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Visiting Designer Aroussiak Gabrielian
Liberal Arts Division and NCSS Graduate Program
Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies welcomes Aroussiak Gabrielian, an environmental designer and bioartist working with living organisms, natural systems and atmospheric phenomena. Her work aims to torque our imaginaries to help us rethink our interactions with both human and non-human agents on this planet.
Aroussiak’s work has received numerous design recognitions including the Emerging Designer Awards from the Design Futures Initiative, the Tomorrowland Projects Foundation Award administered through the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Word Changing Ideas Awards recognized by Fast Company, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. She has exhibited internationally at various institutions, including SXSW, Ars Electronica, Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing, the Eli & Edith Broad Museum Art Lab, A+D Museum Los Angeles, Science Gallery Detroit, among others.
Aroussiak is Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism at the School of Architecture at USC, where she teaches design across ecologic and biologic scales. She is an Affiliate Faculty of Media Arts Practice at the School of Cinematic Arts and founding director of the Landscape Futures Lab - a design-research incubator focused on climate innovation and imagination. Outside of academia, Aroussiak is co-founder and Design Principal of foreground design agency, a critical design practice that aims to dismantle structures of power and privilege that render specific humans, species, and matter silent.
Organized by the NCSS Undergrad Concentration
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Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors
Liberal Arts Division, Grist Magazine, Fix Solutions Lab, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and Orion Magazine
Lecture, October 6, 2022. 6:30 pm, Metcalf Auditorium, Chace Center/RISD Museum. Fix, Grist Magazine’s Solutions Lab, invites you to join a conversation about decolonizing and diversifying climate storytelling, as explored in its climate fiction contest, Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors. Imagine 2200 judges Grace Dillon, Arkady Martine, and Sheree Renée Thomas will join Fix’s Tory Stephens on the RISD campus to discuss the relationship between climate fiction and climate solutions. They’ll also touch on the craft of weaving climate into all forms of storytelling, and how building deeply intersectional worlds helps create visions for a planet grounded in justice and abundance.
This event is presented in partnership with the RISD Division of Liberal Arts and the RISD Nature–Culture–Sustainability Studies Master’s program, Orion Magazine, and with support from NRDC.
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Farming While Black: African Diasporic Wisdom for Farming and Food Justice | Leah Penniman
Liberal Arts Division, Center for Social Equity & Inclusion, and NCSS Graduate Program
Lecture, April 24, 2019. 4:30 pm, 20 Washington Place Auditorium. Some of our most cherished sustainable farming practices - from organic agriculture to the farm cooperative and the CSA - have roots in African wisdom. Yet, discrimination and violence against African-American farmers has led to our decline from 14 percent of all growers in 1920 to less than 2 percent today, with a corresponding loss of over 14 million acres of land. Further, Black communities suffer disproportionately from illnesses related to lack of access to fresh food and healthy natural ecosystems. Soul Fire Farm, cofounded by author, activist, and farmer Leah Penniman, is committed to ending racism and injustice in our food system. Through programs such as the Black-Latinx Farmers Immersion, a sliding-scale farmshare CSA, and Youth Food Justice leadership training, Soul Fire Farm is part of a global network of farmers working to increase farmland stewardship by people of color, restore Afro-indigenous farming practices, and end food apartheid. And now, with the new book Farming While Black, Soul Fire Farm extends that work by offering the first comprehensive manual for African-heritage people ready to reclaim our rightful place of dignified agency in the food system. Join us to learn how you too can be part of the movement for food sovereignty and help build a food system based on justice, dignity, and abundance for all members of our community.
WEBSITE FOR BOOK: www.farmingwhileblack.org
WEBSITE FOR FARM: www.soulfirefarm.org
SOCIAL MEDIA: @soulfirefarm @farmingwhileblack
Leah Penniman is a Black Kreyol educator, farmer/peyizan, author, and food justice activist from Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, NY. Li co-founded Soul Fire Farm in 2011 with the mission to end racism in the food system and reclaim our ancestral connection to land. As co-Executive Director, Leah is part of a team that facilitates powerful food sovereignty programs – including farmer training for Black & Brown people, a subsidized farm food distribution program for communities living under food apartheid, and domestic and international organizing toward equity in the food system. Leah has been farming since 1996, holds an MA in Science Education and a BA in Environmental Science and International Development from Clark University, and is a Manye (Queen Mother) in Vodun. The work of Leah and Soul Fire Farm has been recognized by the Soros Racial Justice Fellowship, Fulbright Program, Grist 50, and the James Beard Award, among others. Her book, Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Landis a love song for the land and her people.
