Guests and Collaborators
Autonomy Thinktank,
Unit 38,
David Rosenberg,
Ed Hall,
Helen Hester,
Dalia Gebrial,
Georgia Anderson,
Women’s Strike Campaign,
Careworker’s Union,
IWGB Union
Rural Urban Synthesis Society,
UVW Union Architect’s Branch
LSE Justice for Cleaners Campaign
Justice for Deliveroo Workers
Embodied Knowledge and Urban Struggle
Theory Module Leader, MA City Design, Royal College of Art (2020-)
Theory Module Leader, MA City Design, Royal College of Art (2020-)
‘That’s the first lesson. If you want to learn about something, you need to take your body onto the land and do it. Get a practice. If you want to learn about movement building, get yourself outside involved with people that are building movements. That doesn’t mean don’t read books, or don’t talk to people with all kinds of intelligences. It doesn’t mean don’t find mentors. It does mean, get out, get involved and get invested.’
Together, we work to situate city design in the collective knowledge(s), subjectivities and agencies produced with and through political campaigns and social movements, in order to to develop situated frameworks for encounter and engagement with the MA's sites and subjects of research; currently these are across Palestine (2021-) and along migrant passages in Europe (2022-).
Throughout the module, ways of thinking and being in the world that have historically been deemed ‘other’ are instead foregrounded and taken as foundational, building on the Subaltern position put forward by thinkers like Antonio Gramsci and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. A range of academic, journalistic, visual, filmic and audio literatures are brought into conversation with informal, situated and dialogical sources, namely a) materials produced in the moment and wake of struggle and b) perspectives voiced by those who struggle.
We also explore methodological and pedagogical frameworks disrupt the traditionally confined spaces of learning and acting.
Acknowledging the complex distribution of political and social power that comes with access to resources, autonomy, and/or influence, we strive to develop a mutualist approach to the production and interpretation of knowledge between ourselves, our references and our guests.
This sharpens and operationalises our understanding of established spatial notions like scale, context, perspective and relation and hold them to account for their effect on the world, building a critical relationship to the structures of knowledge itself and nurturing a critical, reflexive praxis that students can carry with them through their design proects and beyond.
Each term Comprises seminar sessionns, an Urban Struggles walk/walking tour
(East End, North Kensington, Somers Town), a 2-day Grassroots Organising Workshop
(Pelican House, Mayday Rooms, House of Annetta, Latin Village, Trellick Tower), and makes use of written and filmic literature. Submissions involve Miro Mapping, the design and publication of a Web-based essay and an Audio Essay. As the year progresses, I join the design module as tutor to help students account for and be accountable to the ethos of the theory module and course as a whole.
.
Exhibition Curtain
Book and pamphlet covers, pdf and video screenshots archival scans, bibliographical citations and quotes from across the year. It stitches together the voices of thinkers, practitioners, activists and the students themselves. The curtain will accumulate layers over time, gradually forming a patchwork of threads and frays of inquiry that have been woven together over the years
.