain College, which has long been a source of fascination for the way in which it actively braided the critical and the creative inside a community wholly dedicated to interdisciplinarity and the social necessity of the arts. I wouldn't wish to glamourise it—Martin Duberman’s history of Black Mountain comprises something of an extended commentary on twenty years of internal squabbling. But, you look at the work that emerged and the cultural confidence seeded by this small hand-to-mouth institution in Northern Carolina. And then there’s the example of Paris 8, and more fugitive formations like the Drury Lane Arts Lab and the Hedge Schools in 18th-century rural Ireland. You can also think about the post-2012 revolutionary universities built in north-eastern Syria with which the New School is setting up an academic solidary network. Elsewhere in the world, between the 11th and the 15th centuries we had the viharas in Northern India. There's the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, part of the Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. What's common to all of these utopian spaces is the principle of desire over duty, an ethos of reciprocity and care, as well as the very high quality of work that's produced. Back in 2010, I felt the university world was entirely complicit in a generational unmaking, which would (and has) resulted in a final, purposive and systematic dismantling of a functioning adult education system in this country.
That’s a very useful mapping of the origins of the NSotA, Michael. I want to pick up this very telling formula of the ‘para-site’ because it raises the thorny issue of finding a specific site for the School. All these necessarily utopic ideas require the work of building them from the ground up. How did you go about this after 2010?
That is an interesting question. I’d been friends with the organisers of October Gallery in Bloomsbury for two decades. The Gallery is part of the Institute of Ecotechnics, a loose gathering of adventurers drawn from many disciplines but all with a shared interest in theatre and ecology, who came together in the San Francisco Bay Area during the final years of the Hippie movement. Over five decades they created a series of quite extraordinary biosphere demonstration projects, the best known of which is Biosphere 2 in Arizona, which is an enormous hermetic greenhouse that zonally contains the five main earth biomes as an experiment in closed-systems living. Eight scientists locked themselves in for two years in 1991. A very good film, Spaceship Earth, was made of this recently. They also built a ship called the RV Heraclitus in 1975, which was a replica 80-foot three-masted Chinese junk, cased in ferrocement, which sailed 270,000 nautical miles around the world, collecting data on the decline cycles of our marine-ecology, encouraging citizen science and hosting theatre workshops in ports.
That is a great name for a ship.
Isn’t it just perfect? ‘What does not change is the will to change’, said Charles Olson in ‘The Kingfishers,’ in paraphrase of Fragment 23. They built an earthquake-proof hotel in Kathmandu with local materials; constructed a rare-breeds cattle station in the middle of Australia; and restored a medieval farm in Provence as an experiment in organic farming. The October Gallery is their experiment in intercultural urban ecologies that opened in 1979 in a Victorian school building that they collectively restored from ruin, just off Queen’s Square in Bloomsbury in 1979. In each case, a group of people gathered together and invited new friends, new energies and new techniques. They learnt how to do things on the spot. They had no experience in biosphere building, but in the space of ten years or so they’d raised $200 million and learnt the skills. It’s the same with shipbuilding and the same with this gallery. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that they first gathered in California and in the Bay Area. We all know that America is built on genocidal violence, land-grab and slavery, but there is nonetheless a can-do adventurousness, a commitment to starting afresh that's not unproblematic, but they’ve got it. We haven’t.
I learned from this, and I thought this is how we build a school. We improvise, we gather forces, we draw on one another’s expertise, energies and knowledge, and we just make a start. If you’re in a warm place, a school can just be built around a tree. In the Northern Hemisphere, you need a room, someone who has expertise, a group of willing participants and you’re off. There’s nothing shatteringly complicated about this. I e-mailed Gallery. Within five minutes, their curators said `yes' and `now'. That’s unusual in this country; doubly so in academia, where it's typically `no' or, at best, `apply to set up a working group'. The cultural production of the new doesn’t need anyone’s permission. You self-organise and improvise collectively as you go. I wanted to emulate the African-American post-bop ensemble, which to me is a high point of civilisation in its fostering of collectivity, disciplined attention and limitless creativity, not to mention sheer ecstasy. Such thinking came out of ten years of conversation, sped by the pause in the industrial university teaching machine during lockdown.
