“Landscapes of Slavery, Landscapes of Freedom: The African Diaspora and the American Built Environment”

Registration Information
The GSD’s Fall 2021 Public Programs are all virtual and require registration. Click here to register for “Landscapes of Slavery, Landscapes of Freedom.” Live captioning will be provided during this event.

Event Description

This forum brings together scholars whose research investigates the relationship between the African diaspora, Afro-descendants, and the built environment of North America and the Caribbean from a variety of lenses that are specific to the scholars’ fields of inquiry. The goal is to begin to expand the field of landscape history by taking into consideration questions that are not always deemed central to the practice of design, if design is understood as an activity that has featured—in the historical narratives—the presence of an author-designer, a client, and a variety of tools the former has used to communicate ideas about form, materials and use, to the latter.

By its very cross-disciplinary nature and topical organization, this forum questions a traditional mode of history writing that is based both on the description of linear developments and on the exclusive use of archival and written sources. Instead it argues for a relational historiography that considers what methods and what traces—written, spoken, or material, and whether found on the land’s surface or below—may allow us to tell the story of the Black North American and Caribbean landscape of enslaved people, maroons and freemen. Without arguing for the obliteration of what is already known about the landscape of plantations and the settlements of early America, essays presented at this symposium will ultimately produce a landscape history that, paraphrasing Èdouard Glissant, is latent, open, multicultural in intention, and directly in contact with everything possible.

*Download the conference program*

Schedule

Friday, November 5, 2021

6 PM
Welcome remarks by Anita Berrizbeitia, Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture

Introduction by Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto, Conference Chair

6:10 – 7:30 PM
Keynote Address by Michael Twitty
Beyond ‘Slave Food’: Re-Organizing the Perceptions and Potential of African American Foodways

Saturday, November 6 

10 – 10:20 AM
Introduction by Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto

10:20 – 11:50 AM
Panel Discussion 1, moderated by Jarvis McInnis

Hoeing, Harvesting, Healing & Hexing: The Earth and its Cultivation as Tools of Resistance to Enslavement
Anne Bouie

Forgotten Witnesses: Exploring Archaeological Sites of Labor at a Presidential Plantation
James French and Matthew Reeves

11:50 AM – 1:30 PM
Lunch Break

1:30 – 3 PM
Panel Discussion 2, moderated by Matthew Mulcahy

Nowhere and Everywhere: The Archaeological Footprint of Afro-Descendants on the Urban Landscape of 16^th-Century Spanish Hispaniola
Pauline Martha Kulstad-González

The Plantation Cityscape: Slave Labor as a Circulatory System in the Urbanization of Colonial New Orleans
Nicholas Paskert

3 – 3:30 PM
Break 

3:30 – 5 PM
Panel Discussion 3, moderated by Jennifer Anderson

“The Fences Have Flown”: Unsettling Enclosure in Narratives of Black Spatial Practice
Elleza Kelley

Landscape, Memory, and the History of Slavery in Mississippi
Max Grivno

Sunday, November 7, 2021

10 – 11:30 AM
Panel Discussion 4, moderated by Andrea Mosterman

Muted Place and Free Settlement Icons
Everett Fly

Working Freedom: Black Farmers and Industrious Landscapes in Maryland, 1866-1880
Melissa Blair

11:30 AM – 1 PM
Lunch Break 

1 – 3 PM
Panel Discussion 5, moderated by Sara Zewde

Toward a Black Historical Ecology of the Atlantic World
Justin Dunnavant

Beneath the Surfaces of Historical Landscapes: Archaeology, African and Indigenous Diasporic Communities, and the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina
Daniel Sayers 

Living Freedom in the Maroon Landscape: An Ecological Way of Life
Diane Jones Allen

3 – 3:15 PM
Closing Remarks by Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto
 

Conference Chair

Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto is a landscape historian, critic, and part-time lecturer at the GSD. Her approach to landscape history is guided by the belief that world-wide relations across spatial and temporal scales are best discerned and studied through an accumulation of commonplaces.

Dr. Fabiani Giannetto is also an independent scholar and, when not in the classroom, she reads and writes about the productive landscape, early modern Atlantic history, and the roots of Western society’s progressive alienation from the natural world.

Keynote Speaker

Michael W. Twitty is a living history interpreter, culinary historian, and food writer personally charged with teaching, documenting, and preserving the African American culinary traditions of the historic South and its connections with the wider African Atlantic world as well as parent traditions in Africa. He blogs at Afroculinaria.com . He’s appeared on Bizarre Foods America with Andrew Zimmern, Many Rivers to Cross with Henry Louis Gates, and most recently Taste the Nation with Top Chef‘s Padma Lakshmi and a special guest appearance in Michelle Obama’s Waffles and Mochi show on Netflix. HarperCollins released Twitty’s The Cooking Gene , in 2017, tracing his ancestry through food from West and Central Africa to America and from slavery to freedom. The Cooking Gene won the 2018 James Beard Award for best writing as well as the book of the year, making him the first Black author so awarded. His piece on visiting Ghana in Bon Appetit was included in Best Food Writing in 2019 and was nominated for a 2019 James Beard Award. Twitty’s next book, Rice with UNC press, is currently fresh off the presses. Koshersoul, about his culinary journey as a Jew of African descent, will be out in 2022 through HarperCollins. He was most recently named a National Geographic Explorer in 2021.

Panelists

Diane Jones Allen, D. Eng., PLA, FASLA is Program Director and Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Texas, Arlington. She is Principal Landscape Architect with DesignJones LLC which received the 2016 American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) Community Service Award.  She participated on the 2017 ASLA Blue Ribbon Panel on Climate Change. Diane serves on the board of the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) as vice president of education for the 2021 year.  Diane is author of Lost in the Transit Desert: Race Transit Access and Suburban Form , Routledge Press, 2017, and co-editor of Design as Democracy: Techniques for Collective Creativity , Island Press, 2017. Diane is part of one of two cross disciplinary teams that won the 2020 SOM Foundation Research Prize focused on examining social justice in urban contexts.  She alsoreceived an appointment as fellow for Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks for the 2021-2022 academic year.

Melissa Blair is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is a historian of architecture, landscapes and material culture with 20 years of experience gained at public history and academic institutions. She teaches the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America and historic preservation. She is co-author of Washington and Baltimore Art Deco: A Design History of Neighboring Cities (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Her current research focuses on the Mid-Atlantic’s rural buildings and landscapes, the farming patterns that shaped them, and their preservation.

Anne Bouie was born in Birmingham, Alabama; she grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, and was deeply affected by the beauty and culture she experienced during summers on her grandparents’ farm in Florida. Her family lived in six states and she had attended seven schools by the fifth grade before settling in Riverside, California, where she grew up, and eventually graduated from the University of California there. She left southern California and moved to the Bay Area to enter the graduate School of Education at Stanford University, where she earned a Ph.D. in Administration & Policy Analysis, a Master’s degree in Secondary Education, and a Master’s degree in African-American History. As a mixed media, assemblage artist, Ms. Bouie has exhibited at the Honfluer Gallery, Galarie Myrtis, the Nevin Kelly Gallery, Millennium Salon, and the D.C. Arts Center. She has also participated in exhibits in California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and India. She is a member of the Black Artists of D.C., the Millennium Arts Salon, Washington D.C. Friends of Brandywine, and the Women’s Caucus for the Arts, the Honfluer Gallery, the Washington Arts Project, and the Pen and Brush Gallery in New York.

Dr. Justin Dunnavant is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA. His current research in the US Virgin Islands investigates the relationship between ecology and enslavement in the former Danish West Indies. In addition to his archaeological research, Justin is co-founder and President of the Society of Black Archaeologists and an AAUS Scientific SCUBA Diver. In 2021, he was named a National Geographic Emerging Explorer and inducted into The Explorers Club as one of “Fifty People Changing the World that You Need to Know About.” He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation. His research has been featured on Netflix’s “Explained,” Hulu’s “Your Attention Please” and in print in American Archaeology and Science Magazine.

Everett L. Fly , MLA ’77, native of San Antonio, Texas, resides in the city with his wife Rosalinda. An honors graduate of the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, he is the first African American graduate of Harvard University’s Department of Landscape Architecture. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects. Fly’s forty-year practice as a licensed landscape architect and architect includes national multidisciplinary consultations for the National Park Service and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He served on the State of Texas National Register Board of Review and City of San Antonio Historic and Design Review Commission. He chaired the board of Humanities Texas from 1993 to 1994. Fly served appointments by President Bill Clinton to the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities from 1994 to 2001. President Barack Obama awarded him one of ten 2014 National Humanities Medals for his body of work preserving the integrity of African-American places and landmarks. Recent awards include the 2018 San Antonio Power of Preservation Foundation “Champion of Preservation Award” and the 2020 Conservation Society of San Antonio “Texas Preservation Hero Award”. He co-founded the San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum .

