Current Affairs #1
Meanderings from Emergent Grounds
Top Five
Hey y’all,
Hello again from Emergent Grounds. This edition summarizes some of our activities since the last newsletter we published 15 months ago, in March 2021. We’re excited to bring back our newsletter, under the title:
CURRENT AFFAIRS
Support
We are excited to announce financial support for Emergent Grounds from two sources: the Graham Foundation and Project STAND. These grants will sustain our continued efforts, particularly the Emergent Grounds Archive.
About Graham: Founded in 1956, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts fosters the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society. The Graham realizes this vision through making project-based grants to individuals and organizations and producing exhibitions, events, and publications.
About Project STAND: Project STAND is a radical grassroots archival consortia project between colleges and universities across the country; to create a centralized digital space highlighting analog and digital collections emphasizing student activism in marginalized communities. Project STAND aims to foster ethical documentation of contemporary and past social justice movements in underdocumented student populations.
From Penitentiary Philosophies to Abolitionist Alternatives (PPAA)
In the summer of 2021, we found ourselves returning often to conversations about the abolition of policing and prisons. Inspired by engagements with organizers we met through networks of the Architecture Lobby (TAL) and Design as Protest (DAP), and driven by carceral work we found ourselves tasked with in our day jobs, we worked with members of TAL’s Racial Justice Working Group to adapt an existing workshop on carceral design into ‘From Penitentiary Philosophies to Abolitionist Alternatives’ (PPAA), a 1.5 hour interactive teach-in designed to bring students, alumni, educators, practitioners and activists into conversation with each other around questions of carceral design, abolitionist advocacy, student and emergent practitioner agency.
A participatory activity from our February 2022 workshop with UC Berkeley NOMAS and Bay Area partners. Faces have been obscured to protect participants’ privacy.
We have hosted three PPAA teach-ins:
October 2021: The Design School at ASU, NOMA Arizona, TAL Phoenix
February 2022: UC Berkeley NOMAS, SFNOMA, TAL Bay Area
April 2022: Tulane School of Architecture, members of Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson’s Transition Teams
We are immensely grateful to the educators, students and practitioners who participated, and especially to those who took part in organizing these teach-ins with us - especially the late Prescott Reavis, whose support was instrumental in shaping the series, and to whom our February workshop is dedicated.
Be a part of the Emergent Grounds Archive!
Our collective’s name, EGDE, ‘Emergent Grounds for Design Education’, references emergent strategy, an organizing philosophy for political, social and organizational change theorized by writer adrienne maree brown from sources including 20th century Black freedom movement organizer Ella Baker and the visionary fiction of Octavia Butler. Emergent strategy emphasizes adaptability, human relationships and a connection to ecology - organized change. In the fall of 2020, Harold Fisk’s Mississippi River meander maps inspired a visual representation of our organizing philosophy. As the river changes course, each generation building upon the path laid out by the last, student and alumni organizers work on institutionally geologic timescales to bend design academia and the design professions toward conditions of justice and equity. Like Fisk’s maps, Emergent Grounds seeks to archive and make visible past currents of activism, as guides for future generations.
The Emergent Grounds Archive has grown organically from the earliest months of our collective, in which organizers across institutions and geographies came together to share our strategies as design students and practitioners demanding racial justice before, during and after the summer of 2020. The archive will collect narratives from student organizers past and present.
Have you participated in a letter writing campaign or other organizing effort to decolonize design education? Interested in being a part of this project? Use this form to share your contact information.
Yours from Emergent Grounds,
Michelle, Chris and My-Anh