recent course offerings
Biodesign Challenge Studio
Graduate Studio, Parsons School of Design
The Biodesign Challenge is an international program engaging over fifty schools and universities through an extensive resource and learning platform and within a large community and network of scientists, designers, and theorists. The Summit takes place in June each year, and is a competition, symposium and showcase of student projects that explore biotech’s entanglements within society—in the way it empowers people, contributes to structural inequities, and creates opportunities for change. Today’s designer must become fluent and engaged with this critical new domain that includes a range of transdisciplinary approaches, from bioengineering and biotechnology, to bio-art, biomimicry, biofabrication and biodesign. Through this course, we invite participation of students and teams at The New School to develop biologically informed exploration(s) that are socially, environmentally, and critically engaged. We will work with you to examine, develop and advise projects/research directions that intend to inform future designers to work with biotech thoughtfully and ethically. Projects should critically push the limits of current industry/practices and provoke new ways to design for the future. This course is multidisciplinary and collaborative.
Political Imagination
Graduate Seminar-Studio, Anthropology, New School for Social Research
This course focuses on imagination as a mode of inquiry and as a site of political creativity. We will build on long standing work on the sensorium to expand conceptions of the political, providing students with the opportunity to generate new imaginative possibilities. Approaches include building a research practice that involves walking, archiving, mapping, multimedia and sensory-oriented fieldwork, speculative storytelling, and practicing material synaesthesia. Grounded in a series of site engagements, the course will foreground sensorial literacies and methods of ‘observation’ that include but go beyond the visual, developing mimetic capacities and embodied modes of understanding and relating. We center collaboration and cooperation as essential modes of inquiry and practice. Possible sites range from a sewer grate to local waterways and sidewalk trees to botanical gardens. We will look to living systems asking what the natural world can teach us about mutual aid, recovery, and restoration, while emphasizing traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), queer and non-binary perspectives, and multi-species cosmopolitics. We will work collectively to develop alternative visions and approaches that challenge the myths, metaphors, practices, and narratives that make it difficult to shape the world and our futures in ways that center justice. The class is co-taught by faculty from across the university—Barbara Adams, Victoria Hattam, and Jane Pirone—each of whom has rather different but overlapping interests and backgrounds. We come together to create an experimental learning space from which we will imagine alternate presents and future possibilities.
Speculative Storytelling
Studio-Seminar, Art, Media, and Technology, Parsons School of Design
This collaboration studio actively engages with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Innovation Service (UNHCR) and members of UNESCO’s Futures Literacy Network to explore storytelling and speculative fabulation as a practice of design. We explore the capacities of stories to build relationships, challenge entrenched power dynamics, and prompt imagination beyond the representational. Engaging storytelling as a ‘cosmological technology,’ we work together to develop alternative visions and approaches that challenge the myths, metaphors, and narratives that make it difficult to shape futures that center justice in organizational processes. With an emphasis on transformation, we disrupt traditional storytelling practices and tropes through the use of cut-ups, recombinant narrative, visionary fiction, collaborative meaning-making, non-linear, and transmedia forms. In conversation with science fiction, queer and feminist theories, indigenous discourses, Afrofuturism, and other performative interventions, this course explores how speculative and critical approaches to design can act as catalysts for imagining alternate presents and possible futures. We engage intersectional themes such as ecological collapse, the politics of humanitarianism, belonging and identity, and living and complex systems.
Anthropology + Design
Graduate Seminar, Anthropology, New School for Social Research
Designers commonly use ethnographic methods, and social scientists often adopt design practices, economies, cultures, and artifacts as their subjects of study, focusing in particular on how design “translates values into tangible experiences,” as anthropologist Dori Tunstall puts it. The New School offers us a unique environment for studying the myriad ways in which these disciplines and practices can inform one another, and we’ll begin our semester by examining those relationships: anthropology of design, ethnography for design, ethnography as design, and so forth. We’ll then explore some conceptual case studies, taking up various anthropological concepts and concerns and observing how they’re designed—made material, experiential, affective; given form—through a range of design practices (e.g., from urban design and architecture to fashion and software design), and how anthropological concepts and methods inform those practices. Throughout the semester we’ll host guest lectures and take field trips to see these methods in action, and students will have the opportunity to conduct a final research project, which could take the form of a written research paper, an ethnographic report, or a research-based creative project. While this seminar serves as the core course for the Anthropology and Design track, graduate students from across the university are encouraged to enroll.