James French founded the Montpelier Descendants Committee (MDC) and joined the Board of The Montpelier Foundation (TMF) in 2019. The MDC educates the public about the social, intellectual and economic contributions to the nation’s founding of enslaved Americans across Central Virginia, including at James Madison’s plantation, Montpelier. Mr. French strenuously advocated for power sharing to a largely resistant board and led the MDC in achieving structural parity with The Montpelier Foundation by innovating a widely applicable model for resolving legacy power imbalances in organizations. The MDC is the only descendant organization to establish itself as an equal co-steward of a major historic site in America. Mr. French is a graduate of the Darden Business School at the University of Virginia and has worked in international banking, government and in entrepreneurial roles across the globe. Mr. French is launching a fintech startup focused on emerging economies in Africa and beyond. 

Max Grivno is Associate Professor of History at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he teaches courses on the Old South, Slavery, and American Economic History. While completing his Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, Grivno worked for several years as a research assistant with the Freedmen and Southern Society Project. Grivno has also served as a research historian for the National Park Service and has completed the historic resources survey for Ferry Hill Plantation and the Forks of the Road Slave Market in Natchez, Mississippi. Dr. Grivno has received received research fellowships from the Gilder Lehrman, the University of North Carolina, and has been awarded the Humanities Scholar of the Year Award by the Mississippi Humanities Council for his work promoting slavery and public history. Dr. Grivno is currently working on a book on the last survivors of slavery in the United States.

Elleza Kelley is a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University in the departments of English and African American Studies. Her current book project explores black spatial knowledge and practice through African American literature and visual art. Kelley is a co-founder of the BSA at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she acts as a senior advisor, programming symposia and producing publications related to blackness and architecture. Kelley writes and teaches on a range of subjects from black aesthetics and black geographies to historical fiction. Kelley’s writing can be found in Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, The New Inquiry, Cabinet Magazine, and elsewhere.

Pauline M. Kulstad González has a B.A. in Latin American Studies and Anthropology from Macalester College in Minnesota (USA); a Masters in Latin American Studies from the University of Florida (concentration Archaeology) (USA); and a PhD in Archaeology from Leiden University (The Netherlands).

Her consulting firm (PK Research and Translations ) focuses on 16th century Spanish Hispaniola research, both archival and in the field. She specializes in 16th century paleography. Her work has focused mainly on translating and interpreting (English/Spanish), providing administrative assistance, and organizing meetings with multiple stakeholders. She has worked as in-country liaison in the Dominican Republic for various international commercial and educational organizations.

Nicholas Paskert is a doctoral candidate in African American history in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is presently finishing a dissertation on urban slavery and the built environment in African colonial New Orleans from 1718-1852. His research has been supported by Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Charles Warren Center for American History, the Historic New Orleans Collection and Tulane University’s New Orleans Center for the Gulf South. He received a BA in Psychology from Lawrence University in 2003, two BAs in Interdisciplinary Studies and History from the University of New Orleans in 2011, and an MA in African American Studies from Harvard University in 2014. His forthcoming article “Coercing the Delta: The French Grammar of Control in the African Landscape of New Orleans, 1699-1732” is scheduled for publication in September 2021 in the journal Global Environment.

Matthew Reeves is the Director of Archaeology at James Madison’s Montpelier in Orange, Virginia.  His specialty is sites of the African Diaspora including plantation and freedman period sites, and Civil War. In his 20 years at Montpelier, Reeves has developed a strong public archaeology program known for its citizen science approach to research. At the heart of this program is community-based research with a heavy focus on investing descendant communities in the research and interpretation process and governance of cultural institutions. He has also led the archaeological discipline in devising new ways to engage metal detector hobbyists and archaeological survey through his department’s work locating the living and work sites of the enslaved community across the 2700-acre Montpelier property. These new site discoveries hold the future for Montpelier continuing to tell the story of the enslaved community.

Daniel O. Sayers is Associate Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington D.C. As a Historical Archaeologist, Sayers has analyzed and interpreted many archaeological sites across the U.S. through landscape perspectives that are informed by his political-economic approach and orientation. He is the author of many academic articles, he has made numerous media appearances, and he has worked with several museums on archaeological exhibits. Sayers is the author of the book, A Desolate Place for a Defiant People: The Archaeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp  (2014, University Press of Florida) and is completing a book manuscript, “Historical Archaeology of the Homeless and the Home” (also for the University Press of Florida).

Moderators

Jennifer Anderson, Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY), has an MA from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture and a PhD in Atlantic History from New York University. She is the author of Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America (Harvard Univ. Press, 2012) and headed the research team for “Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North,” an Emmy-nominated documentary about the Northern slave trade. She has received many awards and fellowships, including most recently Mellon and ACLS Fellowships. As Scholar-in-Residence last year at the Joseph Lloyd Manor (owned by Preservation Long Island), she helped develop an orientation exhibition about its most famous inhabitant—Jupiter Hammon, the first published African American poet. She recently completed research on the William Floyd Estate for the National Park Service; curated an exhibition about Sylvester Manor, a 17^th-century slave plantation, at New York University; and served as an Advisor for Long Island Museum’s ground-breaking exhibition, “Long Road to Freedom: Surviving Slavery on Long Island.” Deeply committed to public history, she continues to collaborate with museums and historical organizations throughout the greater New York region.

Jarvis C. McInnis is the Cordelia & William Laverack Family Assistant Professor of English at Duke University.He is an interdisciplinary scholar of African American & African Diaspora literature and culture, with teaching and research interests in the global south (primarily the US South and the Caribbean), sound studies, performance studies, visual culture, and the archive. McInnis is currently completing his first book manuscript, tentatively titled, “Afterlives of the Plantation: Aesthetics, Labor, and Diaspora in the Global Black South,” which aims to reorient the geographic contours of black transnationalism and diaspora by interrogating the hemispheric linkages between southern African American and Caribbean artists and intellectuals in the early twentieth century. His work appears in journals and venues such as Callaloo, MELUS, Mississippi Quarterly, Public Books, The Global South, American Literature, and American Literary History.

Andrea Mosterman is associate professor in Atlantic History and Joseph Tregle Professor in Early American History at the University of New Orleans. In her work, she explores the multi-faceted dimensions of slavery, slave trade, and cross-cultural contact in the Dutch Atlantic and Early America with special emphasis on Early New York. She has published in the Journal of African History and Early American Studies, and she curated the digital exhibit Slavery in New Netherland for the New Netherland Institute. In her book Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York (Cornell University Press, 2021), she uses spatial analysis to examine enslavement and resistance in New York’s Dutch communities. 

Matthew Mulcahy is professor of history at Loyola University Maryland. His research focuses on the history of hurricanes and other natural disasters in colonial British America. He is the author of Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624-1783 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) and Hubs of Empire: The Southeastern Lowcountry and British Caribbean (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). He and Stuart Schwartz have recently completed a broad survey of disasters in the early modern Caribbean that will be published in Philip Morgan, J.R. McNeill, Stuart Schwartz, and Matthew Mulcahy, Sea and Land: An Environmental History of the Caribbean to about 1850 (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Sara Zewde is founding principal of Studio Zewde, a design firm practicing landscape architecture, urbanism, and public art. Recent and ongoing projects of the firm include the Mander Recreation Center Campus (Philadelphia, PA), the Midtown Activation Project (Seattle, WA), and Graffiti Pier (Philadelphia, PA). Zewde’s practice and research start from her contention that the discipline of landscape architecture is tightly bound by precedents and typologies rooted in specific traditions that must be challenged. Without rigorous investigation, these cultural assumptions will silently continue to constrict the practice of design and reinforce a quiet, cultural hegemony in the built form of cities and landscapes. Her projects exemplify how sensitivities to culture, ecology, and craft can serve as creative departures for expanding design traditions. Read more

Aude-Line Dulière, “The Turn of the Screw and other short stories on dismantling and reuse”

Registration Information

The GSD’s Fall 2021 Public Programs are all virtual and require registration. Click here to register for Wheelwright Prize Lecture: Aude-Line Dulière, “The Turn of the Screw and other short stories on dismantling and reuse”. The event will also be live streamed to the GSD’s YouTube page. Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. If you would like to submit questions for the speaker in advance of the event, please click here.   Live captioning will be provided during this event.