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Decolonizing Design, Imagining Alternative Futures | A talk by Arturo Escobar
Liberal Arts Division, RISD Museum, and NCSS Graduate Program
Decolonizing Design, Imagining Alternative Futures lecture, April 18, 2019. 6:15 pm, Metcalf Auditorium, RISD Museum/Chace Center. Exploring Nature-Culture-Sustainability and design with author, anthropologist, and philosopher Arturo Escobar in conversation with RISD faculty, Namita Dharia, Jess Brown, Ramon Tejada, and Ijlal Muzaffar. This conversation is planned in conjunction with the Museum’s exhibition, Repair and Design Futures.Co-sponsored by RISD’s Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies and Global Arts + Culture graduate programs and the RISD Museum’s exhibition, Repair & Design Futures.
Arturo Escobar is the Kenan Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a Research Associate with the Culture, Memory, and Nation group at Universidad del Valle, Cali. His main interests are political ecology, ontological design, and the anthropology of development, social movements, and technoscience. Over the past twenty-five years, he has worked closely with several Afro-Colombian social movements, particular the Process of Black Communities (PCN). He is author of the well-known book Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (1995, 2011), and more recently, Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (2008); Sentipensar con la Tierra. Nuevas lecturas sobre desarrollo, territorio y diferencia (2014); Otro possible es possible: Caminando hacia las transiciones desde Anya Yala/Afro/Latino-America (2017); and Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (forthcoming, 2018).
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Coastal Futures: Design for the Green New Deal | Hillary Brown, Alan Plattus, Jeff Geisinger
NCSS Graduate Program, Liberal Arts, Architecture Department, and Institute for Environment and Society
A daylong program on Coastal Futures and Design for the Green Deal was held on April 4, 2019 at Rhode Island School of Design. The event marked the collaborative efforts of RISD, Brown, and University of Rhode Island to address climate change impacts and sea level rise in Rhode Island, through imaginative design work.
The event was scheduled in three sections. The first part was the exhibition of Future Visions, the studio work of twelve classes in three RISD departments and interdisciplinary capstone projects from URI. These works represented students’ creative visions for Providence and Narragansett Bay. The second part was a Workshop: Designing for Resilient Providence. The workshop designed to create a platform where communities, institutions, and businesses could share their imaginations and hopes to address the changing climate. It is part of an ongoing longer and wider conversation to explore how Rhode Island can step up into a leadership position on climate impacts through the work of our research and design institutions. Further exploring how design can address the crisis and improve our communities at the same time, the day culminated with part three: Presentations and Panel Discussion. President Somerson welcomed the audience with a video message. Hillary Brown, Jeff Geisinger, and Alan Plattus shared their work, views, and thoughts in this session. They gave us a taste of how other cities are grappling with climate changes from a global view, to Bridgeport CT, and Boston MA. Discussion led by Manuel Cordero followed and Damian White wrapped up the event.
The event was made possible with the support of the Department of Architecture, RISD; Division of Liberal Arts, RISD; Nature Culture Sustainability Studies, RISD; Rhode Island Sea Grant; and the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.
Learn more on the event page at https://www.risd.edu/news/stories/design-green-new-deal.
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Decolonizing Design, Repair, and Mapping Indigenous Futures | A Conversatoin with Tristan Schultz
Liberal Arts Division, RISD Museum, and NCSS Graduate Program
Lecture, March 21, 2019. 6:30 pm, Metcalf Auditorium, Chace Center/RISD Museum. In this discussion, Tristan Schultz will discuss his work with the decolonizing design group. He will also discuss his research on repair and maintenance as radical eco-design strategies and consider the role that indigenous futuring could play in expanding our understanding of sustainable futures.
Tristan Schultz is a Lecturer and Convenor of Visual Communication Design in the Design Futures Program at Griffith University, Tristan is an Australian/Aboriginal interdisciplinary designer, strategist and researcher with a Master of Design Futures (Hons) and PhD Candidate. Recent research has focused on how design has been, and still is implicated in ongoing colonialism, particularly in relation to Aboriginal cultures in Australia.
