ISSUE I : Note from the Editor
Limited Only by Our Willingness To See
In 2005, the Graduate Program of International Affairs at The New School had only been running for four years. Founded in 2001 by Michael Cohen, a World Bank urban expert who had worked in over fifty countries, the program wanted to challenge orthodoxies in international relations about global politics. Among the faculty Mike had attracted to the school was Nina Khrushcheva, a propaganda and media politics expert. By 2005, GPIA, as the program soon became known, decided it would be good if its students created their own publication, “conceived, edited and produced solely by GPIA students.”
The result was Contexts Magazine. It would come out annually and in print. On the second page of the first issue (in 2005), Nina, who served as the faculty advisor, wrote that the goal wasn’t merely to copy other graduate programs and schools and have a publication, but “also to address the most challenging and most current topics of international affairs.” The first issue included short essays on the civil war in Kosovo, blogging, the politics of truth in the Global South, images from a departmental student photo contest, and essays from Aceh (Indonesia), Meknes (Morocco), and Ireland (the student editor, Denis Fitzgerald, was from there).
There would be four more annual print issues. In 2009, I arrived at GPIA. I was promptly named faculty advisor to that academic year’s issue, which came out in 2010. It was also the last time Contexts came out. We had become victims of the internet and rising printing costs. In the intervening years, as social media changed how most of us consumed and interacted with international affairs, there were a few attempts to revive Contexts—until now.
This new version of Contexts, now known as The New Context, has a more ambitious goal. The New Context aims to continue Nina’s mission, but with a broader focus on extending the conversation to new debates on decolonizing international institutions and global governance systems. I will serve as editor and we will publish monthly. We will both commission pieces and accept submissions. Articles will be chosen on the basis of thematic fit and quality. Writers will have to be willing to accept edits.
We also have a fresh new look, thanks to the vision of our designer, Nirkhunan Govindan Kuppuram. This first issue features a mix of short essays from second-year GPIA students, including one student graduating this December (Rebecca Snyder), along with contributions from new first-years and students from other divisions, including NSSR and Parsons, who have enjoyed taking courses in GPIA. It also introduces our new series, “Accidental IR Theorists,” with the first subject being the Argentine footballer, Diego Maradona.
It is worth ending this introduction to The New Context and its first issue with what JK Fowler, the student editor of the 2010 CONTEXTS print issue, wrote in that issue: “To walk to the corner of West 14th Street and 5th Avenue in New York City is to weave through a network of hundreds of relations, interactions, and intersections, simultaneously local and international. It is, in the end, a context that we live, work, and study within, our vision of which is limited only by our willingness to see.”