Recent Courses

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POLITICAL IMAGINATION

This course focuses on imagination as a mode of inquiry and as a site of political creativity. We will build on long standing work on the sensorium to expand conceptions of the political, providing students with the opportunity to generate new imaginative possibilities. Approaches include building a research practice that involves walking, archiving, mapping, multimedia and sensory-oriented fieldwork, speculative storytelling, and practicing material synaesthesia.  Grounded in a series of site engagements, the course will foreground sensorial literacies and methods of ‘observation’ that include but go beyond the visual, developing mimetic capacities and embodied modes of understanding and relating. We center collaboration and cooperation as essential modes of inquiry and practice. Possible sites range from a sewer grate to local waterways and sidewalk trees to botanical gardens. The class is co-taught by faculty from across the university—Barbara Adams, Victoria Hattam, and Jane Pirone—each of whom has rather different but overlapping interests and backgrounds. We come together to create an experimental learning space from which we will imagine alternate presents and future possibilities.

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COLLAB: SPECULATIVE STORYTELLING

Parsons School of Design, 2021

This collaboration studio actively engages with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Innovation Service (UNHCR) and members of UNESCO’s Futures Literacy Network to explore storytelling and speculative fabulation as a practice of design. We explore the capacities of stories to build relationships, challenge entrenched power dynamics, and prompt imagination beyond the representational. Engaging storytelling as a ‘cosmological technology,’ we work together to develop alternative visions and approaches that challenge the myths, metaphors, and narratives that make it difficult to shape futures that center justice in organizational processes. With an emphasis on transformation, we disrupt traditional storytelling practices and tropes through the use of cut-ups, recombinant narrative, visionary fiction, collaborative meaning-making, non-linear, and transmedia forms. In conversation with science fiction, queer and feminist theories, indigenous discourses, Afrofuturism, and other performative interventions, this course explores how speculative and critical approaches to design can act as catalysts for imagining alternate presents and possible futures. We engage intersectional themes such as ecological collapse, the politics of humanitarianism, belonging and identity, and living and complex systems.

 

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SPECULATIVE SOCIAL JUSTICE

Parsons School of Design, 2020

In this studio, we experiment with estrangement and defamiliarization in the creation of provocative scenarios and imaginative artifacts as a way to envision more just ways of inhabiting the world. We begin with the premise that design, as an integrated mode of thought and action, is intrinsically social and deeply political. In conversation with science fiction, queer and feminist theories, indigenous discourses, Afrofuturism, drag and other performative interventions, this course explores how speculative and critical approaches to design can act as catalysts for imagining alternate presents and possible futures. From alien kinship to the undercommons, we consider subversive responses to dispossession, marginalization, precarity, and the forces that foreclose or curtail the possibility of a future. Mass incarceration, refugee crises, and the need to assert that lives matter—whether Black, trans, or otherwise, call for design responses that are critical and capable of suspending disbelief about change. Through design, students in this course will enact speculative forms of social justice that draw on radical traditions and will develop and materialize narratives beyond the normative. Sample student work.

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Studio modules, Transdisciplinary Design MFA program, Parsons, 2020-2021:

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Language of Oppression

In dismantling taken-for-granted and dominant frames, this studio event will focus on examining the language and framing of oppression and will experiment with forms that propose and practice transformation via the visual, textual, cinematic, theatrical, artistic, and the ritualistic. Language, understood as performative, not only expresses political action and social performance, but also functions as a form of praxis itself. We will explore this with tiokasin ghosthorse from the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation of South Dakota in a fire ceremony and other activities.We will focus on studio practice as a mode of dialogue, thought, and action. Through making and exploring Indigenous knowledges of the earth, we will examine the ways language frames and constrains and we will explore and experiment with forms of language that are liberatory and propositional.The bulk of this event will take place offsite, outside of the classroom. It will involve travel within the city and upstate.

