overview
My research examines the methods used in generating artifacts and spaces of engagement that facilitate the capacity to form acting, speaking publics. This has included ethnographic work with squatters organizing shared housing, adolescent girls establishing belonging in public space, while more recently my research has turned to the practices of artists and designers. My current research projects focus on displacement. Transdisciplinary and collaborative, this work asks how speculative and visionary fiction might provide alternatives to stories of damage, resilience, and heroism.
My dissertation, The Artist in the Social Field: Contemporary Art and the Sociological Imagination, looked at the practices of contemporary artists whose work has affinity with community organizing, political activism, anthropology and service design. These artists engage the sociological imagination and create aesthetic experiences that embrace an ethos of world-making that nurtures participation and public discourse. My research explores how forums for dialogue are created through art projects that inaugurate new rituals and techniques of engagement. These are examined through scenarios developed by creative practitioners who aim to materialize social and political forms via platforms that establish unorthodox variables for (inter)action. The artists participating in my research address the anomic and precarious conditions in which we live—the loss of civility in public space, the marginalization of social groups, the institutionalization of inequalities, the commodification of society and culture, and the ways in which legacies of imperialist exploitation continue to shape our world—and make provocative assumptions about the kinds of knowledge and action art might initiate.
research
previous research
My coedited book, Design as Future Making, addresses these themes using the perspective of design whereas my dissertation looked strictly at contemporary art. While a Mellon Fellow from 2015-2016, at the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography and Social Thought (GIDEST), I led a project with two collaborators that examined the ways in which social scientists, artists and designers use ethnographic methods in their work. Through a series of dialogues (The Ethnography Dialogues) where practitioners talked across fields, we explored the ways in which ethnography is understood and employed in these disciplines. The project involved the creation of an archive and exhibition (Ethnography in the Expanded Field) that showcased the expansiveness of ethnography today. In all of these projects, I have a particular interest in how artists and designers leverage alternate logics and methods to produce knowledge that is in relation to, yet different from that produced by social scientists. As part of my research, I co-create and participate in environments (e.g. The Institute for Art Scene Studies; Workshopping the Unruly) that bring artists into conversation with researchers from the human sciences.
​
Beyond claims that dismiss artistic research as simply a naïve form of social science lacking necessary rigor, my research considers how artists who work in the social realm produce knowledge that blurs the lines between object making, performance, political activism, community organizing, and research. Socially engaged artists anticipate changes in presence and create experimental scenarios where participants rehearse alternate ways of being and acting in the world. The works of art and practices studied in my projects are active in the redesign of systems, the creation of alternative economies, the development of progressive forms of education, and the organization of platforms for poetic decision-making. They employ methods derived from action research, ethnography, and practice-based inquiry.
​
My research demonstrates that, at times, this work is frictionless—or worse, agnostic about outcomes, reifying privilege, discouraging dissent, and allegorizing people—while, at other times, the artwork succeeds in visualizing and materializing abstract forms and relations in the public imagination that would otherwise remain too remote or amorphous. My work contributes to our understanding of how practitioners from the fields of art and the social sciences might develop shared methods and visions not only to diagnose the world in which we live, but also to act as a dissenting force with the capacity to offer perspectives and experiences counter to dominant social and cultural forms. This research argues that art can generate novel, reflexive zones that operate outside rigid methodologies and defined disciplines. This can widen the field of knowledge production and activate and distribute agency.
current and
future work
During my time as a research resident at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) and as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Wesleyan University, I began work on a book that will trace a history of creative and poetic forms in sociology and will consider how art and design can redirect sociological practice. I am also working on an extended essay that will be published as a small book that examines the politics of helping and possibilities for solidarity as a mode of action in socially engaged art and design projects. These two manuscripts elaborate the following themes that first emerged in my doctoral research:
-
the methods artists use when conducting social research and the types of knowledge produced through these practices;
-
the modes of engagement artists employ when people constitute the artistic medium; and
-
the ways in which creative practices can initiate and activate public discourse and action.
The ways in which artists and designers participate in worldmaking, crafting the artifacts and spaces we have in common, informs my recent research projects. For the past two years, I worked with the Innovation Service at UNHCR using speculative approaches to reimagine humanitarian response, asking difficult questions about the state of the organization, the world it inhabits, and futures it shapes through its current actions. This work resulted in a course (Speculative Storytelling) co-taught with UNHCR staff, an exhibition with programming at PODIUM in Oslo, conference presentations, webinars, and the book Project Unsung (for which I wrote two essays). From 2019-2022, I was part of an NEA supported project at the DESIS Lab, where I conducted traditional and video-based ethnographic research to explore the notions of care and justice as these are active in the Brooklyn Public Library’s services. With a focus on BPL’s programming related to incarceration and reentry, this research aimed to understand inclusionary and justice-based practices at BPL. I led a research team of graduate students who collaborated with library staff, patrons, and partners, instituting art and design-based approaches that built on existing assets and strategies.
Currently, I am beginning three interconnected new projects that focus (albeit differently) on issues of displacement—with GrowHouseNYC in Brooklyn, with UniMak Futures Literacy Center and the UNESCO Chair in Sierra Leone, and with a coalition of collaborators in Lebanon (including the Center for Civic Engagement and Community Service at the American University of Beirut, Aammiq Wetland, Ghata schools for tented settlements, Lebanon Mountain Trail Association, and various arts and cultural organizations). Like the projects above, these research projects will also intersect with my teaching in ways that enrich student learning. Foundational to these projects is a commitment to building sustainable relationships between community organizers, creative practitioners, social researchers, and the various institutional entities involved.
Adapted in site-specific ways to speak both to and across unique locales and situations, these linked projects ask: How might speculative storytelling play a role in initiating change and generating futures based in justice and belonging? How might we reimagine stories of stasis as those of transformation by asking what else is possible? What do future stories of mutuality, interdependence, and belonging look like? What would climate-resilient, planet-conscious, and regenerative aid look like? How might we respond to the slow violence surrounding communities in the face of ecological loss? How do we respond to what is invisible, unseen and fractured? What would the world look like if we put intergenerational justice and long-term thinking at the heart of policy and decision making?
In parallel to (and drawing from) this research, I am working on a book project (noted above) that explores how methods for sociological understanding might be buttressed by artistic interventions that are aesthetic, lyrical, and performative. From W.E.B. Dubois’ modernist data visualizations to C. Wright Mills’ notion of “sociological poetry” to understandings that social research first emerged from English Romanticism, this project involves a historical approach as well as an examination of contemporary art practice. Art’s trajectory over the last fifty years has included a sequence of investigations that eroded the distinction between artistic imagination and scientific logic. Inquiries into the conditions of perception, challenges as to what constitutes a work of art, and recognition that the artist is not defined by the limits of the gallery, studio and museum, have encouraged artists to develop dispositions and practices formerly circumscribed by the social sciences. Conversely, as social scientists increasingly acknowledge how representations (in the forms of statistics, maps, charts, and archives, for example) freeze and distort the flow of human experience, they increasingly engage in aesthetic and poetic practice. Conceptual art, artistic research, relational aesthetics, socially engaged art, littoral art, social aesthetics, and dialogic art, among others have moved the artist toward exploration of a larger cultural field just as the various ‘turns’ (e.g. cultural, aesthetic, corporeal) have moved social scientists toward the artistic. This project will explore these intersections and the possibilities for collaboration and shared practices, bringing different perspectives to bear on pressing problems. Central to the research is the question: How might the combined fields of art and the human sciences better engage the sociological imagination as a transdisciplinary capability that can equip us in reckoning with our most vexing social issues?
​
​