Speculative Social Justice
Graduate project-based studio, Transdisciplinary Design MFA Program, Parsons School of Design
In this studio, we experiment with estrangement and defamiliarization in the creation of provocative scenarios and imaginative artifacts as a way to envision more just ways of inhabiting the world. We begin with the premise that design, as an integrated mode of thought and action, is intrinsically social and deeply political. In conversation with science fiction, queer and feminist theories, indigenous discourses, Afrofuturism, drag and other performative interventions, this course explores how speculative and critical approaches to design can act as catalysts for imagining alternate presents and possible futures. From alien kinship to the undercommons, we consider subversive responses to dispossession, marginalization, precarity, and the forces that foreclose or curtail the possibility of a future. Mass incarceration, refugee crises, and the need to assert that lives matter—whether Black, trans, or otherwise, call for design responses that are critical and capable of suspending disbelief about change. Through design, students in this course will enact speculative forms of social justice that draw on radical traditions and will develop and materialize narratives beyond the normative.
Libraries as Sites of Unconditional Hospitality
Graduate project-based studio, Transdisciplinary Design MFA Program, Parsons School of Design
There are few places in our society that offer opportunities to engage with people, share services, or exchange resources without structural partitions or economic demands. We are accustomed to speaking to one another through glass dividers, paying fees to belong, and purchasing things as a condition for use. In this context, public libraries are an exception, offering refuge. While most institutions operate according to principles of exclusion, libraries are committed to inclusionary practices. This studio explores the radical hospitality of the public library and considers how design responses might strengthen and contribute to the ways in which hospitality establishes links between people and groups, redrawing parameters of alliance. Hospitality extends protection, enables survival, fosters connectedness, and conveys respect. It converts strangers into familiars and repositions outsiders as insiders. With this in mind, we will explore formal and informal inclusionary programs and practices at the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL). This will include, but is not limited to, services for immigrants, older adults, the unhoused, and those transitioning out of correctional systems. Building on BPL’s existing strategic plan, we will seek local and situated knowledges and will engage these assets in the design process. We will leverage the social infrastructural capacities and the expanded mission of the library to explore how designerly knowledge and practice might contribute to the library’s efforts to meet the needs of local residents while nurturing the conviviality that comes with finding “commonality in difference.”
Social Practice
Undergraduate university lecture course, The New School/Parsons School of Design
How is it that a work of art may now double as a restaurant, a barter network, a walking tour, a community garden, a scientific study, a town hall meeting, or a virtual community archive, and vice-versa? Since the turn of the 21st century, artistic projects that invite exchange, imagine new social relationships, and provoke individual and collective actions have grown increasingly influential, especially amongst a younger generation of creative practitioners around the world. This transdisciplinary approach is typically characterized by collaboration across liberal art and art/ design disciplines. Rather than being the product of a single artist working within an isolated studio, social practice projects are driven by the desire to connect, to look outside oneself in meaningful and tangible ways, and to positively impact daily life within specific communities—often co-created with people with a variety of life experiences. For this kind of socially-engaged work to have an impact as both action and artwork, artists, designers, writers, scholars, architects, urban planners, and curators (among others) must develop a unique set of social and material skills. They must demonstrate an awareness of local histories and a nuanced understanding of the relationship between social justice, polemics and poetics, and learn a set of critical tools that can help an artist work in this field and improve their practice. This course offers a theoretical and historical foundation for students interested in socially-engaged practices within or across their own disciplines, whether they are studying in the liberal arts, art and design, or the performing arts. It will introduce some of the economic, political, and aesthetic forces that have influenced the emergence of these contemporary art and design practices. Through assigned texts, case studies, possible site visits, writing assignments and group projects, students will investigate art historical legacies that challenge the boundaries between “art” and “life”; study methodologies stemming from social justice movements, new ways of teaching and learning, and ethnography; and engage in current debates regarding the ethics of cultural production in the public sphere. This course satisfies a requirement for the Social Practice minor. [This ULEC is in category 1, Tools for Social Change.] Note: Students must register for both the lecture and discussion section of this course. Both the lecture meeting of this course and all discussion sections will be delivered in-person and on campus.