I would acknowledge some early fellow travellers like Catherine Flay, Richard Wentworth and Bob Richmond, who were most helpful, and also the invaluable support of Franc Roddam (director of Quadrophenia and owner of the Masterchef franchise), who gave us some early funding and who has continued to be a great friend. From there, we incorporated as a community interest company. We stayed in the gallery for two happy years and then moved to the Art Workers’ Guild, which is literally 100 yards away and was founded by the revolutionary socialist William Morris and his circle, because we needed disabled access. So, we found another warm and genial host. The thing to bear in mind is that universities are now ostensibly financial instruments fronted by mass accreditation agencies with a fascination, often ruinous, with real estate speculation. If you don’t have the burden of property-ownership and maintenance, you can do so much. In this country, there are thousands of beautifully appointed rooms, libraries, galleries and community centres, and you can set up a school anywhere and live-stream your activities across the earth.
This brings me nicely to my next question. You’ve got these friendly hosts who welcome your idea and a community that is interested in contributing to making it work. You then choose to associate the school explicitly with the ‘Anthropocene’. What made you think, ‘I could open a school of the “Anthropocene” and people will enrol?’
That’s a good question. The original idea was to call it the School of the Three Ecologies, after Félix Guattari’s book—which referred to the interdependent realms of the social, of consciousness and the more-than-human. The term ‘Anthropocene’ was culturally afloat and succinct. But it’s also problematic, insofar as there being a tendency for some people to think that we’re celebrating an era of human mastery over nature, of a masculinist colonial supremacy—which couldn’t be farther from the truth. So the term invites critical interrogation. The concern of the school is with the central inquiry of our times, which is, ‘How do we renegotiate the relationships between the human and non-human life as survival strategy?’ Without moving towards a Post-Anthropocene, we’re facing extinction.
There could be a better name for this era. The term Anthropocene was rejected in 2024 by the International Union of Geological Sciences, but it's more often deployed as an interdisciplinary shorthand. Arguably, a less contentious name would be ‘Capitalocene’, but I wouldn’t want investment bankers applyng for courses on enhancing hedge fund returns. What I’m really interested in is how Gestalts form. When I was at King’s College London as an undergraduate and postgraduate, I was fortunate to study under Eric Mottram, an extraordinary poet, teacher, and essayist. He considered his pedagogy in terms of a cultural imagination of synthesis, whereby you map the concerns of an era via an expressly interdisciplinary field. So, that was our core ethos, complemented by an initiative at Cambridge between 2018 and 2021, led by Isabelle McNeill, who was one of the primary movers behind the New School and who tragically died last February of breast cancer at the age of 45. She co-ran a series of seminars called Tactics and Praxis, a term taken from Michel de Certeau, on the possibility of opening academia to feminist material practices and forms of mutual-aid community organising. That was extraordinarily inspiring. Finally, regarding the October Gallery, NSotA’s co-director was Gessie Houghton, who was also the Gallery’s Director of Special Projects, and a fountain of good counsel and support. Indeed, I could say the same of Chili Hawes, the Gallery’s Director during that time as well. So I had plenty of encouragement and sustenance.
So you had a site and an intellectual rationale for the School. But now you had to recruit people who would teach there. What are you telling them about the School that they would not easily find elsewhere?
Firstly, that we were an experiment in counter-nihilism and an applied research project. We were not here to nurture micro-entrepreneurs of the self. I was an admissions tutor at Cambridge for many years, and familiarised myself with a range of university prospectuses across the world. They basically all looked the same and said the same thing. You had groups of attractive young people sitting on the grass, demonstrably enjoying their lives, all being told that by taking this or that course, they'd score their dream jobs. That transactional attitude, that idea that you were purchasing a service from the university, is something I absolutely wanted to resist. My fundamental premise is that our students want to make changes, to make positive interventions in a series of earth- and social-systems that are plainly failing. These changes require citizens to be imaginative and resilient, to be thoughtful and not reactive. So we needed to return to the idea that higher education was a future-oriented public service. It cannot be for the enhancement of an individual’s marketability, for what's bleakly been called workforce alignment and supply. So, we are interested in the creation of critically and creatively competent and confident citizens who aren’t content simply to replenish the given sacrificial systems. The curriculum is in place to confront the urgencies and the opportunities of our era in as adventurous a way as possible. Within the broad disciplinary boundaries of the environmental humanities, it’s a ‘symposium of the whole’—to quote poet, Robert Duncan—where everything is invited into a contested space. The excitement of learning for us comes out of asking people to make connections between different forms, disciplines, ideas, experiences.
