&Lab

Fall 2022 Design Justice Workshop

COMMUNITY/ENGAGEMENT:

Critical engagement with communities and the structures of inequity challenge designers and humanists to think across a range of scales, systems, and experiences that exist outside of academia. Innovative modes of “field work” conditioned by environmental thought, critical archive studies, mapping, and narrative may empower existing communities but also actively produce alternative, more equitable, and imaginative forms of scholarly work. 

With Detroit as a case study, this seminar will challenge participants to think about engagement and community, two words in wide circulation in various contexts. We will begin with a series of seminars at around questions such as: What constitutes a community of artists/designers/thinkers, and what forms of exclusion are implied or enacted? How do you build reciprocal creative relationships in complex social conditions? Where does the scholar/designer stand in relation to a community she studies? What methods are ethically or intellectually fruitful for engagement? How do we locate resistance to insidious forms that may detrimentally impact a community? We will spend the last week in September in Detroit interacting with high school students from University of Michigan’s Architecture Preparatory (ArcPrep) program, local artists and activists, seeing the city through their lenses. We will visit archives, alternative “museums,” sites of collectives and art and urban farms. After our return to Ithaca, we will use the classroom as a laboratory for Architecture and Humanities students to collaborate on critical design and writing projects inspired by our visit. Students are encouraged to pursue their own research interests in languages other than English and contexts other than U.S.-based as appropriate. Readings will include works by scholars and activists such as Jean Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, Silvia Federici, L.R. Beltrán, Kristin Ross, P. Freire, Clyde Woods, R. Esposito, Gloria Anzaldúa and others, to help think about new possibilities for community engagement.

Call for Applications: The Fall 2022 Design Justice Workshop is an innovative seminar for graduate students in the humanities and design disciplines. Urban Justice Labs are offered under the auspices of Cornell University's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities grant and are organized by the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning and the Society for the Humanities.

Selected students receive a $1,500 stipend to support a final project. Since final projects will be collaborative, students with diverse backgrounds and skillsets (i.e. ethnography, film and video, critical theory, digital mapping, architecture, fine art, landscape architecture, city planning, etc.) are encouraged to apply. Applicants should be in their first three years of graduate training or enrolled in a graduate professional program. Advanced undergraduate students may apply, but preference will be given to graduate students.

Applications must be submitted via  https://experience.cornell.edu/opportunities/mellon-collaborative-studies by May 20, 2022. Questions should be directed to Lauren Brown, leb69@cornell.edu. Learn more at urbanismseminars.cornell.edu.

Accepted Architecture students are encouraged to enroll in the Fall 2022 Option Studio led by Lettieri.  The studio will design spatial methods of community engagement through critical examinations of image-culture and social media. Explorations into chroma-keying and mixed reality practices of blurring physical and digital worlds will establish a host of strategies and techniques.