School of Social Science

Pablo J. Boczkowski, Member (2023–24) in the School of Social Science, took part in the School’s theme year, “PLATFORM.” Speaking with The Institute Letter, he shares his perspective on the enduring experiences and relationships formed during his time at the Institute and carried back to his home institution.

In a book titled Paranoid Publics: Psychopolitics of Truth, Zahid R. Chaudhary, Member (2023–24) in the School of Social Science, brings psychoanalysis to bear on modern culture’s fraught relationship to truth. Chaudhary argues that unconscious mental forces like our fears and memories might also inform attitudes about truth, and that the unconscious plays a role in political-economic processes.

Peniel Joseph, Friends of the Institute for Advanced Study Member in the School of Social Science (2025–26), discusses revisiting James Baldwin through an interdisciplinary lens—as a historian, sociologist, and artist shaped by Beauford Delaney and jazz-like prose. 

Alyssa Battistoni, Member (2022–23) in the School of Social Science, reflects on her book Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature in an interview that traces how “free gifts of nature” help explain what capitalism uses but doesn’t price—from ecological processes to pollution framed as an “externality.” 

The Institute’s School of Social Science turned its focus for the 2025–26 academic year to the theme of Digital (In)Equality. The parentheses in the title gesture to what Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor in the School and the theme year’s organizer, refers to as the “double-edged-ness” of the contemporary digital ecosystem. Nelson’s convening insight challenges the dominant narratives around technology: both techno-optimism and techno-pessimism miss the point.

In 1995, Wendy Brown, UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science and American political theorist, published States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Thirty years later, Princeton University Press has issued the book as part of the Princeton Classics collection.

In her new book Learning through Collective Memory Work: Troubling Testimonio in Post-war Peru, Goya Wilson Vásquez, Visitor (2023–24) in the School of Social Science, examines the creation of testimonio—a genre of testimonial narrative rooted in Latin American traditions—as collective memory work.

Corey Robin, Member in the School of Social Science, is a political theorist and journalist whose scholarship addresses a range of topics across modern economic and political thought, from the role of fear in the Western imagination to the black nationalist roots of Justice Clarence Thomas’s jurisprudence. He has published landmark work on the history of conservatism, including The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. 

Paisley Currah, Robbert Dijkgraaf Member in the School of Social Science (2024–25), describes how the Institute for Advanced Study enriches conversation and research across languages and cultures, bringing about new ways of thinking about his work on gender and sexuality studies.

Ulla Berg, Member in the School of Social Science (2024–25), explores how anthropologists engage in "deep hanging out" to better understand different cultures and communities. She also discusses her involvement in conversations at the Institute for Advanced Study that address some of society’s most pressing questions.