NECROPHILANTHROPY:
​NONPROFIT KILLERS, CULTURAL WORK AND THE CARCERAL STATE

This course is a survey of the nonprofit industrial complex’s (NPIC) exploitation of labor and movements over the last two centuries, its impacts on our lives and livelihoods, and a space to strategize alternatives.

Indebted to the benevolence of grantmakers and one-percenters, liberal 501(c)(3) organizations have consistently absorbed, defanged, and profited off of radical movements for social transformation over the past 40 years. From a workers’ perspective, the web of public and private interests that make up the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC) might be experienced as constant negotiations between domination and subjugation, exploitation and genuine pleasure. “Necrophilanthropy,” the neologism at the heart of this course, invokes ideas around necropolitics and necrophilia to probe deeper into the seductive death drive of capital.​

The first half of the course will rely on lectures and discussions to survey the nonprofit industrial complex’s (NPIC) structural underpinnings from the late 1800s “scientific charity” movement through the fall of the welfare state and rise of mass incarceration. We’ll then narrow in on art/culture to historicize the 1990s rise of “social practice,” examine how artists have been used to beautify the carceral system, look at the contemporary wave of (arts) nonprofit labor struggle, and break down the “nonprofit killer” bill currently being pushed through the U.S. federal government—planning to revoke nonprofit status of organizations deemed to be “terrorist supporting” with no recourse, targeting even the most mild Palestine solidarity. These factors and more have brought the liberal 501(c)(3) to its current existential crossroads.

The second half of the course will be responsive to the particular needs and interests of the participants. A workshop will use case studies, power mapping, and lived experiences to consider what it means to evade mechanisms of elite capture. The course will culminate with a collaborative final project in the form of direct action or workshopping a speculative organization. Themes of death and seduction will remain front and center as we strive toward a range of artistic, administrative, and agitational strategies toward the question of how cultural production, within or against the NPIC, can be materially useful to revolutionary movement work today.

We will study materials by artists and thinkers like Robert Allen, Chloë Bass, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Larne Abse Gogarty, Jarrod Shanahan & Zhandarka Kurti, Morgan Quaintance, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, and Jeniffer Wolch. Readings and other assignments will be adjusted based on collective capacity. Artists and cultural workers—salariat or precariat, waged or unwaged—are particularly encouraged to register, though we are eager to study with folks from other sectors who are interested in the broader themes.

INSTRUCTORS

​Emily Rose Apter is a writer/programmer whose work explores overlapping spheres of cultural production, (counter)archives, and collective struggle. She works in public programming for film and cultural heritage organizations, most recently as Director of Programming at Maysles Documentary Center. 
emilyroseapter.com

Charles de Agustin is a filmmaker scavenging at the boundaries of elite capture and institutional critique. This work is mutually informed by experiences of collective study and organizing alongside jobs at arts nonprofits and universities. 
charlesdeagustin.com

Emily and Charles have collaborated on Palestine solidarity organizing and political education screenings around exploitation in the nonprofit sector.
Image Credit : Emily Rose Apter and Charles de Agustin
Sunday, 11a-1p PST; 2-4p EST
​Online on Zoom
120 minute sessions, 5 weeks
August 3rd - 31st, 2025
$125 - $375 Tuition
Select scholarships and solidarity rate discounts available upon request.