The New Centre for Research & Practice

As part of our Spring/Summer 2026 Season, we present our Workshop “Conspiracy Theory as Method: Speculation and the Infrastructure of Belief,” taught by Joseph C. Russo, starting July 12, 2026.

This Workshop treats conspiracy theory not as pathology or misinformation but as a mode of world-making: a way of connecting fragments, sensing hidden structures, and producing meaning amid chaos. Drawing on anthropological, philosophical, and artistic perspectives, it approaches conspiracy theory as both a cultural phenomenon and an epistemic practice that tries to render the invisible visible. Across four sessions, participants examine key theoretical and ethnographic approaches, from Cold War anthropology and psychoanalytic accounts of projection to contemporary digital subcultures and the aesthetics of evidence.

Rather than debunk or defend conspiracy theories, the Workshop analyzes how they organize perception and belonging, how they intersect with gender, race, and power, and how they mirror the methods of anthropological critique itself. Each week pairs a short reading or media artifact with a practical task: tracing a narrative, mapping its affective economies, or producing a short speculation in text, image, or sound. The final meeting centers on participants’ own creative or analytical projects, from mini-essays and field notebooks to zines and experimental presentations, each treating conspiracy as a diagnostic lens for the present.

Session 1: The Conspiratorial Turn, Reading the Hidden
Session 2: Infrastructures of Belief
Session 3: Intimacy, Gender, and the Body of Proof
Session 4: Speculative Ethnography and Counter-Conspiracy

To learn more about this Workshop, please visit the link in our bio.

IMAGE: Jonathan Martin, London’s Overthrow, circa 1839

This week on &&& Triple Ampersand, we are publishing "SPRING CLEANING: Was Iran’s Regime Change an Inside Job?" by Mohammad Salemy .

The essay reads the assassination of Ali Khamenei and the opening hours of Operation Epic Fury backward from their outcome, not as a Western strategic victory but as the culmination of a succession long prepared from inside the Islamic Republic. Salemy's central hypothesis is that a network of younger IRGC officers spent years feeding classified targets to Israeli intelligence, systematically clearing the old guard from positions they were set to inherit, presenting the regime as weak and near collapse to the outside world.

What the text refuses to let settle is the question of who the war was actually for. The United States and Israel went in carrying two candidates for a throne that had already been assigned without their knowledge, and what they read as collapse was, on this reading, a managed transition, one in which the hidden Imam doctrine is no longer theology but administrative infrastructure, and supreme authority is now delegated to a machine in a sealed room.

To read the text, please visit the link in our stories or bio.

IMAGE: IRGC commanders tour a subterranean missle city, June 2025.

We are offering one full and one partial Scholarship for our upcoming Seminar “Philosophers’ Diagram,” taught by Thomas Mical and starting on June 20.

This Seminar investigates the conceptual and affective power of diagrams across the history of continental philosophy. From Plato’s cosmological schemas and Husserl’s time-consciousness graphs to Deleuze’s rhizomes and Barad’s agential cuts, the course engages diagrammatics not merely as interpretation but as method, tracing how philosophical diagrams operate as devices that both expose and produce structures of thought. Drawing from ancient metaphysics, media theory, and speculative technics, each session moves through a specific philosophical problem and culminates in a hands-on practicum where participants develop their own situated, speculative diagrammatics.

Session 1: Cosmological Origins
Session 2: Time, Perception, and Memory
Session 3: Dispositifs and Media Apparatuses
Session 4: Platonism, Event, and the One

DEADLINE: June 18 at 23:59 ET.
To apply, send a 250-word letter to [email protected] explaining your background and your need for financial relief. The New Centre Members will be given priority for the full Scholarship.

To learn more about this Seminar, please visit the link in our Bio.

IMAGE: Alexander von Humboldt and A.G. Bonpland, Geography of Plants in the Tropics, 1803

Our Programmer Morgane Billuart will present extracts of her new book, The Heat of Others, at Sybil .gg , Berlin, on June 18 at 8 PM.