Event Description

This lecture presents a collection of stories on the use and reuse of materials across building sites, demolition sites, salvage yards, quarries, film sets, and other out-of-the-way locations.

Together, they offer glimpses of the material practices at play in multiple contexts, from the skill-rich but frantically energy-intensive movie industry to the slower, less agile building industry. The materials — and the expertise of the craftswomen and craftsmen that shape them — are the protagonists in these stories. 

With destinations such as Bry-sur-Marne, Lasham, Gond-Pontouvre, and Fót, this will be a journey across suburban and hinterland ecosystems where the production, sourcing, construction and disposal of film sets has been pushed to the outskirts.

Horror stories of downcycling dead ends, nonfiction financial and carbon calculations, romantic tales of perpetual recycling, fables of pastiche and patina, green-washing propaganda, oral histories of low-tech solutions, and scripts for industrialised shredding of materials: this anthology feeds myriad anthropological perspectives, and helps tune us into our (damaged) relationship to resources. 

This lecture asks: How can we create space for material after-life processes, where demolition only happens as a last resort, downcycling gives way to a blossoming salvage and reuse industry, and dismantling becomes a craft as valuable as carpentry and sculpting? How can we bring more of these stories of unscrewing from the periphery to the front row?

Speaker

Aude-Line Dulière is an architect, researcher, and educator. She runs a studio and a technical course at the Architectural Association in London with a focus on material reuse. She manages academic, cultural, and built projects that consider our relationship to resources, labor, and supply systems. Since 2016, she collaborates with the Brussels-based cooperative Rotor . 
 
She has been a visiting professor at the KADK in Copenhagen and also taught at La Cambre ENSAV in Brussels. She is a registered architect, member of the British Film Design Guild, recipient of the Harvard Wheelwright Prize, and a board member of the Brussels-based space ‘La Loge’ dedicated to contemporary art, architecture, and theory. She has been invited to collaborate with institutions on exhibitions including the V&A in London, M – Museum in Leuven, and Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. 
 
Aude-Line studied in Brussels at Sint-Lucas (KU Leuven), holds a Master of Architecture degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and worked at David Chipperfield Architects between 2010-15.

Jade Kake, “Indigenous Urbanism”

Registration Information

The GSD’s Fall 2021 Public Programs are all virtual and require registration. Click here to register for Margaret McCurry Lectureship in the Design Arts: Jade Kake, “Indigenous Urbanism”. The event will also be live streamed to the Harvard GSD YouTube page. Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. If you would like to submit questions for the speaker in advance of the event, please click here.   Live captioning will be provided during this event.

Event Description

Jade Kake (Ngāpuhi, Te Arawa, Te Whakatōhea) leads a small team at Matakohe Architecture + Urbanism, a kaupapa Māori design studio based in Whangārei in the Te Tai Tokerau region of Aotearoa New Zealand. The architectural department of the studio is focused on working primarily with Māori community clients on their papakāinga, marae, commercial and community projects, whilst the pūrākau (culture narrative) integration strand focuses on working to facilitate meaningful hapū participation in the design of major civic, commercial and education projects within their rohe. Matakohe are also involved in cultural landscape research and the development of digital tools. In the talk, Jade will present a number of recent projects, as well as reflecting on the philosophy behind Matakohe and approach to practice.

After Jade’s lecture, she will be joined in conversation by Grant Fahlgren, Elyjana Roach and Zoe Toledo from the Harvard Indigenous Design Collective and by Dan D’Oca, GSD Assistant Professor in Practice of Urban Planning.

This event is organized in partnership with the Harvard Indigenous Design Collective .

Speaker

Jade Kake was born on Bundjalung Country, and received her training in architecture at the University of Queensland and UNITEC Institute of Technology in Auckland. Of Māori and Dutch descent, her tribal affiliations are Ngāpuhi, Te Whakatōhea and Te Arawa. She leads a small team at Matakohe Architecture and Urbanism, a Whangārei-based design studio which she founded in mid-2018. Matakohe works with Māori organisations to progress their multi-residential, community and commercial projects, and with mana whenua (local tribal) groups to express their values, aspirations and narratives in the design of civic, commercial and education projects within their rohe (tribal area).  
 
In 2018, she hosted and produced Indigenous Urbanism , a podcast about the spaces we inhabit, and the community drivers and practitioners who are shaping these environments and decolonising through design. She has written for a variety of housing and architecture magazines and contributed chapters to several books on architecture and urbanism.  

Follow Jade Kake on Twitter and Instagram.

Eric Klinenberg, “Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life”

Registration Information

The GSD’s Fall 2021 Public Programs are all virtual and require registration. Click here to register for Eric Klinenberg, “Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life”. The event will also be live streamed to the GSD’s YouTube page. Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. If you would like to submit questions for the speaker in advance of the event, please click here.   Live captioning will be provided during this event.

Event Description

The future of democratic societies rests not simply on shared values but on shared spaces: the libraries, childcare centers, and parks where crucial connections are formed. Drawing on extensive sociological research, Klinenberg claims that “social infrastructure,” which he defines as the physical spaces that shape our interactions, plays an essential but unappreciated role in modern societies, generating inequalities in health, education, crime, climate vulnerability, and social networks. In this lecture, he shares key findings from his landmark book, Palaces for the People, and offers a blueprint for rebuilding in this moment of crisis.

Speaker

Eric Klinenberg is Helen Gould Shepard Professor of Social Science and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is the author of Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (Crown, 2018), Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (The Penguin Press, 2012), Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media (Metropolitan Books, 2007), and Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2002), as well as the editor of Cultural Production in a Digital Age , co-editor of Antidemocracy in America (Columbia University Press, 2019), and co-author, with Aziz Ansari, of the New York Times #1 bestseller Modern Romance (The Penguin Press, 2015). His scholarly work has been published in journals including the American Sociological Review, Theory and Society, and Ethnography, and he has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, and This American Life. He’s currently working on a new book, 2020: A Social Autopsy, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf.

Follow Eric Klinenberg on Twitter .

Andrea Roberts, “The Community Core: Making and Keeping Place Heritage in Texas’s Freedom Colonies”

Registration Information

The GSD’s Fall 2021 Public Programs are all virtual and require registration. Click here to register for Rachel Dorothy Tanur Memorial Lecture: Andrea Roberts, “The Community Core: Making and Keeping Place Heritage in Texas’s Freedom Colonies”. The event will also be live streamed to the Harvard GSD YouTube page. Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. If you would like to submit questions for the speaker in advance of the event, please click here.   Live captioning will be provided during this event.

Event Description

In Texas’ freedom colonies — African American settlements founded 1866-1930 — descendants of community founders engage in heritage conservation by keeping folklife, sacred rituals, and other cultural expressions that sustain communities’ Black sense of place. However, rural, vernacular African American placekeeping strategies are rarely framed in planning and architectural history as transgressive or expressions of Black liberation. Presenting an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Never Sell the Land, Dr. Roberts shares case studies in which descendants of Deep East Texas freedom colony founders leverage heritage conservation to revitalize community cores. In contrast with urban cores defined by density and transit, the author conceptualizes freedom colony cores as embodied, rhizomatic, and dynamic. Placekeeping descendants, who live simultaneously in urban and rural Black settlements, act as interstices between freedom colony full and part-time residents, contest local land-use decisions, and rehabilitate properties. Heritage conservation activities sustain the diaspora of descendants’ commitment to and financial support of homestead rehabilitation, land retention, and adaptive reuse of a segregation-era school. The author will share ways freedom colony descendants co-opt, subvert, and reinvent community cores to resist placelessness and create “free Black space.”

Following Dr. Roberts’ presentation, she will be joined by current Loeb Fellow, Monica Rhodes for a discussion.

Speakers

Dr. Andrea Roberts is Director of The Texas Freedom Colonies Project™ and an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning, and co-founder of the African American Digital Humanities Working Group at Texas A&M University (TAMU).  She is also a fellow with TAMU’s Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center , Center for Heritage Conservation , Institute for Sustainable Communities , and the Africana Studies Program. Dr. Roberts holds a Ph.D. in community and regional planning from The University of Texas at Austin (2016), where her specialization areas were African diaspora studies and historic preservation. She also holds an M.A. in government administration from the University of Pennsylvania (2006) and a B.A. in political science from Vassar College (1996).  Her 12 years of nonprofit management, community development, and government administration experience inform her efforts to move disappearing African American communities — facing sprawl, gentrification, and resource extraction — from the margin to the center of public discourse, pedagogy, and research.

