Spring 2022 Mellon Forum on the Urban Environment / Reframing Repair 

co-curated by Assistant Professor of Architecture Jay Cephas and HMEI/Princeton-Mellon Fellow Davy Knittle

Climate + Environmental Futures

with

Rituparna Mitra, Emerson, and Joshua Moses, Haverford

March 14 at 12pm EST

How do scholars from a range of backgrounds conceptualize a range of futures for our climate? How can we best develop interdisciplinary approaches to teaching environmental justice?

Attend this discussion in Betts Auditorium, abiding by University event guidelines, or register for the Zoom link:

https://princeton.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_t-zhzkfOS3WHqLqU4EXzew

Our theme for Spring 2022 is “Reframing Repair.” Repair has been a common subject of inquiry within interdisciplinary work on cities and built environments in recent years, especially as scholars have introduced new frameworks for analyzing crumbling social and physical infrastructures. We are particularly interested in addressing the topic of repair with skepticism, however, as we consider how to engage with places that perhaps cannot be repaired (as in the case of flood-prone coastal cities debating plans for managed retreat) and conditions that otherwise confound the presumptions underlying current discourses on repair. To that end, we ask how repair might be reimagined to center equitable futures, which necessarily means challenging how the language of repair has been used in the service of racist, anti-queer, trans-phobic, and ableist discourses and policies. It also means moving away from discourses of progress that have been deployed to justify harm to instead conceptualize new built environment possibilities that can intimately account for both the kinship networks and the non-human communities within which they are embedded. 

The Mellon Forum is sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, High Meadows Environmental Institute, Humanities Council, Center for Collaborative History, Department of Art + Archaeology, Department of English, and the School of Architecture.