Thinking with Things
Undergraduate seminar, Parsons School of Design
Writing intensive first year seminar, Wesleyan University
This course explores the ways in which we think and act in relation to things. At times provocations for thought, at times emotional companions or functional collaborators, things are not only symbolic carriers of the values and meanings that we assign but are also active in shaping the world and our experiences. We critically consider the implications of this and the role of things in a variety of contexts from the historical to the emotional to the sociocultural to the sacred. The course considers how we make, use, and consume things and how, in turn, things make, use, and consume us. Transdisciplinary in its orientation, this course draws insight from anthropology, cultural studies, philosophy, material studies, art, and design. We will examine a range of projects dealing with objects and these will serve as inspirational, theoretical, and methodological models for the projects students will develop over the course of the semester as they explore social and political issues through the materiality of things.
The City through the Body
Undergraduate seminar, Parsons School of Design
The cultural theorist Siegfried Kracauer claimed, “one’s body takes root in the asphalt.” This course begins with that claim to explore sensuous encounters in and with the city. Smells, sounds, visions, textures, and tastes mark cities as environments that cultivate hedonism, pleasure, and desire. How do bodies and senses order space and configure experience? How do we ‘make sense’ in and through urban environments? If we take cities as sensory sites, what are some research strategies we can use to explore the relationship between bodies and cities? The course provides a framework for exploration of various understandings of cities, bodies, experience, and the senses as presented and expressed in social theory, art, film, music, and literature. Using a transdisciplinary perspective, students are encouraged to experiment with creative approaches to understanding unique and diverse embodied, urban experiences. We address collective and individual bodies and the associated politics engaged and activated by subjective and social configurations.
Project Studio 1
Studio, Transdisciplinary Design MFA Program, Parsons School of Design
This studio course consisted of a series of modules organized over the course of two years. Those I developed and led included: Carceral Capitalism Study Group focused on incarceration and the carceral continuum. We approached this broad theme through study—a practice of gathering and directing our learning as a group. Through a series of activities with artists, designers, and researchers, we explored predictive policing, wrongful conviction, and abolition, among other issues. Embodying History, Provotyping Futures positionsed Dread Scott’s ‘Slave Rebellion’ (2019) project as a springboard for understanding historical legacies and enacting alternative futures. Through key concepts (provotypes, inflection points, crisis as extreme opportunities) and creative activities (performative re-enactment, cinematic scenario sketching), this module engaged students in activating communities/constituencies to envision bold new futures. Performing Education invited students to research, reenact, and reimagine alternative and traditional educational formats. Participants closely studied and created an archive of precedents, deconstructing and distilling components, values, practices, and competencies. We also explored and carefully rethought formats such as conferences, lectures, symposia, and workshops, experimenting with alternative modes through which we might activate these platforms. The (Geo)Politics of Helping critically explored the issues, inequities, ineffectualness, and injury related to and resulting from practices generally described as “community engagement,” “social impact,” “philanthropy,” and “helping.” In this studio event, we examined the (geo)politics of helping through the lenses of racial and social justice, as well as issues of colonization in global work, particularly in the context of the so-called “global South.” With two collaborators, one “global” (ThinkPlace) and one “local” (Center for Court Innovation), students developed ethical frameworks for community engagement, visualized the ecosystems around defined problems to make systems and power relationships apparent; and in small groups, proposed and assessed projects that establish differing modes of engagement and operate on different scales from awareness-raising campaigns, to treating symptoms, to action-oriented efforts that initiate deep systemic change. Language of Oppression focused on examining the language and framing of oppression and experimented with forms that propose and practice transformation via the visual, textual, cinematic, theatrical, artistic, and the ritualistic. We explored this with tiokasin ghosthorse from the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation of South Dakota in a series of conversations including a fire ceremony. Resonance engagesd participants in collective trance. In this altered state of consciousness, we explored remote realms difficult to access on our own across emotional, relational, conceptual and energetic planes. We explored collective avenues of growth and challenged encoded group patterns, asking: What does it mean to enter a common dream space? To resonate with each other across space, time, culture, subjectivity, outlook? Are there reflexive ways of approaching each other and the world around us outside of contemporary dissonance, alienation and cynicism? Mutual Aid and Caring Communities and Designing Communities of Care spanned two years and was a collaboration with students at Elisave developing the social capacities of Superblocks. Spatial Stories (Space as a Medium) involved a collaboration with the Flatbush African Burial Ground Coalition in Brooklny, NY.