Her research frames planning & historic preservation practices as avenues to social justice. Her scholarship and digital humanities platforms tell the story of freedom colonies, African American settlements founded after Juneteenth in Texas between 1865-1930. The Journal of Planning History, Buildings and Landscapes, the Journal of the American Planning Association, the Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage, Planning Theory & Practice, and Environmental Justice have published her peer-reviewed scholarship on Black planning history, cultural landscape theory, Black feminist preservation, and participatory preservation. Her commentary has also appeared in Newsweek, The Conversation, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Leadership Forum.

She is also a 6^th generation Texan, whose ancestors were formerly enslaved and founded freedom colonies. In 2014, she founded The Texas Freedom Colonies Project. The Project’s student researchers, volunteers, and the freedom colony diaspora contribute to The TXFCP Atlas , a publicly accessible map and database containing descendants’ memories, images, and reports on contemporary life in nearly 400 settlements. The Texas Department of Transportation and the Council of Texas Archeologists use the platform to identify Black historic resources at risk.  

Dr. Roberts is also the Consultant/Owner of Freedom Colonies Project, LLC, which provides research design support and DEIA workshops for preservation organizations. She is a Texas State Board of Review member and a National Monument Audit Advisory Board member. She has received awards for her engaged scholarship from The Vernacular Architecture Forum and the Urban Affairs Association.  Dr. Roberts is a 2020-21 Whiting Public Engagement Fellow and was a 2020 Visiting Scholar at Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, Abolition. Currently, she’s writing a book about Black historic preservation practice for The University of Texas Press.   

Follow Dr. Andrea Roberts on Twitter and and follow the Texas Freedom Colonies Project on Facebook .

 

Monica Rhodes is the former director of Resource Management at the National Park Foundation. In this role, Rhodes oversaw facility and construction grant-making to the National Park Service and helped lead efforts to develop strategies for African American and Latinx engagement.

Prior to her role at NPF, Rhodes was the founding director of the National Trust’s HOPE (Hands-On Preservation Experience) Crew, which was created to expand the preservation movement to a younger, more diverse audience. In the five years of leading HOPE Crew, Rhodes guided over 165 preservation construction projects, trained 750 young people and veterans, and engaged 3700 volunteers in large-scale community events. Under her leadership, the program garnered more than 1 billion media impressions and supported $18 million of preservation work, primarily in national parks. Before joining the Trust, Rhodes worked as a consultant to preservation non-profits.

Rhodes’ work has been featured in national outlets like PBS NewsHour, Huffington Post, Washington Post, and U.S. News & World Report. She also appeared in a feature spread on women in the preservation movement in Essence Magazine’s Spring 2018 issue. Separate from her work with NPF, Rhodes served on the Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation and the Market Center Community Development Corporation board in Baltimore City. She also served as an advisor for the DC LGBTQ Historic Context Study and a project reviewer for the Facilities and Buildings grant program for the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

Rhodes earned her undergraduate degree in History at the University of Tulsa and a Master’s degree in African American Studies at Temple University. She also attended the University of Pennsylvania where she received a Master’s degree in Historic Preservation.

Jamaica Kincaid

Registration Information

The GSD’s Fall 2021 Public Programs are all virtual and require registration. Click here to register for Frederick Law Olmsted Lecture: Jamaica Kincaid. The event will also be live streamed to the Harvard GSD YouTube page. Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. If you would like to submit questions for the speaker in advance of the event, please click here.   Live captioning will be provided during this event.

Speaker

Jamaica Kincaid is a widely acclaimed and fiercely original writer known for her novels, short stories, and essays, including writings on her life as a gardener. She was also staff writer for the New Yorker from 1973 to 1996 and has been a contributor for the Village Voice.

She is beloved by generations of readers who discovered her fiction, including Annie John and “Girl,” in high school and is admired by critics for her daring and unorthodox body of work. Answering claims that her fiction and essays are characterized by anger, Kincaid says, “The important thing isn’t whether I’m angry. The more important thing is, is it true? Do these things really happen? I think I’m saying something true. I’m not angry … The way I think of it is that I’m telling the truth.”

In the New York Review of Books, Darryl Pinckney wrote, “Kincaid’s rhythms and the circularity of her thought patterns in language bring Gertrude Stein to mind. She is an eccentric and altogether impressive descendant.”

Kincaid is the recipient of a Guggenheim grant and has been nominated for the National Book Award. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.

Kincaid was born in Antigua, British West Indies, in 1949, and arrived in the United States in 1965 to work as an au pair. In 1973, she changed her name from Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson to Jamaica Kincaid, mostly to prevent her parents from finding out that she was writing. She’s now the mother of two grown children and is a professor in the African and African American Studies department at Harvard University.

Harvard Design Magazine #49: “Publics” Issue Launch and Conversation

Registration Information

The GSD’s Fall 2021 Public Programs are all virtual and require registration. Click here to register for Harvard Design Magazine #49: “Publics” Issue Launch and Conversation. The event will also be live streamed to the GSD’s YouTube page. Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. If you would like to submit questions for the speakers in advance of the event, please click here.   Live captioning will be provided during this event.

Event Description

In a world of increasing polarization and boundary-drawing manifest at multiple scales, what has happened to the notion of “the public”? Is there evidence that collective understanding of who belongs in our neighborhoods, cities, regions, and nations is changing? And to what extent have the urban planning and design professions enabled or constrained these transformations? The 49th issue of Harvard Design Magazine , guest-edited by Anita Berrizbeitia and Diane Davis, addresses “the status of the public” in political and social discourse, in design thinking and practice, and in the built environment itself. We ask leading public intellectuals, scholars, and practitioners in architecture, urban planning, landscape design, law, and the social sciences and humanities to join us in pondering the fate of the public in a world where challenges to collective responsibility and xenophobic thinking are becoming ever more dominant.

The event will be introduced by Harvard Design Magazine’s Editorial Director, Julie Cirelli.

Speakers

Assemble is a multi-disciplinary collective working across built environment disciplines, including architecture, research, design, and public art.  Founded in 2010 to undertake a single self-built project, Assemble has since delivered a diverse and award-winning body of work, whilst retaining a democratic and co-operative working method that enables built, social and research-based work at a variety of scales, both making things and making things happen. Members have a broad range of skills and experience covering design, construction, furniture making, fabrication, brief development, urban and public realm design, organizational development, making, audio production, events programming and production, performance, carpentry, ceramics, product development, set design and theatre-making.

Elijah Anderson is the Sterling Professor of Sociology and of African American Studies at Yale University, and one of the leading urban ethnographers in the United States. He is the author of the classic sociological work, A Place on the Corner (1978; 2nd ed., 2003); and the award-winning books, Streetwise (1990) and Code of the Street (1999); and The Cosmopolitan Canopy (2011). Dr. Anderson is the recipient of the 2017 Merit Award from the Eastern Sociological Society, the 2013 Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award, and the 2018 W.E.B. DuBois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, both from the American Sociological Association.

Anita Berrizbeitia is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture. Her research focuses on design theories of modern and contemporary landscape architecture, the productive aspects of landscapes, and Latin American cities and landscapes. She was awarded the 2005/2006 Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize Fellowship in Landscape Architecture. A native of Caracas, Venezuela, she studied architecture at the Universidad Simon Bolivar before receiving a BA from Wellesley College and an MLA from the GSD. Read More

Diane E. Davis is the Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Before moving to the GSD in 2011, Davis served as the head of the International Development Group in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, where she also had a term as Associate Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. Trained as a sociologist, Davis’s research interests include the relations between urbanization and national development, comparative urban governance, socio-spatial practice in conflict cities, urban violence, and new territorial manifestations of sovereignty. Her books include Transforming Urban Transport (with Alan Altshuler) (Oxford University Press, 2018), Cities and Sovereignty: Identity Conflicts in the Urban Realm (Indiana University Press, 2011), Discipline and Development: Middle Classes and Prosperity in East Asia and Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2004; named the ASA’s 2005 Best Book in Political Sociology), Irregular Armed Forces and their Role in Politics and State Formation (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century (Temple University Press 1994; Spanish translation 1999). Read More

Tali Hatuka an architect and urban planner, is a Professor of Urban Planning and the head of the Laboratory of Contemporary Urban Design, at Tel Aviv University . Her work is focused primarily on two fields: urban society and city design and development. Hatuka is the author and co-author of the books: The Design of Protest , Violent Acts and Urban Space in Contemporary Tel Aviv , The Factory, State-Neighborhood, The Planners, City-Industry and Land- Gardens. She also works as a city planner and urban designer, consulting with municipalities in Israel. Hatuka has received many awards, including being a Fulbright Scholar and a Marie Curie Scholar at MIT. She holds academic degrees from the Technion in Israel and Heriot-Watt University in the UK.