We try to move away from thinking of education as a competition between individuals. Today, universities are essentially trade schools offering professional training and job skills. These words are about operating procedures and machines, rather than the production of meaning. We want people not to be consumers of the given, but producers of the new, by collaboratively testing their ideas and finding their voices in seminars. We work to achieve the fusion of the imaginative and the theoretical through the critical-creative seam, whereby analysis arises out of the act of making.
This is a pretty strong pitch: experimental, collaborative, creative, critical, explicitly against professionalisation. It is asking people to commit to the very opposite of what they have been told all their lives about higher education. Give me a sense of who is responding to this call. What is the profile of your students? How are they navigating the course? What are they going to do after they finish the course?
We’ve had three cohorts, so we’re in our fourth year. We don't award degrees. Originally, the New School was going to be part of the Federated Co-operative University that was proposed around 2018 and led by the Co-operative College in Manchester. Together with several other schools and colleges, we drew up a proposal and took it to the OfS (Office for Students), the body that oversees degree-awarding institutions in the UK. They threw it out. My memory is a little vague, but I think OfS insisted each participating school or college have £5 million as capital and also replicate all kinds of bureaucratic apparatus that we were hell-bent on resisting. So the Co-operative University didn't happen, but several of those institutions are still thriving. The Feral Art School up in Hull is doing terrific work, as is the RED Learning Co-op and Leicester Vaughan College. Good things came out of this.
So, who is coming to study in your School?
We have a truly intergenerational cohort. Last year, they were between 18 and 79 years in age. I’m delighted by this and by the fact that we have students from every continent. People get on well and mobilise as a self-organising community. They organise their own activities around the curriculum and host their own seminars. Last year, they curated their own art show in Hackney as part of the London Design Festival. They have their own quarterly sound collage, which is hosted by Resonance FM and syndicated to a dozen radio stations around the world. We have a couple of people who left school without qualifications at 16 to join the climate strikes before the Covid pandemic, and a couple of young people who’ve served prison sentences owing to the disgraceful criminalisation of climate protest. We’ve had people with PhDs, and two or three with tenure at universities.
That is a wide range of age and nationality. Is there an equitable gender ratio as well?
Yes, completely.
What are they doing after they finish their course? How are they using the experience they have had in New School?
Well, quite a lot of them return for an additional year, which is pleasing because it shows that NSotA is working and gives people a sense of purpose. I don’t think it’s a question of career paths. The school is dedicated to affording a greater sense of agency and autonomy across life, regardless of one’s domestic or employment circumstances. That’s in the true spirit of the Ministry of Reconstruction’s 1919 Report on Adult Education that laid the foundations for modern university study in Britain, and which was seen as ‘inseparable’ from citizenship. It’s the ethos behind the 1969 inception of the Open University, which stands peer to the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 as one of the greatest democratising gestures in our history, but which has been financialised and instrumentalised to the point of obsolescence.
We have people who have come from and returned to conservation work. Two of last year’s cohort are currently working at Plumwood Mountain on the lands of the Walbunja peoples of the Yuin Nation. We had someone who’s working as a children’s counsellor in east London schools. There are people who work in the trades, in education, and community groups. There’s someone who teaches in prisons. People who own businesses are studying with us.
The point of the New School is to equip people to deal with the polycrisis that we face today. I think of that Aristotelian definition of poetics, which encompasses a whole range of knowledge that make positive social interventions imaginable. That is what we’re doing here. We think of ourselves as an engine of civic renewal. I regard myself personally as a civil servant: we operate with a system that cannot be managerialised or financialised.
When people join us, they see that we don't function like the industrial university where neoliberalism has been incorporated within every operational layer. This extends to what I’d call managerial realism, wherein educated people can seemingly no longer be trusted to think and act outside of draining and labyrinthian procedures that determine how humans are institutionally processed. We’ve stripped all that back. People can see that they’re here to encounter the practices of freedom. With that comes an enormous responsibility, of course.
Part of what I’m hearing you say is that they live differently. Their relationship to each other and their relationship to the world around them are, in some measure, changed.
That’s a helpful way of putting it. The sphere of relations is no longer transactional. There’s a stupefying emphasis now on measurement of teaching and learning. For example, the Teaching Evaluation Framework (TEF) measures ‘graduate outcomes’ in terms of how much money they make after taking their degree. That's not an index of university education as a public service. If you make colossal sums as a bond trader, on what basis can you be compared to someone who works in a special needs school, generating extraordinary social value? It’s the metrics, the algorithms, the audit system and the destructive greed that have erased much of what’s immeasurable, ineffable, and life-affirming in higher education.
