ACD January Webinar

Emergent Grounds for Design Education: Nourishing Roots of Solidarity
My-Anh Nguyen and Chris Daemmrich
Wednesday, 1/27
3:30-5:00PM EDT / 2:30-4:00PM CDT / 1:30-3:00PM MDT / 12:30-2:00PM PDT

Session Description:

How can we respond to White supremacy through our work? Contemporary activism for racial justice in design and planning is part of a long tradition extending back to the earliest days of American architectural education. This session will be a space for attendees to consider themselves and their work in these historical contexts as part historical teach-in and part activist roundtable. We will foreground the participatory workshop with the role of academic institutions in upholding and perpetuating White supremacist settler colonial cisheteroatriarchal capitalist professional practices and their responsibility to dismantle it as articulated by statements from students, alumni, and faculty across the American continent. Together we will read White settler design culture, share community driven design strategies for reconstruction, and survey racial justice organizing in design education.

Facilitators My-Anh Nguyen and Chris Daemmrich will provide a space for design students and professionals engaged in organizing or other transformational actions to move design discipline towards racial justice to workshop their actions. We welcome those who have not yet become active to learn how they can become involved. As two of the co-organizers of Emergent Grounds in Design Education, My-Anh and Chris will share their experiences of emergent strategy, or decentralized organizing, as a queer, feminist intervention challenging masculinist, hierarchical norms of organizing and professional practice. 

Successful transformation towards anti-racist and anti-colonial design education requires interdisciplinary and intergenerational representation from diverse design, planning, policy professions, and beyond. We warmly welcome all built environment design students and professionals to participate.

Learn more about Emergent Grounds for Design Education at www.eg-de.org

This session will be 90 minutes long. There will be a 30 minute presentation followed by a 60 minute breakout for more collaborative discussion

#findyourpeople #learntogether #designwithcommunities #communitydesign

Speaker Bios:

My-Anh (me-on) Nguyen approaches the built environment from the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank people (Washington, DC) and an architectural background. They’re committed to spatial justice, social sustainability, and intersectional design as an architectural designer and core facilitator of Emergent Grounds for Design Education. Their research interests are generative discourse about the values that have been built into our environments and transformed by BIPOC, feminist, and queer perspectives and culture. 

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Chris Daemmrich grew up in Austin, Texas on land taken from the Tonkawa people. He studied architecture and political science at Tulane University of Louisiana in New Orleans, graduating in 2017, and spent several years working in a wide range of architectural, development, advocacy and political organizations. Chris is a Project Pipeline mentor and a member of the NOMA Louisiana leadership team. As a writer, consultant and design facilitator for the Collaborative Design Workshop (Collab.), Chris participates in creating antiracist, queer, feminist space. Find him on Twitter and Instagram @sodaemmgood and Collab. on Instagram @collabdesign_works, and online at collabdesignworkshop.com.