A. K. Sandoval-Strausz is director of the Latina/o Studies Program and associate professor of history at Penn State University. His books include Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City, which won the Caroline Bancroft History Prize and was a finalist for the Victor Villaseñor Book Award; Hotel: An American History ; and Making Cities Global: The Transnational Turn in Urban History .

Christ & Gantenbein and OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, interviewed by Jeannette Kuo

Registration Information

The GSD’s Fall 2021 Public Programs are all virtual and require registration. Click here to register for Kenzo Tange Lecture: Christ & Gantenbein and OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, interviewed by Jeannette Kuo. The event will also be live streamed to the Harvard GSD YouTube page. Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. If you would like to submit questions for the speakers in advance of the event, please click here.   Live captioning will be provided during this event.

Speakers

Swiss architects Emanuel Christ, born 1970, and Christoph Gantenbein, born 1971, both graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich in 1998. In the same year they founded their firm Christ & Gantenbein in Basel. The office’s activity extends to a broad spectrum of projects—private and public commissions, ranging from small transformations, to housing, office buildings, bridges, and urban master plans. One of their main focal points is museum architecture: They are currently planning an extension to Basel’s Kunstmuseum, the renovation and extension of the Swiss National Museum in Zurich as well as an extension to the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud in Cologne. Completed projects are to be found in Switzerland, Germany, England, China and Mexico.

Parallel to the firm’s activity, Emanuel Christ and Christoph Gantenbein have been involved in academic teaching in different schools (ETH Studio Basel, HGK in Basel, Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio, Oslo School of Architecture and Design, among other institutes). Since 2010 they have been teaching together as professors at the ETH Zurich, where they research architectural typologies of the urban city.

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen was founded in 2002 by Kersten Geers and David Van Severen. OFFICE is renowned for its idiosyncratic architecture, in which realisations and theoretical projects stand side by side. The projects are direct, spatial and firmly rooted in architectural theory. The firm reduces architecture to its very essence and most original form: a limited set of basic geometric rules is used to create a framework within which life unfolds out in all its complexity.

Since its establishment OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen has earned a reputation as one of Belgium’s most successful and renowned practices, and one of the world’s truly original voices in present-day architecture. OFFICE engages in all architectural and urbanist design, creating projects of all scales ranging from furniture to masterplanning in Belgium as well as internationally. This practice is combined with academic research and teaching. These two aspects of OFFICE’s work are explicitly each other’s mirror, creating unexpected parallels between academic and practical work.

Jeannette Kuo is Assistant Professor in Practice at Harvard GSD and founding partner of KARAMUK KUO . Established in 2010 with Ünal Karamuk, the work of the office focuses on the intersection of spatial concepts and constructive technologies, recognizing architecture as a social and material discipline. The office works on projects of a range of scales, from schools and housing to complex cultural projects. In 2018, KARAMUK KUO was featured in issue 196 of El Croquis monographs. Recent projects include the International Sports Sciences Institute, the Augusta Raurica Archaeological Center, Weiden Secondary School, and Cham Apartments. In 2020 they were recognized by Domus as one of the 50 best architectural firms of the year.

Beyond her practice, Kuo regularly contributes through her academic commitments, writings, as well as participation in conferences and symposia. Her publication, “A-Typical Plan: Projects and Essays on Identity, Flexibility and Atmosphere in the Office Building ,” received the 2013 Most Beautiful Swiss Book award. This was followed by the critically acclaimed “Space of Production: Projects and Essays on Rationality, Atmosphere, and Expression in the Industrial Building ” in 2015. She regularly serves on competition juries and most recently was European jury president for the LafargeHolcim Awards for Sustainable Construction.

Black in Design 2021: “Black Matter”

Event Description
The Black in Design conference, organized by the Harvard Graduate School of Design African American Student Union , recognizes the contributions of the African diaspora to the design fields and promotes discourse around the agency of the design professions to address and dismantle the institutional barriers faced by our communities. The fourth biannual conference, Black Matter , will take place virtually on October 8-10, 2021.
Black Matter celebrates the cultivation of Black design and creativity from the magical to the mundane. The conference aims to lift up Black spatial practices and experiences that operate below the surface of design discourse, bringing nuance to the trope of Black excellence and acknowledging the urgent political, spatial, and ecological crises facing Black communities across the diaspora.
This year’s conference will host discussions, exhibitions, and performances at the intersections of technology, history, and design, with focus on encouraging new design practices. Black Matter offers a dynamic virtual environment where geographically distant participants are connected synchronously to share their ideas and creative work, forming a global constellation of Black consciousness. Learn more about this year’s conference at blackmatter.tv .
Schedule
Friday, October 8, 2021
12 PM
Introduction by Caleb Negash and Tomi Laja
“Sacred Pause for the Cause” by Ashley Wilkerson
12:15 PM
Welcome remarks by Sarah Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture
12:20 – 1:20 PM
Keynote Address by Mpho Matsipa
6:30 – 8:30 PM
Virtual Beer ‘n Dogs with a DJ Set by Darien Carr
 
Saturday, October 9, 2021
9:00 – 10:00 AM
Movement and Breathwork with Andrea Yarbrough
10:00 – 11:00 AM
Panel Discussion 1: Everyday Portals to Black Cultural Pasts, Presents, and Futures
11:30 AM – 12:30 PM
Panel Discussion 2: Designing for Black Pleasure, Joy, and Intimacy
1:00 – 2:00 PM
The Nexus Podcast: Live (audio only)
2:00 – 2:30 PM
“Taking Up Space, Breath by Breath” by Ashley Wilkerson
3:00 – 4:00 PM
Workshop 1: Black Interior Spatial Thought with Ladi’Sasha Jones
6:00 – 8:00 PM
Virtual DJ Set by Tyler Kpakpo
 
Sunday, October 10, 2021
9:00 – 10:00 AM
Movement and Breathwork with Andrea Yarbrough
10:00 – 11:00 AM
Panel Discussion 3: Art, Media, and Black Urban Mobility
12:00 – 2:00 PM
Workshop 2: Dancing for the Internet with NIC Kay
12:00 – 1:00 PM
Workshop 3: The Funambulist Magazine x Black Quantum Futurism Collective
1:30 – 2:30 PM
Workshop 4: Black in Design Mentorship Initiative
Workshop 5: Design as Protest
2:45 PM
Closing Remarks by Caleb Negash and Tomi Laja
3:00 PM
“Guided Meditation For Continued Liberation” by Ashley Wilkerson
 

 
Friday, October 8
Keynote: Mpho Matsipa
Mpho Matsipa is a current Loeb Fellow at the GSD, and an educator, researcher and curator based at the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She received her PhD in architecture from UC Berkeley. She is a researcher at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research and co-investigator on an Andrew Mellon research grant on Mobilities, Temporalities and African Political Futures, housed in the African Center for Society and Migration Studies.
Dr. Matsipa has written critical essays on art and architecture and curated several exhibitions and discursive platforms, including the South Africa Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2008, the African Mobilities 2.0 podcast series, and Studio-X Johannesburg. Her curatorial practice aims to support independent research practices across and beyond the African continent, and to democratize access by promoting discursive mobility among Black and African artists, scholars and designers.
 
Opening Breath
Ashley Wilkerson is a spirit-led actress, poet, trauma-informed meditation teacher, wellness practitioner, and consultant from Dallas, Texas. She currently resides in Los Angeles. She completed her Atma Yoga Training at Tree South LA and received her Mindfulness Training from Deer Park Monastery. Ashley has shared her expertise on various platforms such as All Def Digital, ATTN, and Facebook. She has presented at The California Wellness Foundation, Alliance For Safety & Justice, Revolve Impact, 72andSunny, Black Women For Wellness, Dallas Meditation Center, National Performance Network, etc. She is a principal member of Zeal Wellness and the founder of Brother Breathe, a mindfulness initiative designed for Black boys and men. Ashley has coordinated healing spaces and circles for hundreds of crime survivors and has helped bring more calm & positivity to various educational, corporate and creative sectors.
 