The Heat of Others follows Max, a young researcher who travels to Svalbard, Norway, to speak at a conference on the ethics of mind enhancement. There she encounters a high-tech experimental building powered by "Dual Resolve," a system that harvests human body heat. As the conference unfolds, the warmth of bodies and the pressure of ideas begin to blur, pulling Max into a state of growing uncertainty where thought and sensation are no longer discernible.

The evening will include a reading by Billuart, accompanied by a prologue and a soundscape by Meii Soh . Physical copies of The Heat of Others, published by Set Margins, will be available for purchase at the event.

18.06.2026 — 20:00 at SYBIL
Leuschnerdamm 13 / Aufgang 3 / EG
10999 Berlin

To learn more about the book, please visit the link in our bio.

We are offering one full and one partial Scholarship for our upcoming Seminar, “African Philosophy in the 20th Century: Historical Materialism or Ethnophilosophy?,” by our Instructor Zeyad El Nabolsy and starting on June 19.

This Seminar revisits a founding debate in African philosophy as an academic field: whether historical materialism or ethnophilosophy offers the more adequate theoretical orientation for emancipatory politics on the African continent. At the center of the Seminar is the work of Beninois philosopher Paulin J. Hountondji, whose critiques of ethnophilosophy, developed across African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (1983 [1976]) and The Struggle for Meaning (2002 [1998]), argue that certain approaches to African philosophy risk impeding development through mystification. Participants will reconstruct and critically assess Hountondji’s arguments alongside his positive account of philosophy’s role in development and political movements, asking what this debate means for emancipatory thought in Africa today.

Session 1: The Origins of the Debate
Session 2: The Critique of Ethnophilosophy
Session 3: Nkrumah and the Shadow of Ethnophilosophy
Session 4: The Place of Marxism in African Philosophy

DEADLINE: June 18 at 23:59 ET.
To apply, send a 250-word letter to [email protected] explaining your background and your need for financial relief.
The New Centre Members will be given priority for the full Scholarship.

To learn more about this Seminar, please visit the link in our Bio.

IMAGE: Wosene Worke Kosrof, Woman of the Nile, 1998

Our Full Enroll Student Héctor Almeida is organizing the Q***r Communist Game Jam ***rcomgames , an online jam taking place on itch.io from August 1 to August 31, 2026. Created from Cuba, the open call welcomes q***r, leftist, anti-capitalist, and experimental game makers working across games, prototypes, interactive stories, digital experiments, and any playful form around q***r communist ideas and collective futures.

The project grew in part from Conrad Hamilton's Seminar "Video Games: Between Contagion and Reality" at The New Centre. Running independently and without institutional funding, the jam aims to build a community and archive for q***r and leftist game-making.

To learn more and participate, please visit the link in our Bio or Story.

IMAGE: Undertale (Toby Fox, 2015)

This week on &&& Triple Ampersand, we are publishing ”How Decoloniality & Identity PoliticsFailed Me Completely“ by Bijan Moosavi .

Writing as an Iranian artist and refugee living in the UK, Moosavi traces a decade of encounters with Western art institutions around his 2020 film Disco Islam, a sci-fi corporate video examining neoliberal dynamics and the commodification of resistance culture in Iran. The film was repeatedly turned away from festivals, platforms, and prize shortlists, each time under the logic that engaging with its critiques might prove too ”divisive“ or jeopardize institutional relationships.

His argument is not that these institutions are overtly hostile, but that decoloniality in practice has developed a selective logic: it amplifies voices from the margins that confirm the theory’s own authority, while quietly displacing those that expose its contradictions or resist its frameworks. The result is an apparatus that presents itself as liberatory while reproducing the same mechanisms of gatekeeping it claims to oppose.

To read the full text, please visit the link in our stories or bio.

IMAGE: Bijan Moosavi, Disco Islam, 2020