Speaking Events

Upcoming

Activating Animals in the Visual Archive

Co-chaired Panel with Vanessa Bateman (Maastricht University, NL), October 2023, Banff, Alberta.
Universities Art Association of Canada (UAAC) Annual Conference
Deceit by Design: Colonial Fabrications of Care and Countercolonial Subversions in North Africa

Co-chaired panel with Nancy N.A. Demerdash (Albion College) and Lacy Murphy (Washington University in St. Louis). February, 2024 Chicago, Illinois.
College Art Association (CAA) Annual Conference

“Warping Neurological Gaze”

European University in St.-Petersburg, hybrid (watch link to come)

“Institutional Infrastructures in Colonial Libya”

NCSA Annual Conference, March 2023, Sacramento, CA

“Soft Structures in Hard Times” Design@large speaker series

UC San Diego Design Lab, La Jolla, CA Oct-Nov 2022

Watch here

The fabric of care in French colonial disaster relief: Algerian refugee tents and the soft material culture of the colonial habitus”

Society for French Historical Studies, Charlotte, NC, 2022

Is ‘soft’ the new strong design principle? Concrete retaining walls, steel girders, rock breakwaters: we tend to think of strength as a quality conveyed by hard structures and materials. In this series, we ask how soft structures and materials such as woven fabrics, smart textiles, refugee tents, costume, and inflatable plastics are employed in the design of structures in which softness is the key to structural strength, providing adaptability and transportability in ways that are responsive to circumstances ranging from environmental disaster to geopolitical upheaval and in support of resilient political action in hard times.

“Fiction under the sign of self-evasion: Bernadette Corporation, Michèle Bernstein”

Bibliothèque Kandisky Summer University Centre Pompidou, Paris, France 7-11 July, 2021

This essay contributes an art historical approach to material culture studies through an analysis of the social and political effects of French colonial disaster relief in Chleff, Algeria 1954. The tent, as French army provision, is analyzed as a “soft” and unstable home, whose cloth physicality is interpretable through the social fabric, context, and relations amongst individuals, family life, and colonialism at the start of the Algerian war. Bourdieu’s habitus theoretically grounds an argument for tents as involved in the negotiation of power and liberation in daily life in French Algeria.

Founding member of Situationism Michèle Bernstein’s first novel is analyzed together with the tactics deployed by New York and Paris based Bernadette Corporation (BC), a collective artist group working through many modes including books, video, fashion, magazines. I use these examples to articulate a strategy of fiction in the name of self-evasion, a fiction whose aims include self-evacuation or abandonment of the individual. My aim is to make a case for this in the early 2000s. Reflecting backwards towards Situationism allows us to investigate whether a resemblance cuts across time between collaborative methods for debunking the celebration of the individual and to ask how political moments prompt them.