Saturday, October 9
Panel 1: Everyday Portals to Black Cultural Pasts, Presents, and Futures
Moderator Dorothy Berry currently serves as Digital Collections Program Manager at Harvard’s Houghton Library. She graduated from Indiana University with an MA from the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and an MLS from the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. In 2020-2021, she was honored with Library Journal’s “Movers and Shakers” Award, and the Society of American Archivists’ Mark A. Greene Emerging Leader Award. Her work has focused on the intersections of information science and African American history, ranging from newspaper database research on the earliest mentions of African American concert music performances, to inventory design for the cosmetic kit of Hollywood’s first Black woman makeup artist, to exhibit curation highlighting transatlantic art inspired by African American film. Archival materials open the door to history in visceral and unfettered ways; she is committed to a career of expanding access to those materials through creative and innovative ways focusing on digital and physical methodologies that unite stakeholder communities with their often displaced heritages. 
Emanuel Admassu is a Founding Partner of AD—WO and an Assistant Professor at Columbia University GSAPP, where he teaches design studios and theory seminars in urban design and architecture. He has previously taught at RISD Architecture and Harvard GSD. Admassu’s teaching, research, and design practices examine the international constellation of Afrodiasporic spaces.

Felecia Davis is an Associate Professor at the Stuckeman Center for Design and Computation at Pennsylvania State University and director of SOFTLAB. Her work in communicating with computational textiles through architecture has been recognized for connecting art with science and was recently featured by PBS in the Women in Science Profiles series. Davis is currently working on a book that examines the role of computational materials in our lives titled Softbuilt: Networked Architectural Textiles. Davis was a contributor to The Museum of Modern Art’s group architecture exhibition “Reconstructions: Blackness and Architecture in America.”  She is principal of FELECIADAVISTUDIO which has received several finalist awards for her architectural designs in open and invited architectural design competitions. She has exhibited and lectured about her work in textiles, computation, and architecture internationally, including at the Swedish School of Textiles, Microsoft Research, and the Media Lab at the MIT.
 
Panel 2: Designing for Black Pleasure, Joy, and Intimacy
Moderator Malcolm J. Rio is a graphic and architectural designer and thinker based in Providence, RI, where they work as an assistant professor of architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. Rio is also currently a Ph.D. student in architecture history and theory at Columbia University, where they research on topics of sexuality, race, kinship, citizenship, urbanism, imperialism, and colonialism across the long-19th and 20th centuries. Rio holds a Master of Science in Architecture Studies from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they were recognized with the 2019 SMArchS Thesis Prize and the Arthur Rotch Special Prize for research on the urbanism of house-ballroom culture in New York City titled “Drag Hinge: ‘Reading’ the Scales between Architecture and Urbanism” (2019). 
Additionally, Rio has earned a Master of Architecture from RISD, and both a Bachelor of Science in Philosophy and a Bachelor of Fine Art in Art + Design from Towson University. Rio’s scholarship, criticism and interviews have appeared in Thresholds, Avery Review, The New York Review of Architecture, ArchitectureMPS and Pidgin, as well as in forthcoming books like Living Room, a volume on sexuality, gender and architecture edited by Sophie Hochhäusl.
Ashon Crawley is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, an investigation of aesthetics and performance as modes of collective, social imagination, as well as The Lonely Letters, an exploration of the interrelation of Blackness, mysticism, quantum mechanics and love. He is currently working on a third book, tentatively titled “Made Instrument,” about the role of the Hammond Organ in the institutional and historic Black Church, in Black sacred practice, and in Black social life more broadly. All his work is about otherwise possibility.
Adam R. is an audio/video technologist, DJ, and one of the co-founders of Papi Juice, a Brooklyn-based art collective that aims to affirm and celebrate the lives of queer and trans people of color. Adam’s music and digital art are inspired by his Caribbean and African-American heritage. His work reflects his interest in afro-futurism, afro-pessimism and the diaspora at large.
Leslie Wilson is an Assistant Professor of Art History and Museum Studies Program Liaison for Art History at Purchase College, State University of New York. Dr. Wilson’s teaching and research focuses on the global history of photography, modern and contemporary art from Africa and the African diaspora, American art post-1900, and museum studies. Her current project charts the development and popularization of color photography in South Africa, from its inception in the early twentieth century to contemporary practice. She has held curatorial internships at the Art Institute of Chicago, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and the St. Louis Art Museum. From 2015 to 2017, she was a 24-Month Chester Dale Predoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Aneesah Ettress is an arts professional and writer based in the Denver Metro Area. Moved by the intersections of art and religion, she seeks to center historically underrepresented narratives and the work of POC artists past and present. She recently completed the Master of Divinity program at The University of Chicago with a research interest in the prophetic imagination of contemporary Black artists. Through her curatorial practice, she hopes to communicate that art is at work to transform the soul.
 
Keynote: Lesley Lokko
Lesley Lokko is the founder and director of the African Futures Institute in Accra, Ghana, an independent postgraduate school of architecture and a public events platform. She was the founder and director of the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg, from 2014 to 2019 and the Dean of Architecture at the Bernard & Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York from 2019 to 2020. She is the editor of White Papers, Black Marks: Race, Culture, Architecture and editor-in-chief of FOLIO: Journal of Contemporary African Architecture.
In 2004, Professor Lokko made the successful transition from academic to novelist with the publication of her first novel, Sundowners, and has since followed with twelve further bestsellers, which have been translated into fifteen languages. She is a founding member of the UN-Habitat Council on Urban Initiatives, a member of the 17th International Jury of the Venice Architecture Biennale, and a trustee of the London-based Architecture Foundation. Professor Lokko trained as an architect at the Bartlett School of Architecture and holds a PhD in Architecture from University of London.
 
Sunday, October 10
Panel 3: Art, Media, and Black Urban Mobility
Moderator Wandy Pascoal is an artist and architectural designer who is interested in the ways housing design and policy come together to shape global urban landscapes. This inquiry led to her current role as the Housing Innovation Design Fellow, a position co-hosted by the City of Boston’s Housing Innovation Lab and the Boston Society for Architecture. In this work she strives to center the many voices of Boston’s residents and their complex experiences in order to drive the design and implementation of the city’s current and future housing models. Wandy holds a BFA in Architecture from UMass Amherst and a Master of Architecture from MassArt where she focused on the urban and housing design of a self-sustaining eco-village in her home country of Angola. Previously, she worked as an architectural designer at Stull & Lee, Inc focused on affordable housing projects in the New England area. She has also worked with the Madison Park Development Corporation, where she first gained a deeper understanding of the complexities of local services and housing creation.
Jamila Moore Pewu, is a public and digital historian whose work explores how and why groups and individuals reimagine the spaces around them to create new urban futures.  She is particularly interested in examining the concept of reimagining through the unique historical, geographic and methodological perspectives posed by African Diasporic and or Black Atlantic communities both past and present.  As Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and New Media in History at California State University, Fullerton, Dr. Moore Pewu leads the history department’s digital humanities initiatives. In addition, she teaches survey and upper division courses in U.S. History, African History, and Historical Research and Writing. 
Michael Uwemedimo is a current Loeb Fellow at the GSD, cofounder and director of the Collaborative Media Advocacy Platform, and senior visiting research fellow at King’s College London. As a founding member of the filmmaking collaboration Vision Machine and a producer of the Academy Award-nominated, BAFTA-winning documentary, The Act of Killing, he has been developing innovative approaches to documentary practice as a means of enabling critical reflection on histories of political violence and challenges to official impunity. Michael is cofounder and project director of the Human City Project, a community-driven media, architecture, planning, and human rights initiative in Nigeria. There he explores design processes through which violently marginalized urban communities might gain a greater measure of control over their representation and the shaping of their cities. Michael has curated major programs at the National Film Theatre, Tate Modern, Architecture Association, and Institute for Contemporary Art, London; sat on international film festival juries; and presented his research and work internationally. Recent publications include, “A Cinema-séance of Power and Violence in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt,” in Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory and the Performance of Violence (2012), and “Violence By Design,” in Dey Your Lane: Lagos Variations (2016).
Jordan Weber, current Loeb Fellow at the GSD, is a Des Moines-based regenerative land sculptor and environmental activist who works at the cross section of social justice and environmental racism. Most recently, Jordan was commissioned by the Walker Art Center to create an urban farm in North Minneapolis called Prototype for poetry vs. rhetoric (deep roots), which acts as a counter tactic to industrial violence upon biodiverse lands and racially diverse communities. The project was produced in collaboration with North Minneapolis community members during the height of the George Floyd protests in late May 2020. He is currently in residence at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation and Washington University’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity and Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts. Jordan’s two-year project residency centers on social and environmental justice, incarceration, and healing, with a specific focus on the Close the Workhouse campaign—a collaborative project that is dedicated to the closure of St. Louis’ Medium Security Institute, known locally as the Workhouse. Awards and fellowships include the Joan Mitchell Award for Sculptors, Creative Capital NYC Award, A Blade of Grass fellowship NYC, Tanne Foundation Award, and the African American Leadership Forum Award.