He is also the founder and co-director of Relative, a forward-thinking, strategic design practice with a focus on using up-to-date research and community engagement processes to help people understand complex challenges and to support behaviour changes.
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The Ocean's Skin | A Talk by Philip Hoare
Liberal Arts Division and NCSS Graduate Program
Lecture, January 18, 2019. 5:00 – 7:00 pm, Metcalf Auditorium, RISD Museum/Chace Center. Philip Hoare, a frequent visitor to Cape Cod, is obsessed with the sea. He swims in it every day - winter and summer. In this talk, drawing on his new book, RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR, he looks at the way we humans relate to the sea’s natural history - its whales, its birds, its tides, its myths. From Thoreau to Melville, from Virginia Woolf to Oscar Wilde, from Percy Shelley to Sylvia Plath, he takes up human stories to see how they intertwine with watery mysteries and other species: the singing humpback, the shape-shifting selkie, the gothic cormorant. He swims with sperm whales and walks remote beaches in the footsteps of philosophers. And in their collective past and present - both human and animal, both threatened and celebrated - we see the future, incarnate in all those stories contained beneath what Melville called ‘the ocean’s skin’.
Philip Hoare’s book The Whale won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. It was followed in 2013 by The Sea Inside. His new book, RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR is published by the University of Chicago Press and has been acclaimed as ‘a masterpiece’ by The Observer. The Wall Street Journal noted: ‘There is a romance in his art, but it is never sentimental. On the contrary, he is reforging a primitive bond, paying attention to the natural world with compassion and curiosity. This is a truly mesmerizing read, its writer so very human but clearly wishing to be a part of nature rather than society’.
An experienced broadcaster, curator and filmmaker, Philip presented the BBC film The Hunt for Moby-Dick, filmed in New Bedford, Nantucket and the Azores. He is a regular contributor to The Guardian. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Southampton, UK, and curator of the Moby-Dick Big Read, www.mobydickbigread.com, a free online audio version of Melville’s book read by Tilda Swinton, John Waters, Mary Oliver, Nathaniel Philbrick, Sir David Attenborough, Benedict Cumberbatch, Stephen Fry, Simon Callow and many others. It has received 5 million hits to date.
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Wartime Mobilization and Rapid Climate Change | Laurence Delina
Liberal Arts Division and NCSS Graduate Program
Lecture, November 14, 2018. 1:15 pm Metcalf Auditorium, RISD Museum/Chace Center. Laurence Delina’s work explores governance and institutional arrangements in the politics and policy of sustainability, focusing on sustainable energy transitions and rapid climate mitigation. His book, Strategies for Rapid Climate Mitigation (Routledge 2016), investigates what can be learned from wartime mobilization to achieve rapid deployment of sustainable energy technologies. As a Pardee Center Post-Doc, he is leading a research project on sustainable energy transitions in developing countries. This project led to his most recent book, Accelerating Sustainable Energy Transition(s) in Developing Countries: The challenges of climate change and sustainable development (Routledge 2017), which explores how transitions away from carbon-based fuel sources to renewables occur in fourteen developing countries.
Laurence Delina, a Filipino scholar and author, is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University. He is the author of Strategies for Rapid Climate Mitigation: Wartime mobilization as policy model?, Accelerating Sustainable Energy Transition(s) in Developing Countries: The challenges of climate change and sustainable development, and Climate Actions: Strategies for social mobilization.
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Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life : A Tar Sands Tale | Matt Hern
Liberal Arts Division; History, Philosophy, + the Social Sciences Department; and NCSS Graduate Program
Lecture, October 18, 2018. 6:15 pm, Room 521, College Building. The Liberal Arts division and the department of History, Philosophy + the Social Sciences welcome writer/activist Matt Hern for a talk called Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: A Tar Sands Tale. Hern is co-author of the recent book Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life (MIT, 2018), which charts multiple trips through the tar sands of northern Alberta and documents the effects of global warming on indigenous communities. Hern and co-creators Am Johal and Joe Sacco offer new forms of thinking about global warming and ecological perils in the context of class and de-colonial politics and seek new definitions of the word ecology.
Matt Hern is a community organizer, independent scholar, writer and activist based in East Vancouver, British Columbia (Coast Salish Territories). He is known for his work in radical urbanism, community development, ecology and alternative forms of education. He is currently the co-founder and co-director of a creative production cooperative with and for refugees and recently arrived youth called Solid State Industries. Hern teaches at multiple universities, lectures globally and is widely-referenced in radical political and social discourses. His writing has been published on six continents and translated into 14 languages. He holds a PhD in Urban Studies from the Union Institute & University.
