Faculty

Shana Agid is an artist/designer, educator, and organizer whose work focuses on relationships of power and difference in visual, social, and political cultures. She is an Associate Professor of Arts, Media, and Communication at Parsons School of Design and a co-developer of Working with People (working-with-people.org), a keyword-based curriculum and website for developing critical pedagogical frameworks for collaborative practices. His design work focuses on exploring possibilities for making self-determined services and campaigns through teaching and design research. He is also a book artist and letterpress printer, and a long-time member of Critical Resistance. Shana has an MFA in Printmaking and Book Arts and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts (CCA) and a Ph.D. in Design from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). She is currently serving as the Dean of the School of Art. Media, and Technology at Parsons. In 2024-2025, Shana is the Tranformative Justice Skill Up Fellow at Interrupting Criminalization.

Shana holds an MFA in Printmaking and Book Arts and MA in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts (CCA) and a Ph.D. in Design from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT).

“How What We Ask Shapes What We Can Imagine: De-Coupling Design and Punishment,” Space and Culture (Special Issue: Inside Inside), 25 (3) July 2022.

“Knowing What Needs: Design, Refusal, and Making Otherwise,” in Design in Crisis, edited by Tony Fry and Adam Nocek, New York: Routledge, 2021.

“Reflexive account-giving through ‘practice notations’: plural dimensions and dynamics of infrastructuring,” co-authored with Yoko Akama. Participatory Design Conference Proceedings, ACM International, June 2020.

“Making and negotiating value: design and collaboration with community-led groups,” with Elizabeth Chin. CoDesign, published online January 2019 (print publication forthcoming).

“What do we want?: Designing Cultures of Care in Conditions of Precarity,” in Designing Cultures of Care, edited by Laurene Vaughn, London: Bloomsbury Press, 2018.

“Making ‘safety,’ making freedom: Problem-setting, collaborative design, and contested futures,” in Tricky Design: The Ethics of Things, edited by Tom Fisher and Lorraine Gamman, London: Bloomsbury Press, 2018.

“‘Dismantle, Change, Build’: Designing abolition at the intersections of local, large-scale, and imagined infrastructures,” Design Studies (Special Issue: Participatory Design), 59 (2018).

“Dance of designing: Rethinking position, relation and movement in service design,” co-authored with Yoko Akama, ServDes2018 Conference Proceedings, 2018.

“Ground Rules.” Hobart: A Literary Journal. April 2018.

“‘…it's your project, but it's not necessarily your work…’: Infrastructuring, Situatedness, and Designing Relational Practice,” Participatory Design Conference Proceedings, ACM International, 2016.

“Finding ‘Community’ and other critical words,” with Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani. Urban Pamphleteer, Global Education for Urban Futures, 2015.

“Making Anyway: Education, Designing, Abolition.” Lateral: A Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, Theory Thread, 3 (Spring 2014).

“World-Making: Theory/Practice Practices in Design.” Design and Culture, 4(1) (March 2012).

“‘How can we design something to transition people from a system that doesn’t want to let them go?’: Social Design and its Political Contexts.” Design Philosophy Papers, “Beyond ‘Progressive Design” 3 (December 2011).

It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This. New York: Booklyn Artists Alliance, 2010. Letterpress printed cover, offset interior. Numbered edition of 750 copies.

Shana Agid, Michael Bennett and Kate Drabinski. “Teaching Against the Prison Industrial Complex.” Radical Teacher, 88 (July 2010): 3-6.

Shana Agid and Erica Rand. “Teaching Beyond ‘Tolerance’.” Radical Teacher, 80 (January 2008): 2-5.