an interdisciplinary series on the ground’s many manifestations and meanings
While a primary medium for landscape architects’ physical intervention, the ground has remained muted in discourse and action despite its many manifestations and capacities – to stir, to connect, to remember, as well as to expose and destabilize. This multifaceted explorative series aims to excavate the ground for these manifestations and meanings to better understand how we (humans) situate ourselves in the world and in relation to each other, to our pasts, and to the more-than-human – materials, systems, species. We explore its significance as a noun (the ground; a material), a verb (to ground; its agency), and an adjective (to be grounded; situated). In particular, the series will consider the ground as both a site of exploitation and extraction, as well as resistance and creation. The series of conversations, exhibition and field happenings focused on questions of landscape and its varied grounds, integrates activists, designers, artists, scholars, scientists, environmentalists with diverse and intersectional identities.
This conversation will focus particularly on the body and its relationship to the ground, specifically those bodies that negotiate the ground outside what have been deemed “normative” frameworks. It will consider how the ground is structured by dominant systems to which Others must conform. Queer, gendered, racialized bodies, otherly-abled bodies, non-human bodies are all distinct in their ground negotiations but share their exclusion from hegemonic structures of ground formation. Grouping these categories of variant bodies is not intended to exaggerate the process of Othering, but to discuss ways to mobilize across difference to upend structures of exclusion.
MODERATOR: Gail Dubrow, PhD, Professor, University of Minnesota, School of Architecture
Invitees practicing across disability studies, queer studies, gender studies, international human rights, animal studies, landscape architecture
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