 
Passive Programming and Workshops
Workshop 1: Black Interior Spatial Thought with Ladi’Sasha Jones
Ladi’Sasha Jones is a writer and curator from Harlem, NY. She has written for Aperture, Avery Review, Arts.Black, Houston Center for Photography, Art X Lagos, Temporary Art Review, Art-Agenda, The Art Momentum, and Recess among others. Her project, Black Interior Space / Spatial Thought was commissioned by The Shed (NYC) as a part of Open Call 2021 and was the recipient of a 2021 Research and Development award from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Currently, Jones is the Artist Engagement Manager for The Laundromat Project. She held prior appointments at the Norton Museum of Art, the New Museum’s IdeasCity platform, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She holds a B.A. in African American Studies from Temple University and a M.A. in Arts Politics from NYU, Tisch School of the Arts.

 
Workshop 2: Dancing for the Internet with NIC Kay
NIC Kay (b. 1989 Bronx, NY) makes performances and organizes performative spaces. Their works have been performed nationally and internationally in spaces including Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Germany; Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto, Canada; Encuentro 19, Mexico City, Mexico; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, United Kingdom; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; and University of Arts, Zürich, Switzerland. NIC was a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2020). They published their first book, Cotton Dreams, with Candor Arts in 2020. NIC is a Black queer trans non-binary person.
 
 
Workshop 3: The Funambulist Magazine x Black Quantum Futurism Collective
Caroline Honorien is a trained art historian, curator, and researcher. After graduating from Paris’ Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Caroline Honorien has mainly worked for editorial and curatorial projects in art institutions and collectives in France and the U.S. Her researches and writings revolve around arts in the African Diaspora, with a special focus on emerging contemporary art practices and strategies in France. Her current Ph.D. research focuses on the diasporic experience of futurity and utopia. She previously served as an editorial assistant at The Funambulist, where she now forms part of the Editorial Advisory Board.
Margarida Waco is an Angolan-born, European-raised, and Stockholm-based architect. With lived experiences from geographies spanning from Angola, D.R. Congo, Republic of the Congo, France, and Denmark, her work straddles research, publishing, design, and curating. She holds a master’s degree in architecture and is currently investigating the spatial toolboxes of Black liberation struggles in Southern Africa through her Ph.D. at the Graduate School of Architecture. In addition, she previously served as the head of strategic outreach of The Funambulist where she now forms part of the Editorial Advisory Board.

 
 
Workshop 4: Black in Design Mentorship Initiative
Rania Karamallah believes that design should be defined and inspired from and for the community. She grew up to embrace the lessons from her homeland of Nubia (modern day Sudan), where pyramids and architecture were built thousands of years ago and carried stories of human civilization and culture throughout this time. As she believes in the power of cultural representations in architecture, she also witnessed the effect of climate change in the built environment. Rania believes in design that represents the culture and portrays a human value into space, one that solves a problem and tells a story of the people. While working as an architectural designer at Perkins & Will, Rania is now also pursuing master’s degree in urban planning from the GSD. She hopes to widen her understanding of the built environment nationally and internationally and find her passion in the intersection of architecture, design, community and city planning.
Natalie Volcy is a student at Wentworth Institute of Technology and is majoring in Interior Design. She previously lived in Boston but now resides in Brookline with her two sisters. Her family has supported her in all she has undertaken and has encouraged a good work ethic and is always there to guide her in her life. Religion has been a strong foundation in her upbringing.  Natalie loves to draw and paint, and enjoys poetry, and dance. She is passionate about residential and commercial design. She wants people to be comfortable in their space and “not feel embarrassed about how they live.” Natalie would like people who have experienced hardships to have a fresh start in life. This includes ensuring that people who have housing insecurity have functional spaces with the necessities required for their life. She would love to travel to other countries to not only learn about different design styles but to also ensure that when working with diverse people she has the tools to design their space according to their country’s culture, style and architecture. In 2021, Natalie participated in the Black in Design Mentorship Program and later in the GSD’s Design Discovery Virtual program.
Olivia Fox is a senior at Brookline High School, and grew up in Roxbury. She has the support of her mom, her teachers, and her new mentors acquired from the Black in Design Program. Olivia enjoys after school cheer and she loves to listen to and play music, specifically guitar because she has been playing since she was six. She also enjoys taking care of her 13 plants. What she likes about design is the ability to do it “anywhere and at any time; it’s so easy to make it your own, you can design a space, a shoe, a guitar, the list goes on and on.” Oliva participated in the inaugural launch of the Black in Design Mentorship Program, which provided her with the opportunity to join the GSD’s Design Discovery Virtual program, where she continued to meet so many great people. Through these opportunities, Olivia learned more about design and what it can be and how to look at art and architecture through different perspectives.
Erika Eitland is the Director of the Human Experience (Hx) Lab at Perkins&Will where she is focused on the public health impact of K-12 schools, affordable housing and urban resilience. She received her doctorate from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Environmental Health where she was the lead author of ‘Schools for Health: Foundations for Student Success’ report that examined more than 250 scientific articles on the association between building quality and student health and performance. She has presented her research internationally at the World Bank, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration, American Society of Interior Design and U.S. Green Building Council. She also holds a Masters of Public Health in Climate and Health from Columbia University.
Wanjiku Ngare is a Master of Urban Planning candidate at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. She is broadly interested in how planning and design can be in deeper dialogue with public imagination as we build a more just world. She sees spatial and policy interventions that center the voices and needs of marginalized communities as critical levers for increasing equity. Wanjiku has a Bachelor of Science in foreign service from Georgetown University. Post-college, her professional experiences spanned from expanding renewable energy in response to the climate crisis through project finance; to reducing key barriers for smallholder farmers in East African countries through feasibility studies and funding strategies. In her spare time, she has taken her passion for art and storytelling into building a social impact campaign for a recently premiered feature-length documentary film, Dreams of Daraa. She is also a member of the Black in Design 2021 conference organizing committee.
David Carter is an alumnus of Baltimore School for the Arts and Morgan State University, and has recently joined Hive Design Collaborative as an Architectural Designer in Kansas City, Missouri. David graduated with his bachelor’s degree in 2019 and relocated to the Midwest to pursue his first architecture opportunity at a firm in Springfield, Missouri. He gained 2 years of experience in project management for retail developments, which enhanced his ability to conduct different projects. As a new member of Hive, David is striving to help cultivate new designs by integrating his aesthetic vision into future project developments.

 
Workshop 5: Design as Protest
Kiki Cooper earned a B.A. in Landscape Architecture from The Pennsylvania State University and currently is studying at the Harvard Graduate School of Design for concurrent Master’s degrees in Landscape Architecture in Urban Design and Design Studies. Kiki is an active member of the ASLA Emerging Professionals Committee and is a Design as Protest Core Organizer. During their undergrad and after entering the profession, they developed a myriad of passions that shaped their core design principles rooted in food security, equitable design, community building, and design justice.
Deena Darby received her Bachelor of Architecture from Syracuse University and is an emerging professional pursuing licensure in New York. Originally from Savannah, GA, she attended a performing arts high school where her specialized focus was in contemporary and classical ballet. Initially sparked by her background in dance, her passions in architecture lie in the design of socially just and environmentally responsive cultural, civic, and public spaces, believing these spaces are the ones that have the most diverse user group and thus have the potential to have the greatest impact on those who occupy and experience them. She has been a Core Organizer with Design as Protest since June of 2020 focused on design justice through Direct Action. She has served as a guest reviewer at Ryerson University and the Urban Assembly School of Design and Construction. In 2020 she was one of 16 emerging professionals selected for the AIA TORCH Mentorship Program and is an active member of nycobaNOMA and Design Advocates. She currently works at Studio Fōr and resides in Brooklyn, NY.
Sophie Weston Chien is a designer-organizer. She focuses on solving complex social-spatial issues by building communities and spaces to promote social and ecological justice. Sophie is pursuing a Masters in Landscape Architecture at the GSD as a Dean’s Merit Scholar and is one-half of the collaboration Just Practice. She is a core member of the Design As Protest Collective, and on the Board of Directors at DESIGNXRI. She has a BFA/Bachelor of Architecture from Rhode Island School of Design with a minor in Politics and Policy and served as Student Body President, AIA Diversity Advancement Scholar, and Maharam Fellow. Sophie has worked for National Park Service in Nome, Agency Landscape + Planning in Cambridge, Oualalou + Choi in Paris, LA-Màs in Los Angeles, Biden/Harris Campaign in Charlotte, and recently served as a Teaching Fellow at RISD Architecture.
Ebony Dumas is an Urban and Regional Planner highly skilled at building consensus among multiple stakeholders for local and national projects in economic development, creative placemaking, and neighborhood planning. Interested in creative and public spaces as they contribute to economic development, Ebony has also developed presentations on equitable solutions and community building for conferences, university groups, and national cultural institutions. Ebony is an Associate Planner in Arlington County, Virginia’s Comprehensive Planning team, an Association for Community Design board member, and a DJ (aka DJ Natty Boom) who spins music that ranges from Tropical Bass, International Pop, House and Hip-Hop. She has also played at diverse venues such as The JFK Center for the Performing Arts, DC’s 9:30 Club and across the Mid-Atlantic Region, New Orleans, and Lima, Peru.
Taylor Holloway is a designer, architect, and educator who uses design-driven approaches to promote equity in the built environment. As a biracial woman, first generation college graduate, and individual who has experienced the U.S. foster care system, issues of creative voice, belonging, and healing are personal to her. Her work is focused on developing new and radical uses of public space, advancing collective capacities for social impact, and championing the preservation of shared cultural legacies. With a unique ability to see and capture different perspectives, Taylor is adept at identifying assets and utilizing resources in order to facilitate the creation of people- and community-centered design solutions. Taylor holds a Bachelor of Arts from Wellesley College, a Master of Architecture from the University of Illinois, and is honored to be a 2020 NextCity Vanguard, a 2019 Association for Community Design Fellow, an AIA Jason Pettigrew Memorial ARE Scholar, and the 2013 AIA Chicago Martin Roche Travel Fellow. Her organization, Public Design Agency, utilizes design-thinking, public art, and architecture to train future generations of designers, builders, & change-makers.
 