You’ve drawn a very powerful picture of self-organising students, who are discovering—or rediscovering, in some cases—ways of being alive, lively. How are you avoiding the pitfalls of the conventional hierarchy and distribution of power between teachers and students in your classrooms?
We regard every student as a researcher. They self-determine their patterns of learning and they are fundamentally here to create a project. I’m concerned with recovering the etymology of the word, which is a verb, meaning to throw forward. It’s an active investigation of adventure and risk. One could also think of the word `essay’—again, another verb, meaning to search or to try out. Within that, they have extraordinary licence, but one subject to critical guidance.
What I took from Cambridge was the supervision model, which is underscored at the New School by another two layers, which are being modified for next year. On the first Friday of the month we'll gather at the Art Worker's Guild for two extended lecture-seminars and a film screening, followed by a Q&A with the director--all live-streamed, of course. We'll share lunch and observe the ritual of tea and cake. It’s a chance to pay sustained attention to informed conversation but in a festive atmposphere. That’s a very important quality in education, to respect expertise. For instance, this year we’ve had people talking about extending legal personhood to the more-than-human worlds, food systems and agriculture, ecotologically informed design, carceral cities, indigenous cosmologies in Abya Yala, anarchism, biospherics, settler spatial controls in Palestine, prison reform, techno-fascism, futures literacy, and racial capitalism, as well as more conventional arts subjects such as literature and cinema—and even musical archaeology, featuring a performance on a reconstructed Carnyx, the Iron-Age Celtic warhorn. Some of these encounters will change people’s lives; others will not perhaps move them so deeply but, nonetheless, all will offer a way of opening them to new ideas and possibilities.
These days are complemented by critical-creative seam classes, which are smaller in size and more interactive. They take place on one afternoon and one evening per week. This year, we’ve an extended course run by Jane Rendell and Polly Gould who have adapted a Master’s module run at UCL for the past twenty years called site-writing, in which you engage in a granular way with place as a culturally-layered situation. Finally, we have the student projects which are both analytical, creative and trans-medial. Would you want some examples of those?
That would be wonderful.
There’s so many. One person built a coracle. He thought he was going to make a film about animals and cities, but after four weeks decided to build a coracle instead by harvesting and drying all the materials himself and basically learning how to make a boat from scratch. We put him in touch with an expert on Iraqi Marsh societies. Of course, they have a different kind of vessel there. But he was able to build this fusion of English and Iraqi coracle, and then set sail down the river Roding, which is the second most chemically polluted river in this country. He wrote a piece on this and filmed himself setting sail at midnight in this beautiful craft. To me, that was a wonderful example of something that’s both investigatory, analytical and an integrated act of hand, eye and mind.
We had a displaced person from Rwanda last year who wrote a fine dissertation on the Banyamulenge community—a minority ethnicity in the Congo—and their migration patterns and their experiences of genocide. That was a more conventional academic dissertation. We’ve had some extraordinary collaborations. Last year, a group of six women worked on something called, 'Chaotic Harvest', which was a multi-media work on the relationship between food-systems and aseasonality. We had a disabled man in South Wales write about the relationship between his own body and the depleted ex-mining landscapes. We’ve had a psychogeographical work on Heathrow as a carceral city. Last year, someone did a project on barricades from the 1870s through to today, complemented by an ironically glass-encased relic of a cobblestone smeared with fake blood, which to his amazement sold at the NSotA art show for a sizeable sum! We’ve had a book of aphoristic prose poems on the island of Gometra—which is an [almost] uninhabited Hebridean island—a rumination on the effects of climate change observed over a twenty-year period in situ. Someone made and then wrote about a soundscape produced by bats in Haringey. We had a photo essay on entropy featuring biomaterials and algae, and a resonant audio-visual piece on vanishing agrarian practices in Tajikistan. I could go on!
That sounds like a Borges short story; a list of wonders. Since you have mentioned ‘polycrisis’ in this conversation, I want to turn to this concept in our remaining time. For me, the contemporary polycrisis has two major intersecting elements: global authoritarianism and rapid climate change. I want you to look ahead to 2035. I want you to tell me what the New School looks like in ten years’ time when the polycrisis has been totally normalised.
