EARTH-HOUSE POESIS
WITNESSING – DOCUMENTING – STORYING
2026-27
THE NEW COURSE
Earth-House Poiesis is the New School’s radical new transdisciplinary course in the Environmental Arts and Humanities. It explores how we might actively respond to, interpret and generate new understandings of an epoch defined by morbid-stage capitalism and its irreversible human impact on earth systems.
Our curriculum fosters a critical-creative stance towards social, eological and epistemic crisis, recovering the word’s origins as ‘decision’ or ‘turning point:’ a means of rejuvenating possibilities for flourishing within the more-than-human assembly within which we are entangled. The title admiringly conjures Gary Snyder’s landmark 1969 volume, Earth House Hold, with its play on the root meaning of “ecology” and concern with “growth and enlightenment in self-disciplined freedom.”
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 that map contemporary urgencies and opportunities. A 400-year old story is coming to an end. Once more, we must make it new!
Ecology, from German Oecologie (E. Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie); taken from ancient Greek οἶκος, “house, dwelling.” (1866)
Poiesis, from ancient Greek ποίησις “creation, production; to make; to bring forth.” (1851)
Story, from Anglo-Norman storie (also estorie, istorie), “The series of past events connected with a particular person, country, institution, or thing, esp. when considered as a sequential narrative; the facts of the matter.” (1225)
Document, from Latin documentum “lesson, proof”; from docere “teach”; "to show, teach, cause; to support by documentary evidence." (1500)
RATIONALE
The Earth-House Poesis curriculum aims to open the wealth of expressive possibilities available to students, who are encouraged to think of themselves as scholars of primary sources that use art as a sharp instrument for exploring complex cultural fields. We regard everyone as an energetic researcher from the very start of his or her time at the New School.
At the core of NSotA’s pedagogy is the project, a “throwing forward,” a self-directed act of discovery, organisation and meaning-making. Accordingly, a project may be considered a feminist figuration or place of gathering; or fieldnotes mined within the critical-creative seam; or discovered and retrieved materials subjected to adventurous shaping into narratives for public engagement.
As such, the course invites students to think about how more traditional forms of critical enquiry can be woven into feral creative forms such as collage or combines, accommodating materials drawn from multiple disciplines and contexts, often with a stress on the imaginative use of archives in representing biographical habitats under threat.
Students will be inspired to emulate intermedia developments in 21st Century documentary and story-making practice, which comprise hybrid assemblages of text, moving image, sound design, performance, oral testimony and immersive environments in any variety of non-prescribed combinations. The emerging work might gesture towards what Roland Barthes calls an artform “drawn towards an unknown praxis,” situated outside given representational forms to stand as a performance in and of itself.
The results will be published on our website and in material form (where appropriate), and exhibited as an act of civic engagement at our end-of-year September art show, which contributes to the London Design Festival. The activities of the e-flux online journal and the Documents of Contemporary Art anthologies published by the Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press between 2006 and the present indicate the level of engagement.
“[T]he ‘double fracture of modernity,’ is a divide that, to a fault, separates environmental histories, theories, and issues from the histories and theories of colonialism and slavery and their resistances. I argue that facing environmental issues such as ecocide requires moving beyond this double fracture both in the present and in the past. One cannot effectively preserve the environment without engaging with the long historical logics that cause its destruction, and vice versa. One cannot think about the emancipation process without looking at how the uses of the environment in turn exacerbate the suffering of the dominated. What does it mean to be free from slavery if this freedom is to be lived in a toxicant-ridden island or an unbreathable city?”
--Malcom Ferdinand, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2021)
“[T]he ‘double fracture of modernity,’ is a divide that, to a fault, separates environmental histories, theories, and issues from the histories and theories of colonialism and slavery and their resistances. I argue that facing environmental issues such as ecocide requires moving beyond this double fracture both in the present and in the past. One cannot effectively preserve the environment without engaging with the long historical logics that cause its destruction, and vice versa. One cannot think about the emancipation process without looking at how the uses of the environment in turn exacerbate the suffering of the dominated. What does it mean to be free from slavery if this freedom is to be lived in a toxicant-ridden island or an unbreathable city?”
