Here’s an evolving library of voices that challenge disciplinary boundaries - voices that could help us reimagine how we inhabit together space and language:
“Black People, Porches, and Politics” by Germane Barnes
“This list is critical of architectural history as it covers an underrepresented experience in our country. It is critical of urban planning as policies that were created by professionals directly contributed to inhumane practices of segregation and exclusion. It is vital to architectural theory as it posits the role of the blackness during Jim Crow-era America. It is vital to architectural education as we aim to bestow knowledge to future generations of designers so that they may not repeat practices that negatively affect large groups of people.”
https://placesjournal.org/reading-list/black-people-porches-and-politics/?cn-reloaded=1
“Design and Violence” Exhibition, MoMA, NYC, May 2015:
“Design has a history of violence. It can be an act of creative destruction and a double-edged sword, surprising us with consequences intended or unintended. Yet professional discourse has been dominated by voices that only trumpet design’s commercial and aesthetic successes. Historically, designers’ ambitions have ranged from the quotidian to the autocratic, from the spoon to the city. Under the guise of urban renewal or the cliché of disruptive innovation, designers of all kinds—from architects and typographers to interface, product, and fashion designers—have played a role in the reconfiguration of ways of life, ecosystems, and moral philosophies. Although designers aim to work toward the betterment of society, it is and has been easy for them to overstep, indulge in temptation, succumb to the dark side of a moral dilemma, or simply err.”
https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/designandviolence/about/
“Poetry Studies Now” Conference, NYC, March 2019:
”This 2-day conference aims to critically examine the current state of poetry studies while looking ahead to the possibilities opened up by recent reframings of questions of race and coloniality in and outside the academy. Through a cluster of panel discussions with poets and scholars, we hope to foster interdisciplinary exchange toward a centering of race and coloniality in discourse about poetry, renovating this toward new horizons of thought and action. In part, this conference hopes to bring to bear the groundbreaking work in purportedly “extra-literary” fields to rethink poetry studies and excavate unexamined assumptions.”
“Aging in [a] Place Symposium: Planning, Design & Spatial Justice in Aging Societies“, Harvard Graduate School of Design, October 2019
”[The] symposium applies a spatial justice lens to this challenge, asking, who has access to age-friendly communities, accessible housing to prolong independence, and sufficient funds to cover housing and care? How can planners, policymakers, designers, and citizens make progress on social inequalities among older adults through planning and design? How can the fields of medicine, public health, and planning/design work together to effect change? Differences in access to places to age well can take the form of spatial inequalities, such as inadequate market rate housing for older adults on fixed incomes.”
De Boeck, Filip, and Sammy Baloji. (2016). Suturing the City. Living Together in Congo's Urban Worlds. London: Autograph ABP.
Le Guin, Ursula K. (2015). “Listening to the Unheard Voices.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_vzSgkjBEI
Ingold, Tim. (2015). The Life of Lines. London and New York: Routledge.
”This book, at once sociological and ecological in scope and ambition, is a study of the life of lines. This is not how either sociology or ecology is normally written. It is more usual to think of persons or organisms as blobs of one sort or another. Blobs have insides and outsides, divided at their surfaces. They can expand and contract, encroach and retrench. They take up space or – in the elaborate language of some philosophers – they enact a principle of territorialisation. They may bump into one another, aggregate together, even meld into larger blobs rather like drops of oil spilled on the surface of water. What blobs cannot do, however, is cling to one another, not at least without losing their particularity in the intimacy of their embrace…Potatoes in a sack are but blobs; in the soil, however, every potato is a reservoir of carbohydrate formed along the thread- like roots, and from which a new plant can sprout. ”
Bennett, Jane. “Artistry and Agency in a World of Vibrant Matter”, The New School University, NYC, Sept 2011:
“The story will highlight the extent to which human beings and thinghood overlap, the extent to which the us and the it slip-slide into each other. One moral of the story is that we are also nonhuman and that things, too, are vital players in the world. The hope is that the story will enhance receptivity to the impersonal life that surrounds and infuses us, will generate a more subtle awareness of the complicated web of dissonant connections between bodies, and will enable wiser interventions into that ecology.“