Established August 22, 2013 Founded 22 August 2013 | Nickname GCAS | |
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Location Brooklyn, New York
Wyoming, Michigan
Maribor, Slovenia Website www.globalcenterforadvancedstudies.org Similar Alma Mater Europaea, European Graduate School, University of Liberal Arts Bang, University of Primorska | ||
The Global Center for Advanced Studies (GCAS /ˈdʒiːˌkɑːs/) is a non-profit educational and research institution located in Brooklyn, New York. It is known for its seminars with the world's leading philosophers, journalists, artists, academics, and public figures. GCAS is governed by a board of directors, which consists of the founder/director, a vice-president, a treasurer, a researchers' union representative, and a director of student affairs.
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History
The Global Center for Advanced Studies was originally incorporated in the state of Colorado on August 22, 2013, by Creston C. Davis (currently Professor of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis at GCAS), as an institute of higher learning based on critical theory, and on the concept of a "debt free education grounded in the principles of Democracy and the Commons". Jason M. Adams joined GCAS on September 23, 2013 as co-director. Adams later withdrew from GCAS.
The GCAS was subsequently relocated to Grand Rapids, Michigan and incorporated in Michigan on November 27, 2013 as a non-profit organization. The Colorado corporation was voluntarily dissolved on February 26, 2014.
In 2014–15, Alain Badiou had the role of Honorary President at GCAS. Azfar Hussain joined GCAS as its Vice-President in 2013 and is still working in that capacity. On July 16–19, 2015, a GCAS conference called "Democracy Rising World Conference 2015" took place in Athens. In autumn 2015, GCAS partnered with two institutions of higher education in Europe, the Alma Mater Europaea-European Center Maribor (AMEU-ECM) and the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis (ISH).
Academics
The GCAS identifies ten institutes within its school: Critical Philosophy, Critical Media and Cultural Studies, Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Policy Studies, Critical Theology, Psychoanalysis, Global Studies, Political Economy, Critical Pedagogy.
Through its partnership with AMEU-ECM and ISH, the GCAS academic structure consists of both online and in-residence courses that can be audited or taken towards earning a Master of Arts (M.A.) or Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in the Humanities. All degrees are conferred by AMEU-ECM, which is accredited by the National Agency for Quality in Higher Education NAKVIS and a full member of the Bologna Process/European higher education area.
The organization affiliates itself with some of the most prominent academic professors in the world including, among others, Joan Copjec, Simon Critchley, Enrique Dussel, Arif Dirlik, Henry Giroux, Richard Kearney, Antonio Negri, Jean-Luc Nancy, Avital Ronell, Gayatri Spivak, and Gianni Vattimo, while past faculty members include Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek.
Since its inception, GCAS held over 400 different meetings, classes, workshops and conferences, in which GCAS taught and engaged with over 100,000 people world-wide from more than 80 different countries. Events' locations range from The Centre Pompidou in Paris to Berlin, New York, Athens, Grand Rapids, and Cincinnati; engaging with live lectures from Oliver Stone, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Alain Badiou, Farhang Erfani, Tariq Ali, Antonio Negri, Zoe Konstantopoulou, Jean-Luc Nancy, Eric Toussaint, Documenta’s Adam Szymczyk, Azfar Hussain, Sigrid Hackenberg, Adrian Parr, Brad Evans, Clayton Crockett, John D. Caputo, Paul Mason, Leo Panitch, Jodi Dean, Bruno Bosteels, Francesca Coin, Giovanni Tusa, Lori Marso, Pete Rollins, Agata Bielik-Robson, William Desmond, Fragkiska Megaloudi, Jeffrey Robbins, Katherine Keller, Carl Reschke, George Katsiaficas, Shon Meckfessel, Graham Priest, Michael Hardt, Henry Giroux, Debt-Strike’s Andrew Ross, Costas Lapavitsas, Astra Taylor, and via the Zizek Studies conference with forthcoming lectures by Noam Chomsky, Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges, Lisa Duggan, and Richard Wolff, among others.