--Malcom Ferdinand, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2021)
“Stories need spaces, free to access and enjoy: shelters. We all know that stories can be used to entrench prejudice and suspicion, especially when slurs and falsehoods rampage through social media unchecked. Calling lies lies will not suffice. Only more stories, illuminating, reinvigorating, exploratory, different stories, can oppose the disinformation and rumour-mongering, and the repertoire is vast, waiting to be reanimated.”
--Marina Warner, Introduction to The Shelter of Stories (2025)
“New technologies, realigned social relations, and emerging political challenges call for a reexamination of documentary’s forms, functions, and roles. No longer a fixed object, documentary is taking on iterative, shape-shifting contours and migrating across multiple interfaces.”
--Patricia R. Zimmermann & Helen De Michel, Open Space New Media Documentary (2018)
REFERENTIAL FIELD
Our context is the era of polycrisis: Edgar Morin’s term for the seemingly disparate shocks across the ecology and geopolitics that should more properly be regarded as intersecting biopolitical forces.
In the century’s third decade, these are most visibly characterised by the irreversible harm caused to the earth’s life-support systems by the extractivist imperative, climate injustice across the Global South, genocide in Palestine and Sudan, imperialist wars in Ukraine and Yemen, enforced displacement and migration, grotesque levels of sanctioned inequality and poverty, and the loss of confidence in structures of civic administration; all of which is underscored by the lawlessness and lies of a fascist resurgence, the expanding sphere of techno-feudalist domination machines, the transnational dismantling of nuclear-weapon limitation treaties, the pauperisation of labour and the asocial deregulations of capital. The list, unfortunately, is far from exhaustive . . .
From such confrontations we might broach an imaginary of the post-Anthropocene by charting possible new relationships between humans, technology and earth others that are rooted in an ethics of vigilance, reciprocity and care, and enacting the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Seven Generations Principle of working for the well-being of our descendants 100 years hence.
The subject focus is therefore without boundary or limit. Biome stress, species extinction, soil degradation, neocolonial landgrab, community dismantling, cultural memory deletion: all such themes and many more lend themselves to fine-grained case-studies that must, of course, extend to narrating the many compelling examples of mobilised resistance and speculative models of a liveable ‘otherwise.’
Students will be directed towards the interrogative, constellational and historicising work of intermedia practitioners such as the Otolith Group, Forensic Architecture, Superflux, John Akomfrah and former members of the Black Audo Film Collective, Isaac Julien, Carolee Schneemann, Raqs Media Collective, Alan Sekula, Chris Marker and Frederick Baker, all of whom are (or were) concerned with the use of visual design, alongside more established media of text and screen as a means of engaging participant-viewers with networks of contemporary epistemic pressures.
Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave Archive (An injury to One is an Injury to All) (2001), LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Flint is Family (2016), Mathieu Asselin, Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation (2016), Patrick Keiller’s Robinson Institute (2017), Anselm Kiefer’s Finnegans Wake (2023), Hannah Perry’s Manual Labour (2024), Tanoa Sasraku’s Morale Patch (2025), Edward Geroge’s Black Atlas (2025) Daniel Ward’s Lonesome Ghosts (2025) and Naeem Mohaiemen’s Through a Mirror Darkly (2025) are more localised, diverse and recent examples of mixed-media documentary performance. While photographic/filmic and more overtly given to a single-disciplinary orientation, the international Earth Photo competition created by Forestry England, the Royal Geographical Society and Parker Harris is also exemplary in its innovative visual storytelling of biosphere systems crisis.
Whether you’re an aspiring poet, writer, painter, scholar, filmmaker, mixed-media assembler, dancer, sculptor, textile-artist, musician, designer, dramiturg, cook, carer, community organiser, subvertiser, mechanic, gardener, forester, builder and/or ecologist, you’ll have a part to play.
TEACHING ARRANGEMENTS
Students participate in a varied programme of twice-weekly online seminars, which forms the connective tissue of the course. All of these emphasise theoretically-inflected practice. The year will include classes on composition, worlding, fabulation, documentary cinema, biome site-writing and spatial practice, as well as introductory sessions on formulating an enquiry and interdisciplinary projective methodologies.
