Faculty Experts at The New School Available for Comment on the 2024 U.S. Presidential Campaigns, Conventions, Elections
New York–Faculty experts at The New School, a progressive New York City university with academic programs in politics, policy, economics, international affairs and more, are available for comment on the upcoming U.S. elections.
Faculty members can speak on a range of issues, including the role of personality, image and charm of the presidential and VP candidates; populism and fascism; how misinformation spreads; international relations; immigration and citizenship; economic and racial inequality; globalization; and presidential fashion choices.
David Carroll is associate professor of media design and former Director of the MFA Design and Technology graduate program at Parsons. He is known for legally challenging Cambridge Analytica and related companies in the UK courts to recapture his 2016 voter profile using European data protection law. Featured in “The Great Hack” (2019) on Netflix, his data quest has appeared in WIRED, The Guardian, Motherboard, The Boston Review, Slate, Mother Jones, and the international press more widely.
Areas of expertise: Social media, Digital policy, Media design
Hazel Clark holds a PhD in design history, and a first degree in Fine Arts. Her scholarship has focused on uncovering new perspectives, cultures and geographies for the study of fashion and design, in Europe, the United States, and China.
Areas of expertise: Fashion choices of presidential candidates, First Lady fashions, Fashion theory and history, Design theory and history
Federico Finchelstein is a historian of transatlantic fascism, populism, dirty wars, the Holocaust and Jewish history in Latin America and Europe. His recent book The Wannabe Fascists: A Guide to Understanding the Greatest Threat to Democracy (University of California Press, May 2024) examines the rise of a new type of populist politician, typically a legally elected leader who, unlike previous populists who were eager to distance themselves from fascism, turns to totalitarian lies, racism, and illegal means to destroy democracy from within.
Areas of expertise: Transatlantic fascism, Populism, Dirty wars
Nancy Fraser, the Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics, works on contemporary political theory, critical social theory, and feminist theory. She is the author of Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care and the Planet–and what we can do about it (Verso, 2022), which looks at how the development of global capitalism has been intertwined in exploitative relationships with politics, labor, and the environment, and that current threats to society are the product of capitalism’s tendency to destabilize those key pilars of society.
Areas of expertise: Political economies, Capitalism
Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, and a podcaster. Her most recent book Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, July 2020), reveals the roots of the internet’s chaotic influence on political culture by showing its place within the history of alternative political media. From independent newsletters in the 1950s to talk radio in the 1970s, cable television in the 1980s, and now email, social media, and blogs, this dive into seventy years of change in political media, shows how it transformed—and fractured—American politics.
Areas of expertise: Political media, Gender, sexuality and feminism and anti-feminism in the election
Julia Sonnevend is a sociologist of global culture, focusing on the events, icons, symbols and charismatic personalities of public life. Her forthcoming book Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics (Princeton University Press, August 20, 2024)
Areas of expertise: Power of personality in politics (charisma/charm); Media aspects of debates, campaigns, and visuals; Creation of political mythologies
Jonathan Michael Square is an Assistant Professor in Black Visual Culture at Parsons. His work has been published extensively in academic journals and the popular press, including Guernica, Vestoj, Small Axe, Hyperallergic, British Art Studies, International Journal of Fashion Studies, among others. A proponent of the power of social media as a platform for radical pedagogy, he founded and runs the digital humanities project Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom.
Areas of expertise: Black visual culture, Imaging, Public Relations
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