Fall 2024
Project Title: Power Tools
Institutional Partners: Howard University & Morgan State University
Lead Collaborators: Alexa Tsien-Shiang , Dahlia Nduom, & Jelisa Blumberg
Project Scope: This course explores the site as a dynamic, multidimensional concept, emphasizing its aesthetic, sociopolitical, and programmatic complexities beyond physical boundaries. Students will engage in collective knowledge-building and adapt representational tools to critically analyze and design with the often-overlooked margins and in-betweens of architecture. By synthesizing concepts like bricolage, modernology, and behaviorology, the course fosters new approaches to design that prioritize relationships between buildings and inhabitants. Through thematic explorations—pixel city, machine city, and collage city—students will create a communal repository of techniques, translating their findings into drawings, artifacts, and images that challenge and enrich architectural practice. This process will culminate in revised, reflective final presentations.
Spring 2025
Project Title: ATTTNT: A Land Reparations Network from Baltimore to Jackson
Institutional Partner: Morgan State University
Lead Collaborators: Keller Easterling and Samia Kirchner
Project Scope: The Spring 2025 seminars at Yale and MSU form a collaborative exploration of land, water, and food justice through design and historical analysis. Professor Kirchner’s seminar at MSU focuses on the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, emphasizing urban agriculture and equitable access to blue-green spaces, with a design studio engaging community-based solutions to food insecurity and climate resilience. Professor Easterling’s Yale seminar examines land reparations, exploring Black land cooperatives and mutualist traditions as models for addressing systemic inequality and climate justice. The seminars will share guest speakers and culminate in a joint review, fostering cross-institutional dialogue. The collaboration connects local community challenges with global frameworks, setting the stage for continued work on the ATTTNT project in future semesters.
Project Title: Preservation in the 21st Century
Institutional Partner: Morgan State University
Lead Collaborators: Norma R. Barbacci and Betty R. Torrell
Project Scope: The course focuses on the evolving field of historic preservation, emphasizing its broader and more inclusive role in the 21st century. The project examines the history, theory, and practice of preservation, integrating principles of sustainability, social inclusion, and decolonization. Students will engage in both theoretical exploration and hands-on activities, including site documentation and the creation of preservation plans for historic locations in New Haven and Havana. This initiative underscores preservation’s potential as a tool for addressing global and community-based challenges.
Project Title: Collaborative Teaching Fellowship with Hampton University & Yale University on Environmental Justice
Institutional Partner: Hampton University
Lead Collaborators: Celeste Murphy Greene and Michael Fotos
Project Scope: The course focuses on integrating environmental justice into undergraduate curricula through cross-institutional collaboration. Dr. Celeste Murphy Greene (Hampton) and Dr. Michael Fotos (Yale) will co-develop learning experiences by exchanging guest lectures and coordinating joint activities for their respective Environmental Justice courses in spring 2025. The project includes pre-visit virtual seminars to foster discussion and rapport among students, followed by Hampton students visiting Yale for in-person academic and cultural engagement, including case study discussions, campus tours, and networking with faculty and staff. The fellowship enhances student exposure to diverse perspectives on environmental justice while strengthening institutional ties.
Project Title: History of African Americans I: Racism and Educational Inequality in the Lives of African American Youth
Institutional Partner: Hampton University
Lead Collaborators: Darry Powell-Young and Craig Canfield
Project Scope: This collaboration merges theory and practice in exploring education policy, emphasizing racism, identity, and systemic inequities. By integrating themes from Dr. Powell-Young’s course on Racism & Educational Inequality in African American Youth and Mr. Canfield’s course on Identity, Diversity, and Policy in US Education, students critically examine the intersections of education, race, identity, and policy through diverse theoretical frameworks, including critical race theory, feminist theory, and disability studies. A joint field trip to Washington, DC, will provide experiential learning opportunities that connect classroom discussions to real-world applications of urban education and housing policy. Collaborative projects pairing students from both institutions will foster interdisciplinary engagement and cross-institutional learning, culminating in creative and analytical outputs. Guest lectures by both educators will further enrich the learning experience, deepening students’ understanding of critical topics like Black achievement, representation, and LGBTQ+ perspectives in education.