Building Life

Building Life: Spatial Politics, Science, and Environmental Epistemes, a symposium co-presented by Princeton University and The Museum of Modern Art

Friday, November 10, 2023, 12–6:30pm at Princeton University School of Architecture, Betts Auditorium, Princeton, New Jersey.

Saturday, November 11, 2023, 10am–5pm at the Museum of Modern Art, Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building, Celeste Bartos Theatre, 4 West 54th Street, New York City, New York.

Free and open to the public. Registration is required.

Building Life: Spatial Politics, Science, and Environmental Epistemes is a two-day symposium that examines how entanglements between the interdisciplinary fields of the built environment and the sciences have transformed concepts of nature, territory, and the environment over time, reproducing global inequities that continue to (un)build life. The symposium will feature an array of scholars and practitioners whose work is reshaping our understanding of what it means to inhabit, study, and care for a climate-changed world.

Spanning the fields of art and architectural history, environmental studies, anthropology, sociology, race and ethnicity studies, Indigenous studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, and science and technology studies, among others, papers will consider how spatial and scientific practices have historically shaped human interpretations and approaches to life. They will also offer speculative projections to imagine alternative possibilities.

As a collective thought experiment, Building Life proposes that remaking socio-technological systems to repair the planet for collective human and non-human futures requires a critical rethinking of the relations between the interdisciplinary fields of the built environment and science, which serve as world-making institutions continually shaping current practices and understandings of the living.

Participants: Vincanne Adams, Allison Carruth, J. Kameron Carter, Angela N. H. Creager, Jay Cephas, Irene Cheng, Jaskiran Dhillon, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Samia Henni, Brooke Holmes, Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Josh Lepawsky, Renisa Mawani, Rachel Price, John Paul Ricco, Sophia Roosth, Mimi Sheller, Irene Small, Hadas Steiner, Kath Weston.

Convened by Spyros Papapetros (Princeton University) and Esther M. Choi (The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art), Building Life is a Humanities Council Magic Project co-presented by Princeton University and The Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment at The Museum of Modern Art. This event is supported by a David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Grant from the Humanities Council at Princeton University.

For a full program and to register, please visit here or here. Register here.