International Womxn’s Week 2022
ACCESS
This year, we are celebrating IWW in collaboration with Women's Law Association (WLA) at the Harvard Law school. Our shared theme for IWW 2022 is “Access”.
We define “Access” in two ways. The first definition of the word—“a means of approaching or entering a place”—reflects the physicality of access. This is central to both WiD and WLA’s values of moving away from a society that prioritizes selected groups while marginalizing others. We also define access as “the right or opportunity to use or benefit from something,” which illuminates the future work that is needed to tackle issues of accessibility, race, gender, class, and so much more in the context of design and the legal system.
Event Programming
Keynote Speaker
Nitasha Dhillon
Join us for our Keynote on March 8 at 6:30PM with Nitasha Dhillon.
Dhillon has a B.A. in Mathematics from St Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York and School of International Center of Photography. She holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Media Study - University of Buffalo in New York. She along with Amin Husain is MTL Collective, a collaboration that joins research, aesthetics, and action in its practice.
MTL is a founding member of Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy and Anemones, two in-print movement-generated theory magazines; Strike Debt and Rolling Jubilee, Direct Action Front for Palestine; Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.); and most recently MTL+, the collective facilitating Decolonize This Place. At present, in addition to being involved in Strike MoMA working group of the International Imagination of Anti-national and Anti-imperialist Feelings (IIAAF), MTL is in post-production on a feature-length experimental documentary about land, life, and liberation in occupied Palestine. MTL is also the facilitator of Decolonize This Place. DTP is an action-oriented movement that blurs the lines between art, organizing and action around six strands of struggle: Indigenous struggle, Black liberation, free Palestine, global wage worker, de-gentrification, and dismantle patriarchy.
Monday, March 7
NOTE: The brown bag lunch is postponed to the week of March 28th - please stay tuned for more follow-up email from us!!
Join Womxn in Design in conversation with Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, a faculty of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at GSD. We will discuss Charlotte’s work as a facilitator in Parity Front group, a structure devoted to establishing solidarity networks for gender & equity in architecture, and the broader institutional challenges that women and non-binary thinkers and scholars face in academia.
More About Charlotte:
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, most recently guest professor in the Architecture Department of TU Berlin, directed, managed, and taught the post-graduate Master of Advanced Studies in Urban Design at ETH Zurich from 2014-2019. Charlotte’s teaching and research interests are related to how struggling communities can gain greater access to resources, the mainstream economy, better governance, and ecological/social justice. Her pedagogy is built on a research-based design approach for identifying urgent aspects of contemporary urbanization. She believes that educators and universities have an obligation to be responsive to the challenges of our urbanizing world, equipping young practitioners and researchers with both critical skills and design tools to address them. Charlotte maintains an active feminist practice, engaging in parity & diversity works with the understanding that to be feminist today cannot be understood without intersectionality; the convergence of struggles against sexism, racism, capitalism, and imperialism, as conceptualized by Françoise Vergès. She is also co-founder of OMNIBUS, an urban design laboratory focused on interdisciplinary exploration of community-building factors in various metropolitan contexts.
Charlotte holds a Ph.D. in Architecture from ETH Zurich, and master’s and bachelor’s degrees in Architecture from the National School of Architecture of Marseille (ENSAM). In addition to over two dozen papers, essays, and articles published in a variety of media, she has produced five book-length publications; Eileen Gray- A house under the Sun, with Z. Dzierzawaska, 2019; Some Haunted Spaces in Singapore, with M. Jaeggi, 2018; Cairo Desert Cities, with Marc Angelil, 2017; Housing Cairo – The Informal Response, with Marc Angelil, 2016; and The School, the Book, the Town, 2013. Several others are underway, including Migrant Marseille: Architecture of Social Segregation and Urban Inclusivity, 2020.
Join us for the opening reception of International Womxn’s Week hosted by Womxn in design and Women’s Law Association. Learn more about our theme of the year, “Access”, our diverse events for the week, and explore our special archive collection featuring books about gender equity and disability justice in design.
Free Snacks & Drinks Included!
Tuesday, March 8
Keynote with Nitasha Dhillon
@Decolonize This Place
6:30-8PM, Piper Auditorium & Online
Nitasha Dhillon is a writer, artist, educator, and organizer. Dhillon has a B.A. in Mathematics from St Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York and School of International Center of Photography. She is a Ph.D. candidate at Department of Media Study – University of Buffalo in New York.