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Victor Papanek: Design, Ecology, and Global Activism | Alison Clarke
Liberal Arts Division, Theory & History of Art & Design Department, RISD Museum, RISD Global, and NCSS Graduate Program
Lecture, October 4, 2018. 6:00 pm Metcalf Auditorium, RISD Museum/Chace Center. The division of Liberal Arts, THAD department and RISD Museum welcome author and design historian Alison Clarke to RISD to give a lecture titled “Victor Papanek: Design, Ecology and Global Activism. "In 1968, Papanek described the design profession as a mode of “do-it-yourself murder” that generates waste, wreaks ecological havoc and excludes the most socially disadvantaged. Design, he warned, had become preoccupied with “the concocting of such inane trivia as mink-covered toilet-seats, electronic fingernail polish dryers and baroque fly-swatters,” rather than solving “real world” needs.
Based on the forthcoming book Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World (MIT Press) and research for a recent co-curated exhibition with the Vitra Design Museum, Germany, the lecture will explore how Papanek’s iconoclastic designs, provocative journalism and unique global pedagogic initiatives upended the complacency of the 1960s and ’70s design establishment. Clarke will examine how this shift in the perception of design as a political tool was part of a broader challenge to commodity culture that drew on feminist and counter-culture ideas of non-capitalist production, African-American civil rights and global post-colonial activism, and a burgeoning ecological movement. She will conclude by examining the legacy of Papanek’s ideas in contemporary design discourse. This event is sponsored by the Division of Liberal Arts graduate programs in Global Arts and Cultures and Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies in conjunction with the RISD Museum’s Repair and Design Futures Exhibition and RISD Global.
Alison J. Clarke is a design historian and trained social anthropologist. She is chair of Design History and Theory and Director of the Victor J. Papanek Foundation, University of Applied Arts Vienna, and taught previously at the Royal College of Art, London. Professor Clarke’s publications include Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America, which became the basis of an Emmy Award nominated PBS documentary, Design Anthropology: Object Culture in the 21st Century (2017), and Émigré Cultures in Design and Architecture (with Elana Shapira, 2017). She is currently completing a monograph for MIT Press titled Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World, as well as co-curating a related exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum, Germany.
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Getting to Zero: What it will take to decarbonize electricity | Jesse Jenkins
Liberal Arts Division and NCSS Graduate Program
Lecture, September 26, 2018. 1:10 pm Metcalf Auditorium, RISD Museum/Chace Center.
Jesse D. Jenkins is one of the leading contemporary figures thinking about energy futures and the project of deep decarbonization. He is currently an Environmental Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. His research focuses on the rapidly evolving electricity sector, including the transition to zero-carbon power systems and the proliferation of distributed energy resources. Jesse earned a PhD in Engineering Systems ('18) and MS in Technology & Policy ('14) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He worked previously as a researcher at the MIT Energy Initiative, the Director of Energy and Climate Policy at the Breakthrough Institute, and a Policy and Research Associate at the Renewable Northwest Project.
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Displacement: People, Culture, and Design Practice | A presentation and response to life lived in an age of reconfigurations | Tony Fry
Liberal Arts Division and NCSS Graduate Program
Lecture, September 5, 2018. 1:30 pm, Room 412 College Building, 2 College Street, Providence, RI 02903. In this talk Tony Fry will discuss the importance of design and the liberal arts. He will go on to suggest ways in which design understood as a form of politics will be central for building sustainable futures in radically changing times.
This event is sponsored by the Division of Liberal Arts graduate programs in Global Arts and Cultures and Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies.
Tony Fry is one of the world’s leading scholars in the philosophy of design. He is the author of over 12 books on design, social theory and cultural critique including: Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice, (2009), Design as Politics (2011), Becoming Human by Design (2012), City Futures (2014) and Remaking Cities: An Introduction to Metrofitting (2017). Fry has taught design and cultural theory in Britain, the United States, Hong Kong and Australia and holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of Birmingham. He is a founder of the EcoDesign Foundation, former Professor and Convenor, Master of Design Futures Program, Griffith University, Queensland College of Art, and a contributing editor of the journal Design Philosophy Papers. He currently directs The Studio at the Edge of the World at the University of Tasmania.
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