news + events

one-week laboratory
June 2-8, 2025. Organized by Collective Effervescence (Hala Abdel Malak, Barbara Adams, and Jane Pirone), this one-week event brings together a dynamic group of filmmakers, artists, scholars, farmers, and activists hailing from Lebanon, Brazil, Spain, Bulgaria, the US, the UK, and the Netherlands. These transdisciplinary researchers and creative practitioners resist the ways in which rising fascism, xenophobia, chronic crises, and violence invoke division and fear, weaponizing difference and fostering discord. During the laboratory, we explore responses to current geopolitical shifts with special attention given to the Mediterranean—a region whose historical encounters have established the area as a zone of conflict.

symposium
November 8, 2024. Organized by Barbara Adams and Jane Pirone, this one-day symposium (Beyond Borders: Shifting Landscapes, Multiple Temporalities, and Posthuman Horizons) brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers, artists, scholars, and creative practitioners to explore how we navigate and challenge the borders that separate the past from the present, one spatial and political designation from another, the animate from the inanimate, and species from species. From the role of water in bordering practices to how we might decolonize botany to the ways queering ecology can reconfigure relationships, this event prompts thinking beyond imperial taxonomies, human centrality, and progressive notions of time. More here. 

workshop
October 25-26, 2023. Jane Pirone, Hala A. Malak, Roumiana Gotseva and I will lead the workshop, Fabulations, Fluxus, and Flow at the World Futures Studies Federation XXV World Conference. More here. 

symposium
March 16-17, 2023. Along with Alison Clarke, Shannon Mattern, and Aryana Ghazi-Hessami, I have been supporting and organizing the upcoming Papanek Symposium. More details here. 

workshop
November 4, 2022. I will be leading a workshop, Speculative Storytelling as Transformative Practice, with Jane Pirone, Hala Malak, Lauren Parater, and Shanice Costa at the Anticipation 2022 Conference in Tempe, Arizona.

talk + video
September 29, 2022. Jane Pirone, Hala Malak, and I will present our work, Terra Testimony: Soil as a Living Archive, at the Feral Palace Conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia. 

conversation
September 14, 2022. Jane Pirone, Hala Malak, and I have organized a talk with Mark Randall and Ernesto Collado to discuss their work with bees. Join us for The Metaphor of the Hive: Honeybees, Humans and Biodiversity at Parsons.  

workshop
June 30, 2022. I will be leading a workshop with collaborators Jane Pirone, Hala Malak, Lauren Parater, Cian Mcalone, and Shanice Costa at the Co-Futures conference in Oslo.  

lecture series
February 25-March 24, 2022. I've worked with a group to organize this year's Weiss Lecture series centering Raoul Peck's four-part series, Exterminate All the Brutes. Each screening is followed by a discussion with invited guests. Sponsored by the School of Design Strategies at Parsons.

webinar
December 9, 2021. I'll be talking with Lauren Parater at UNHCR about speculative storytelling, narrative change and the future of humanitarian work as part of Project Unsung's webinar series, New Narratives for Humanitarian Futures. 

talk + video
May 15, 2021. John Bruce and I will be presenting our paper and video, "Public Library Workers, Unconditional Hospitality and Shared Leadership: at The Social Life of Care Conference at Cambridge University. 

assembly
possibilities for thought and action: DESIS @ 10. Reflecting on the last decade, this event considered how design intervenes in and responds to contemporary contexts and crises. As an organizer, I worked with the lab to assemble a diverse group of practitioners to explore how they are forging alliances and developing practices that not only react to social, political, environmental, and economic issues, but also actively redefine these conditions. Participants included: Shana Agid, Ahmed Ansari, American Artist, Francisca Benítez, Wendy Brawer, John Bruce, Michael Carey, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Jodi Dean, Pablo Helguera, Amy Khoshbin, Carin Kuoni, Ezio Manzini, Miodrag Mitrašinović, Kristen Morse, Mari Nakano, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, David Colby Reed, Radhika Subramaniam, and Susan Yelavich. From this, we continue to develop our assembly model that is used in courses and events associated with the lab. 

discussion series
The Ethnography Dialogues (2015-16) was a series of lunchtime conversations that brought practitioners and researchers from the world of design together with researchers from the social sciences to discuss ethnographic practice, its articulations, uses, boundaries, and possibilities. The series created a space in which to consider the divides and resonances between the academy and the professional world, to foster dialogue on the uses and meanings of ethnography, and to share experience, insight, and reflection.