Conference Chairs
Caleb Negash, cochair of Black in Design 2021, is an MArch I candidate at the GSD. He has worked for the African American Design Nexus as a writer, researcher, and cohost of the podcast The Nexus , exploring the intersections of design, identity, and practice through interviews with Black artists, designers, writers, and educators. Before attending the GSD, he taught architecture studios at Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Singapore, and received a BA in Architecture from Princeton University. His research interests include uncovering and narrating Black spatial practices that have been disenfranchised, discredited, or ignored within architectural and urban history.
Tomi Laja, cochair of Black in Design 2021, is an MArch II candidate at the GSD and holds a BArch degree from Iowa State University. Currently, she is an editorial assistant at Harvard Design Magazine and a program assistant at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Before attending the GSD, her previous experiences include contributing to The Funambulist by Its Readers: Political Geographies from Chicago and Elsewhere and the Making Futures Bauhaus+ Mobile Workshop with Raumlabor for the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial, as well as assistant editing The Funambulist Magazine: Politics of Space and Bodies in Paris and Scapegoat: Architecture, Landscape, and Political Economy in Berlin. With professional interests in research-based architectural and exhibition design and writing, her research includes Afrofuturist and ecofeminist perspectives as they relate to agency, consciousness, and the built environment.

Loeb Lecture: Reginald Dwayne Betts, “Felon: A play; A discourse”

Registration Information

The GSD’s Fall 2021 Public Programs are all virtual and require registration. Click here to register for Loeb Lecture: Reginald Dwayne Betts, “Felon: A play; A discourse” The event will also be live streamed to the Harvard GSD YouTube page. Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. If you would like to submit questions for the speaker in advance of the event, please click here.   Live captioning will be provided during this event.

Event Description

Paper, perhaps surprisingly, is a key part of the prison experience. Paper gets you in and sometimes gets you free. Chasing paper on the front is the catalyst to cuffs for many; making papers — that is, parole — is the hope of freedom for others. Inside, letters from family are lifelines, earning the slang moniker “kite” and there is an edge of exhilaration when a kite is slipped into a cell by a guard during mail call or under a cell door by another prisoner. For years after my release, I carried around a slip of paper in my wallet. A receipt for twenty-five dollars and seventy-one cent, the last of the money I’d earned working for 45 cent an hour in a Virginia prison. The experience is marked by paper. Transforming the paper into art complexifies the experience, makes it more than loss, more than the account for crimes and prison time that seem to stalk.

Felon: An America Washi Tale is about re-imagining paper. A solo performance that begins with the pages of a book being slid into a cell, traverses stoves made of toilet paper, kites from a father, handwritten affidavits, legal complaints, handmade paper, certificates of pardon, & a 1,000 squares fashioned from the clothing of men serving life sentences, the variety of papers that reveals what is possible and burdened by prison. Here, I weave traditional theater, poetry, fine art, and Japanese paper making aesthetic principles into a meditation on my own experiences of incarceration and my legal work to free friends that are still in prison. This reflection on the challenges of living in the shadow of mass incarceration is a story of violence, love, and fatherhood. The set is a collaboration created by Kyoko Ibe from “prison paper” that Ruth Lignen constructed from the clothes of men I first met in prison, each of whom were still in prison during the earliest stages of this project. Directed by Elisa Theron, this Washi Tale moves literally and metaphorically beyond my own life, unwrapping the disturbing ways that prison touches us all.

Purchase the book Felon from the Harvard Bookstore .

Speaker

In October 2018, The New York Times Magazine published Reginald Dwayne Betts ’ long essay “Getting Out.” Several months later, the piece was awarded a National Magazine Award. The publication was another example of Betts entering into a new genre and bringing the same depth and richness of self-reflection and exploration of the central problem on this generation: incarceration and its effects on families and communities.

Betts transformed himself from a sixteen-year old kid sentenced to nine-years in prison to a critically acclaimed writer and graduate of the Yale Law School. He has written two collections of poetry, the recently published and critically acclaimed Bastards of the Reagan Era  and Shahid Reads His Own Palm . When he was awarded the PEN New England Award for poetry for his collection, Bastards of the Reagan Era, judge Mark Doty said: “Betts has written an indelible lament for a generation, a necessary book for this American moment.” His memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison , is the story of a young man confined in the worst prisons in the state of Virginia, where solitary confinement, horrific conditions, and the constant violence threatened to break his humanity. Instead, Betts used the time to turn himself into a poet, a scholar, and an advocate for the reform of the criminal justice system.

Betts’ latest collection of poetry, Felon , interrogates and challenges our notions of justice. Longtime New York Times critic, Michiko Kukatani calls Betts’ work both “haunting and harrowing.” A recent collaboration with visual artist Titus Kaphar lead to The Redaction , an exhibition of prints at MoMA PS1. Drawing inspiration and source material from lawsuits filed by the Civil Rights Corps on behalf of people incarcerated because of an inability to pay court fines and fees, The Redaction features poetry by Betts in combination with Kaphar’s etched portraits of incarcerated individuals. Together, Betts’ poems and Kaphar’s printed portraits blend the voices of poet and artist with those of the plaintiffs and prosecutors, reclaiming these lost narratives and drawing attention to some of the many individuals whose lives have been impacted by mass incarceration.

A widely requested speaker, Betts often gives talks about his own experience, detailing his trek from incarceration to Yale Law School and the role that grit, perseverance, and literature played in his success. In addition, he has given lectures on topics ranging from mass incarceration to contemporary poetry and the intersection of literature and advocacy. Betts has given commencement speeches at Quinnipiac University and Warren Wilson College and has lectured widely at universities and conferences, including Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, the University of Maryland, the Beyond the Bench conference, and a wide range of organizations across the country.

Between his work in public defense, his years of advocacy, and Betts’ own experiences as a teenager in maximum security prisons, he is uniquely positioned to speak to the failures of the current criminal justice system and presents encouraging ideas for change. As a result of that work, President Barack Obama appointed Betts to the Coordinating Council of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and, more recently, Governor Ned Lamont of Connecticut appointed him to the Criminal Justice Commission, the state body responsible for hiring prosecutors in Connecticut.

Named a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2018 NEA Fellow, Betts’ poetry has long been praised. His writing has generated national attention and earned him a Soros Justice Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Ruth Lily Fellowship, an NAACP Image Award, and New America Fellowship. Betts has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post, as well as being interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air, The Travis Smiley Show and several other national shows. He holds a B.A. from the University of Maryland; an M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College, where he was a Holden Fellow; and a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was awarded the Israel H. Perez Prize for best student note or comment appearing in the Yale Law Journal. He is a Ph. D. in Law candidate at Yale and, as a Liman Fellow, he spent a year representing clients in the New Haven Public Defender’s Office.

Follow Reginald Dwayne Betts on Twitter .