Research Centers & Labs

Acknowledging the current uncertain and fast-changing times and the centrifugal power of today’s multiple crises, which disrupt, explode, and ultimately reconfigure semantic and semiotic systems of existence and being, the Critical Bodies Research Lab offers a place to discuss, workshop, and collaborate for faculty, staff, students, and alumni whose works question the status of bodies in society and art, as well as embodiment, performance, and performativity.

The Critical Bodies Research Lab welcomes artistic practices and research projects engaging with performance, choreography, and performative practices. It also embraces any creative process sharing concerns about representation and transformation, presence and resistance, and disruption and the hospitality of bodies in contemporary art and society, regardless of the medium used. The lab aims to gather a range of people, from researchers to artists, to offer a multiscalar approach to embodied experiences and their recording and categorizing through images, audiovideo recording, and technological and archival systems. It seeks to mix a variety of theoretical perspectives that can be deployed to study cultural practices of performing, gazing and spectating, and feeling, such as aesthetics, affect theory, and identity politics, as well as performance and performativity, with current artistic, design-related, and social practices.

Main Fields of Investigation

• Performance, performativity, and performative practices in relation to bodies
• Aesthetics and politics of the gaze, visuality, and representation
• Individual, collective, and hybrid regimes of corporeality 
• Performative practices and theories from fields ranging from theater, dance, and acting to anthropology, sociology, and activism.

Partners

• Centre national de la Danse
• Bibliothèque nationale de France, département des Arts du Spectacle
• XReality Center, The New School
• Dasha Ilina, multidisciplinary artist
• Tsuneko Taniuchi, performer

Contact

Emmanuel Cohen, [email protected]

Curating, Archiving, and the Politics of Heritage is a research hub that examines the practices and polemics of public and private museums and archives dedicated to art, design, and fashion. Through a series of research seminars, symposia, talks, publications, and exhibitions, the hub interrogates the history of exhibitions and museums as well as contemporary institutional critique. By analyzing how archival and curatorial practice serves to produce, conserve, communicate, disseminate, perform, and institutionalize cultural heritage for contemporary audiences, this research hub rethinks the cultural relevance of archives and museums in art, design and fashion. 

Main Fields of Investigation

• Institutional critique and museum interfaces (analog and digital)
• History of exhibitions and museums
• Archives’ and museums’ bureaucratic and administrative policies 
• Museums’ and archives’ mediations

Collaborations and Partners

• MAD Paris
• UNESCO
• Palais Galliera Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris
• Fondation Azzedine Alaïa
• L’Air Arts Paris

Contact

Marco Pecorari, [email protected]
Stephanie Nadalo, [email protected]

This hub aims to bring together students, staff, and faculty at the school who are working on questions connected to sustainability and the environment. Its activities speak to art and design practice and research, providing a forum for sharing ideas and offering a range of events, including guest lectures and workshops. Relevant themes include systems thinking, material innovation, process design, biodesign, sustainable fashion practice, social sustainability, environmental communication, and consciousness changing through art, design, and poetics. It also provides a space in which to explore practical applications of sustainability in relation to the internal workings and policies of the school. 

Main Fields of Investigation

• System and place for reclaiming materials and tools
• Critical representations and discourses about the environment
• Student sustainability group 
• Short- and long-term initiatives at and around Parsons (reading groups, dye garden, compost system, clothes swaps, community work, etc.) integrated into curriculum

Contact

Morna Laing, [email protected]

The Fashioning Theory Lab investigates new and cutting-edge theoretical approaches to fashion and responds to the significant absence of theoretical investigations of fashion at French universities. The lab offers talks, research seminars, and publications in which international scholars discuss the state of theoretical and methodological debate in fashion studies and present innovative uses of theory in the field.

The ideas of "translating theory" and "transatlantic connection" play an important role in the explanation of the migration of concepts within—and outside of—fashion studies. One area of focus is the interconnection between French theorists and their interpretation in the Anglo-Saxon landscape of fashion studies.

Main Fields of Investigation

• Critical theory
• History of critical theory and fashion studies
• Translations of theory and applied theory
• Methodologies of research in the humanities and social sciences

Collaborations and Partners

This lab is organized in collaboration with École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (associate professor Emanuele Coccia).

Contact

Marco Pecorari, [email protected]

Education is of course one of the most critical missions of Parsons Paris as a higher education institution with a unique multicultural heritage in art and design that offers valuable artistic, cultural, and professional opportunities. The Making Skills Lab seeks to capture the specificities of Parsons Paris’ teaching and learning experiences and engage in current debates about the role of higher education, the humanities, and the alignment of education in the professional world in relation to skill learning and making. 

Challenging the idea that skills are autonomous competencies, either technical or critical, the Making Skills Lab explores the idea that skills are multifaceted and embodied through academic research, partnerships, and pedagogical innovations. Its projects challenge traditional polarities and hierarchies: heritage versus innovation; preservation versus creation of knowledge; analog versus digital making skills; national and transnational practices and knowledge; and discipline-specific versus interdisciplinary practices.

Main Fields of Investigation

• Pedagogy and critical learning tools in art, fashion, design, and the humanities
• Ethics and politics of AI generative technologies and craftsmanship
• Designing and researching from and around bodies
• Authorship and collaborative networks of human, thing, machine, and environment

Contact

Emmanuel Cohen, [email protected]
Alexandra Helminger, [email protected]

The Unmaking Fashion Media and Creative Industries Lab focuses on the exploration of printed and digital fashion media. The aim is to uncover and examine hidden networks, actors, and practices in the mediation of fashion, its histories, and its imaginaries. The lab includes and gathers academics, practitioners, curators, and critics who focus on the economic and cultural value of historical and contemporary print fashion publications, the relation between digital and printed media, creative labor in the fashion industry, collaboration between creative fields, publications as curatorial projects, institutional versus independent publishing practices, and the issue of representability and national discourse in fashion publishing. All of these topics are explored through conferences, publications, and projects in collaboration with brands, archives, foundations, and museums. A central event is Printing Fashion, a yearly international festival with talks, lectures, and exhibitions that is followed by the publication of a magazine.

Main Fields of Investigation

• Labor and systems of production and dissemination of media
• Printing histories and techniques and their political effects
• The transformation of printing in relation to the digital sphere
• Content creation between creative writing and image making
• Issues of representation of identity politics and social justice in the media

Contact

Marco Pecorari, [email protected]
Monica Fraile Morisson, [email protected]