Seminars

Franklin Delano Roosevelt has always been regarded as one of the most progressive presidents in American history, responsible both for moving the country towards economic recovery after the Great Depression and for committing the United States to achieving victory over Nazi Germany. Yet Roosevelt, largely on account of his racist antipathy toward Asian peoples, was the primary initiator of the internment of Japanese Americans in camps during the Second World War. Roosevelt invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as justification for his action, legislation that is still in effect and has recently been cited by the current President-elect as the legal basis for his plan to institute the mass deportation of immigrants.

This talk will engage histories of design pedagogy and the representation of student labor on campus construction within industrial schools in the wake of the U.S. Civil War. It asks how race, labor, and the material politics of Reconstruction shaped education in architecture and the building trades relative to racialized hierarchies of labor and illuminates the changing ways that students and instructors at schools in the Hampton-Tuskegee model negotiated and transformed these pedagogies through the production and circulation of their design drawings for a global audience.

Susie J. Pak will present the introduction of a manuscript that investigates the stories that universities tell about themselves. A crucial point the book makes is that university storytelling is both integral to and reflective of how universities learn, and by extension, what they teach. The text is concerned with how university storytelling teaches ways of seeing and knowing that also include modeling ways of not knowing, not seeing, not hearing, and not listening, which impact student learning and well-being. In this particular presentation, Pak will introduce an untold story or a story, which belongs to a university and was derived from its archive, but that the university has refused to tell, raising questions about what and why a university would want to limit its knowledge about itself and how and why it would be able to do so. For those of us who work in universities, our presence in these spaces necessarily implicate us in this process of storytelling (including those stories not told), compelling us to consider what its impact has been on ourselves, our research, and on the communities we are purported to serve and have served.