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Communities of:
_________ October 25 – November 3, 2012 Opening reception: October 25, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m. Communities of: _________, is a multi-media exhibition and
symposium presenting community-engaged projects from across The New School
ranging from engagements with local communities to international fieldwork,
from designing through craft to designing policy and from semester-long
collaborations to ongoing partnerships. The intentional blank space of the title is intended to make
conscious the very notion of community.
Through it, we invite each person to bring their interests and notions
of communities to the gallery. We want
to politicize what it means to work with and to build a community, and believe
that the absence of definition will precisely prompt visitors and participants
to fill in the blank. Using photography, text and video that document the
projects, the exhibition conveys the deep exchange and long duration of
community engagements, introduces the people involved, the goals and processes
of the work and most importantly, the challenges that were faced. Additionally, in response to an open call,
students & faculty will host a variety of public programs in the gallery
during the exhibition period. The
two-day Symposium will bring together a community of practitioners in academia,
community-based organizations, NGOs, non-profit organizations, and industry. The Exhibition and Symposium’s framing questions are: - How does (or can) design facilitate or enable
participatory community development?
- What are current models and ethics of working with 'other'
communities in 'emerging economies'?
- What are the politics of considering community as 'other'?
(Should we only work in/with communities to which we belong?)
- How and why should universities partner with communities?
- How can we develop curricula that successfully support
long-term community partnerships?
- What are the financial models that can sustainably support
these partnerships?
This exhibition and symposium on design strategies and
models for sustainable development, has been organized to coincide with the 5th
Anniversary of DEED: Development through Empowerment, Entrepreneurship, and
Design. The organizers are Fabiola
Berdiel, Pascale Gatzen and Cynthia Lawson, and funding comes from the
Provost’s Office Academic Events Fund, Parsons’ School of Design Strategies and
Dean’s Office funds, and the Social Innovation Initiative.
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