We’re at the end of a 400-year-old story of human exceptionalism, going back to Bacon, Descartes, etc, that's manifested in colonialism, extractivism, the impoverishment of the Global South and a civilisation premised upon unlimited growth on a finite planet. We have to attend to the fact that by 2050 the World Health Organization estimates there will be 1.2 billion climate refugees in the world. We already have 800,000 people roaming the Earth, looking for new habitats. So now we're faced with our version of the ‘what is to be done’ question. I would like to see the New School become part of a distributed planetary network, a sisterhood of related organisations, as a means of resurrecting civic vitality through community practices, for change will not come through nation-state initiations. Instead we must instigate forms of coalition building in support of the kind of regenerative infrastructural interventions proposed by the World Inequality Lab (WIL), which navigates the polycrisis pushing the world toward climate breakdown, political extremism and ever greater economic and social tension. The ideas coming out of Dark Matter Labs about planetary governance and of stewardship of the Earth as a commons are equally as exciting. Our role is to provide energy and expertise for such actions. To this end, the New School is co-covening the Built Environment and Ecologies Diplioma with the House of Annetta in Spitalfields, which launched in May; we're working closely with the Open Book organisers at Goldsmiths, which has revolutionised models of HE access among overlooked consituencies, about creating an independent initiative; we're in discussions with the Land Skills Hub, which is allied to the Landworkers' Alliance, about organising residential courses in Dorset; and we've established a collaborative friendshp with the MOTH Life collective at NYU Law. I’ve also been talking to the Research-in-Action Community of the Schumacher Society about new, internationally understood models of peer recognition, which is not necessarily the same as accreditation. A more formal qualification beyond the Diploma in Environmental Humanities as currently offered might serve to enhance the rigour of student work, if it attends to that weave of the critical and the creative, signals collaborative achievement in contrast to mainstream HE's Social-Darwinist emphasis on the individual, and serves as the foundation for an unknown future rather than an expensively acquired passport to reproducing a terminal present. Next year, we’re bringing in a new, more structured course called Earth House Poiesis, which takes on the curricular lessons from our first four years. It will have a theme of diagnosis, repair and rejuvenation. Our material is art, which we consider a force for change. In practice, this means theoretically-inflected acts of witness, diagnosis and making through narrative, documentary, performance and exhibition. These might, for instance, focus on the Sahara or the Antarctica, or communities under social and or ecological stress, appraised through any combination of text, textile, image, film, oral history, sound collage and field notes, which would then be presented as an installation at the end of the year show and published on the website.
Sadly, I can’t see an abatement of the crisis in higher education. The sector is populated by demoralised, denigrated teachers and anxious, indebted students. The idea is that you have to borrow an enormous sum of money to cross the threshold into adulthood is neither viable nor just. There have to be alternative methods for humans to encounter knowledge, to forge new models of sociality and creative encounters with difference in an era in which working-class people are increasingly excluded from the study of the Arts and Humanities at university level, which should be a huge concern for the British Academy, as should the cultural saturation of AI. The whole purpose of studying should be to cultivate citizens as repositories of cultural memory and to build collective neural pathways to engage critically with the world. We also need to maintain our pay-what-you-can-afford system, where people can study with us for as little as £200 PA, and refugees and people escaping conflict can study free. We have eight members of the cohort this year from Palestine, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Ukraine. Crucially, we resist the immiserating self-referential bureaucracy which now characterises the experience of working or studying in the university.
Michael, that sounds like almost a seed bank for the future. I wish you and every member of the New School, past and present, strength and safety. Thank you very much for the conversation today.
That’s typically generous of you, Pablo. I look forward to welcoming you back to the New School soon for one of your life-affirming seminars!
References
DubermanM. (1972), Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (New York, W.W. Norton).
GuattariF. (1989), The Three Ecologies, New Formations (Volume 8; London, Lawrence and Wishart).
OlsonC. (1987), ‘The Kingfishers’, in The Collected Poems of Charles Olson (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press).
RoddamF. (Dir.) (1979), Quadrophenia.
WarnerM. (11 September 2014), ‘Diary: why I quit’, London Review of Books, 36(17), https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n17/marina-warner/diary
WolfM. (Dir.) (2020), Spaceship Earth.
1
Pablo Mukherjee has offered seminars to students at the New School of the Anthropocene, but has not received any financial benefits for these or for any other services rendered to the school.
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/014.a18
Published on: 12 June 2026
Volume: 14
Issue: Issue 2
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© The author(s) 2026. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Hrebeniak, M. with Mukherjee, P. (2026), ‘The New School of the Anthropocene: a conversation with Michael Hrebeniak’, Journal of the British Academy, 14(2): a18 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/014.a18Crossref
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