Night School Durham

Night School Durham Evening classes for curious adults in the Arts & Humanities / Affordable collective study out of Durham, NC / Online for now.

“The Culture Industry” is a crucial concept for understanding society today. Get a two-week crash course. Sign up at nig...
08/25/2026

“The Culture Industry” is a crucial concept for understanding society today. Get a two-week crash course. Sign up at nightschoolbar.com

The Culture Industry: An Introduction to Critical Theory
Instructor: Lindsey Andrews | 2 Weeks | Wednesdays | September 16 & 23 | 7:00-9:00 PM | 719 N Mangum St, Durham NC

How do consumer culture and mass media affect our psyches? The Frankfurt School—founders of modern Critical Theory—argued that in a world dominated by “the culture industry,” we see everything around us, including ideas, people and relationships, as commodities to be bought and sold. In this two-week class, we’ll read and discuss the landmark essay, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, supplemented by additional insights from other key Frankfurt School thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse. Together we’ll ask: Can we enjoy cultural objects–books, films, TV, and music–outside of consumer culture? Are we doomed to self-deception, or can we imagine a communal future for ourselves and our cultural objects?

Upcoming classes and events this week at Night School Bar. The bar is open to everyone (21+) Thursday-Saturday, 5-11 PM....
08/21/2026

Upcoming classes and events this week at Night School Bar. The bar is open to everyone (21+) Thursday-Saturday, 5-11 PM. Enter in the rear if class is in session.

Bring and share your original songs, tonight at 6 pm (sign up from 5-6). This is a supportive environment for performing...
08/15/2026

Bring and share your original songs, tonight at 6 pm (sign up from 5-6). This is a supportive environment for performing original work! We have a keyboard and guitar available for use. Grab a drink and get those fingers and vocal cords warmed up. 🎶🍷🎸

Ready for the next Top Shelf Book Club? We’re back with another banger, and new topics to discuss about AI, care, beauty...
08/13/2026

Ready for the next Top Shelf Book Club? We’re back with another banger, and new topics to discuss about AI, care, beauty culture, and obsolescence in late capitalism. Sign up to discuss Helen Phillips’s Hum in community. nightschoobar.com

THIS SATURDAY! Come to Night School Bar and hear from Carly Campbell, the playwright of Committed: the Musical, before i...
08/07/2026

THIS SATURDAY! Come to Night School Bar and hear from Carly Campbell, the playwright of Committed: the Musical, before it premieres in a Durham! Carly will talk about her creative process writing an original musical in community in Durham!

Saturday, August 8, 6:00-7:30 PM at Night School Bar (719 N. Mangum St., Durham NC). Free, 21+.

Committed is A fantastical dark musical comedy about a young woman jostled between the worlds inside her head, psychiatric institutions, and her q***r Southern community. The show explores grief, spirituality, and mental health, asking the questions: Where is the line between a mental breakdown and a spiritual breakthrough? How do we support others through mental health crises while maintaining care for ourselves? Is it possible to reclaim our personhood after being discarded?"

The week ahead — check out upcoming classes and events at Night School Bar. The bar is open to everyone (21+) Thursday-S...
08/07/2026

The week ahead — check out upcoming classes and events at Night School Bar. The bar is open to everyone (21+) Thursday-Saturday 5-11 PM. Enter in the rear if class is in session.

Sign up for one-day and multi-week classes at nightschoolbar.com. Free events don’t require registration.

See you at the bar for thinking and drinking, good company and great conversation.

Every first Thursday: First Draft Society. Join us tonight for our monthly writers’ meet-up: socialize, write, and make ...
08/06/2026

Every first Thursday: First Draft Society. Join us tonight for our monthly writers’ meet-up: socialize, write, and make new friends. $5 draft pint special all night. Optional prompts, accountability cards, and sharing guidelines will be provided.

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World (Reading Group)Instructor: Leigh Cam...
08/06/2026

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World (Reading Group)
Instructor: Leigh Campoamor | 4 Weeks | Wednesdays, October 21-November 11 | 7:00-9:00 PM | 719 N. Mangum St, Durham NC

Let’s read this highly anticipated book together to get a grip on how the billionaire bros are trying to control the future and how we can resist it!

From the publisher:

In this blistering reckoning with our age, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor take us deep into this man-made Armageddon complex – and show us how to resist it. Around the globe, they investigate how those who are making our world unliveable through climate chaos and job-consuming AI are preparing to protect themselves from the fallout, whether it’s by repairing to luxurious private islands for the super-rich, rocketing off to Mars or bunkering nations against a dehumanized ‘other’.

But, Klein and Taylor reveal, the new supremacist survivalists are far from impregnable. They have no vision of a shared future. All they offer are remixes of a bygone past: the nihilistic, sadistic pleasures of domination. If we’re to meet this critical moment and defend what’s left of democracy before it’s smashed up beyond repair, we must break the doom loop, and find a new way of living together, rooted in our existence on this earth, in the here and now. A story not of end times – but of better times. This book shows us how.

Dolen Perkins Valdez’s Happy Land (Reading Group)Instructor: Tatiana McInnis | 3-Weeks | Mondays | October 5-26 (no clas...
08/03/2026

Dolen Perkins Valdez’s Happy Land (Reading Group)
Instructor: Tatiana McInnis | 3-Weeks | Mondays | October 5-26 (no class 10/12) | 6:30-8:30 PM | 719 N. Mangum St, Durham NC

Have you ever read a book based on real events that tackles generational inheritances, trauma from anti-Blackness, the economic and cultural worth of land, and how much we love our families even when they p**s us off and tell us the important things too late? Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s Happy Land, published in 2025, does all of this. Told in a dual storyline, this historical novel is inspired by a community of formerly enslaved people who dared to strive for self-sufficiency in a place known as the Kingdom of the Happy Land in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina. Together, we’ll navigate this is a tour-de-force of a novel that offers a history of North Carolina from the perspective of a Black family fighting to keep their land.

From the publisher:
Nikki hasn’t seen her grandmother in years. So when the elder calls out of the blue with an urgent request for Nikki to visit her in the hills of western North Carolina, Nikki hesitates only for a moment. But instead of answers about the recent past, Mother Rita tells Nikki an incredible story of a kingdom on this very mountain, and of her great-great-great grandmother, Luella, who would become its queen.It sounds like the makings of a fairy tale—royalty among a community of freed people. But the more Nikki learns about the Kingdom of the Happy Land, and the lives of those who dwelled in the ruins she discovers in the woods, the more she realizes how much of her identity and her family’s secrets are wrapped up in these hills. Inspired by true events, Happy Land is a transporting multi-generational novel about the stories that shape us and the dazzling courage it takes to dream.

Address

719 N Mangum Street
Durham, NC
27701

Opening Hours

Wednesday 5pm - 12am
Thursday 5pm - 12am
Friday 5pm - 12am
Saturday 5pm - 12am
Sunday 5pm - 12am

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