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Resonance

This event engages participants in collective trance. In this altered state of consciousness, we will explore remote realms difficult to access on our own across emotional, relational, conceptual and energetic planes. In particular, this space opens up the possibility of exploring collective avenues of growth, in challenging group patterns encoded within ourselves. After each trance, sharing will be devoted to exploring common themes and recurring patterns through the group’s intelligence, and to building up the group’s resources in finding creative solutions to transmute these patterns in our daily lives and in our creative practice. In particular, we will explore relationships to each other and to the world through the lens of resonance and harmonic likeness. What does it mean to enter a common dream space? To resonate with each other across space, time, culture, subjectivity, outlook? Are there reflexive ways of approaching each other and the world around us outside of contemporary dissonance, alienation and cynicism?

Resonance may be an event filled with joy--the exhilaration born from wearing out the boundaries of selfhood. guideline document

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Carceral Capitalism Study Group

This studio event focuses on incarceration and the carceral continuum. We approach this broad theme through study—a practice of gathering and directing our learning as a group. Through a series of activities with artists, designers, and researchers, we will explore predictive policing, wrongful conviction, and abolition, among other issues. With the understanding that carceral technologies extend beyond those covered in the event, there will also be opportunities to meet with collaborators in office hours to explore issues beyond those explicitly addressed in our meetings. We center ideas from the book Carceral Capitalism by Jackie Wang, who will close our event in conversation with other guests in a roundtable discussion facilitated by students. 

 

Embodying History, Provotyping Futures

This module positions Dread Scott’s ‘Slave Rebellion’ (2019) project as a springboard for understanding historical legacies and enacting alternative futures. Through key concepts (provotypes, inflection points, crisis as extreme opportunities) and creative activities (performative re-enactment, cinematic scenario sketching), this module engages students in activating communities/constituencies to envision bold new futures.

 

Performing Education

This event invites students to research, reenact, and reimagine alternative and traditional educational formats. Participants will closely study and create an archive of precedents, deconstructing and distilling components, values, practices, and competencies. We will also explore and carefully rethink formats such as conferences, lectures, symposia, and workshops, experimenting with alternative modes through which we might activate these platforms.

Students will creatively respond to their research through experience-based inquiry, developing and practicing educational modalities through performance as embodied participants. We will be guided through theater exercises, experiment with pedagogical formats, participate in and facilitate workshops, and will consider the notion of performance through a variety of theoretical and practice-based lenses. We will also engage work from critical pedagogical traditions, contemporary art, and performative enactments in speculative design to explore a series of questions:

• How might transdisciplinary design education creatively respond to our current moment?

• How might we reimagine the ways in which we come together to engage in teaching and learning? In sharing and producing knowledge?

• In what ways might designers use performative methods in their practice?

• What and how should (transdisciplinary) designers learn?

 

The (Geo)Politics of Helping

The (Geo)Politics of Helping critically explores the issues, inequities, ineffectualness, and injury related to and resulting from practices generally described as “community engagement,” “social impact,” “philanthropy,” and “helping.” In this studio event, we will examine the (geo)politics of helping through the lenses of racial and social justice, as well as issues of colonization in global work, particularly in the context of the so-called “global South.” With two collaborators, one “global” (ThinkPlace) and one “local” (Center for Court Innovation), students will develop ethical frameworks for community engagement, visualize the ecosystems around defined problems to make systems and power relationships apparent; and in small groups, propose and assess projects that establish differing modes of engagement and operate on different scales from awareness-raising campaigns, to treating symptoms, to action-oriented efforts that initiate deep systemic change. As designers increasingly turn their efforts to altering conditions for the vulnerable and oppressed, stubborn questions arise around the ethics of engagement. Socially engaged projects seek meaningful change, yet often discourage dissent, reify privilege, remain agnostic about outcomes, and do little to alter larger, structural inequalities. Designers can easily exit projects deemed failures and write these off as learning experiences. Moving from one social injustice to the next, crises and suffering become ‘sites’ from which to develop serialized projects. Armed with empathy and expertise, but with little local knowledge, practitioners struggle to form equitable relationships with partners and collaborators. This studio event will examine a range of design projects and will challenge the idea that helping is beyond reproach. Participants will explore how designers might better situate themselves not only as actors and allies, but as accomplices through developing practices that foster solidarity and actively dismantle oppressive structures and systems. We will pay particular attention to designing artifacts that function as methods of evaluation (where participants evaluate the designers) and that facilitate non-hierarchical and reflexive forms of engagement and relationship-building.