As the Autumn term progresses, students will be encouraged to assemble in small groups around collectively-chosen project-based case studies. These will be closely supervised over the ensuing months by academics and practitioners drawn from the Ensemble.
In addition, we gather once per month (three times per term) at the Art Workers’ Guild for a day of lecture-seminars, workshops and screenings, which are live-streamed to those who cannot join us in-person. The sessions serve to support the in-depth study of topics already under investigation or they could afford an open-minded immersion in a variety of new subjects, themes and methods from which new possibilities might emerge. The conviviality of these occasions is marked by the sharing of lunch and cake.
The programme allows students to combine their studies with life’s wider obligations and nourishments, such as family and work. The total contact time is approximately 180 hours per academic year. This recognises that students should be entrusted to read and collaborate freely and adventurously beyond any prescriptive remit.
We are most grateful for an arrangement with Birkbeck College, whereby NSotA scholars with a UK residential address can consult and borrow books from its library, which is a ten-minute walk from the Guild.
CURRICULUM SUMMARY
1-year, 40-week programme (including termly intervals)
Combination of lecture-seminars, taught courses, supervisions and screenings:
Twice-weekly online evening classes of two-hours’ duration (Mondays and Wednesdays);
Monthly in-person and live-streamed Gathering Days at the Art Workers’ Guild (eight per year) featuring two lecture-seminars and a film screening (Fridays)
Mid-March ‘Afternoon of Making’ in honour of Isabelle McNeill at the Art Workers’ Guild;
Occasional concerts and field-trips;
Ten online supervisions for each student group per year
Examination (cf. Appreciation) through final submission of a collaboratively produced dissertation and/or body of practice, with exhibition at the end-of-year NSotA Art Show in September
Total contact teaching time of c. 180 hours per year.
Tuition fee of £1850 per year with 80% of places reserved for pay-what-you-can-afford scholarships
Completion of the course is marked by the award of a Diploma in Environmental Humanities. NSotA is currently exploring how this course might contribute to the establishing of a new, internationally-recognised academic qualification within a distributed learning network, one that acknowledges the principle of collaborative community, the reconciliation of the critical-creative faculties, research as a critical civic value and an ethos beyond ranking.
This reflects our belief that the standard BA/MA/MPhil accreditation mechanism is increasingly bereft of value in the financialised higher educational environment, for it does little to foster the personal autonomy and agency necessary to spur infrastructural change. Alongside this is the urgent need to reinvent coursework and examining practices in the face of the now ubiquitous use of AI, which has plunged university study into a fathomless existential crisis.
Fees
The main impetus of the New School is to untether higher education from its moorings within a system of global debt financing that favours only the wealthy elite, and restore its role as a public service. We are an independent body that is not in receipt of government funding, and we strive to keep costs as low as possible. All of our teachers are paid the same and we execute our own administration speedily and efficiently.
For the September 2026 - June 2027 academic year, the full cost of student tuition remains at £1,850.00 for both home and international applicants who wish to study with us either in-person or online.
Owing to the generosity of Necessity.info and Franc Roddam, we have been pleased to implement a pay-what-you-can-afford donation scheme (PWYCA), subject to a minimum threshold of £200.00. This ensures that no one with the aptitude and desire to participate in the life of the New School need be excluded. (Please note that PWYCA applies in the first instance to 'home' applicants who have been resident in the UK for at least a year prior to joining us. The first tier applies only to those without prior university-level experience and who have not received a commercial (aka privat) education.)
We have created the following rough guide to explain the PWYCA scheme and help you decide what to donate relative to your personal circumstances:
All such offers and declarations of circumstances will remain wholly confidential. If an applicant wishes to donate more than the full tuition cost, the sum will help us to prolong the PWYCA scheme for as long as possible. Please contact us should you wish to discuss either this or the question of the minimum threshold payment, should this prove prohibitive. We hold that no one should forgo a critical-creative education owing to economic circumstances alone.
If you are a refugee fleeing from conflict, a care-experienced person over the age of 18, or someone serving a custodial sentence as a consequence of the criminalisation of protest against the climate emergency, we would be pleased to welcome you to NSotA for no tuition fee whatsoever.
All of our scholars enjoy free admission to Kew Gardens as a result of its community interest company scheme.