Along with Amin Husain, Dhillon is the founder of MTL Collective, a collaboration that joins research, aesthetics, and action in its practice. MTL Collective, in turn, has founded Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.), a direct action wing of Gulf Labor Artist Coalition as well as MTL+, the collective facilitating Decolonize This Place (DTP).
DTP is an action-oriented movement that blurs the lines between art, organizing and action around six strands of struggle: Indigenous struggle, Black liberation, free Palestine, global wage worker, de-gentrification, and dismantle patriarchy. Since 2016, Decolonize This Place has organized an Indigenous Peoples Day/Anti-Columbus Day tour of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City involving over 1,000 participants.
Wednesday, March 9
Join South Asia GSD and Womxn in Design for a film screening on The Great Indian Kitchen, a story about an Indian woman’s struggles to confront the traditional gender role prescribed by a patriarchal society.
More about The Great Indian Kitchen:
An educated dancer (Nimisha Sajayan), raised in Manama, Bahrain finds herself in an arranged marriage to a teacher (Suraj Venjaramood) in a very traditional and patriarchal family. the film tells the story of a newlywed woman (Nimisha Sajayan) who struggles to be the submissive wife that her husband (Suraj Venjaramood) and his family expect her to be.
Thursday, March 10
Sara Hendren is a humanist in tech—an artist, design researcher, writer, and professor at Olin College of Engineering. Her book What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World explores the places where disability shows up in design. It was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by NPR and won a 2021 Science in Society Journalism award. Her art and design work has been widely exhibited in museum exhibitions and is held in the permanent collections at MoMA and the Cooper Hewitt. In 2021-22, she is Lecturer in Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design and a fellow in Education Policy at the New America think tank.
a+u’s January issue looks at Dwelling Studies as a unique and highly robust curricular platform and approach to architectural design that has played a central role in enabling the extraordinary careers of women architects in Japan, including those of Masako Hayashi and Kazuyo Sejima. Guest editor Momoyo Kaijima defines Dwelling Studies as an open-ended approach that focuses on the exchange between inhabitants and designers to create spaces that embrace individuality. With its origins as a curriculum on “clothing, food, and housing” established in the unique institutional setting of Japan Women’s University at the turn of the 20th century, Dwelling Studies has continued to enable the contemplation and realization of the contemporary.
Zoom Link: https://zoom.us/j/96197383018
moderator: Laurent Stalder (ETHZ, gta)
panelists: Giovanna Borasi (CCA), Sharon Johnston (Harvard GSD),
Elli Mosayebi (ETHZ, IEA)
guest editor of the issue: Momoyo Kaijima (ETHZ)
chief editorial advisor of a+u: Seng Kuan (Harvard GSD, UTokyo)
Join the WLA's International Committee and Alumni & Mentorship Committee, as well as Women in Design at the Graduate School of Design, for a lunch talk with Professor Tomiko Brown-Nagin about her recent book, "Civil Rights Queen", on Thursday, March 10th from 12:30-1:30pm in WCC 3018. Copies of the book will also be made available to the first 40 people to RSVP and request a book.
Tomiko Brown-Nagin is dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, and member of the history department at the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. An award-winning legal historian and an expert in constitutional law and education law and policy, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Law Institute, and the American Philosophical Society, a fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Her 2011 book, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford), won six awards, including the Bancroft Prize in U.S. History. In her latest book, Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality (Pantheon, 2022), Brown-Nagin explores the life and times of Constance Baker Motley, the pathbreaking lawyer, politician, and judge. She earned a law degree from Yale University, where she served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal; a doctorate in history from Duke University; and a BA in history, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from Furman University.
Join Design.Able and WiD for a film screening of Crip Camp, an award-winning and Oscar-nominated documentary about the journey of a group of teenagers with disabilities to come of age, build community, and advocate for disability rights in the latter half of the 20th century.
More about Crip Camp:
In the early 1970s, teenagers with disabilities faced a future shaped by isolation, discrimination and institutionalization. Camp Jened, a ramshackle camp “for the handicapped” (a term no longer used) in the Catskills, exploded those confines. Jened was their freewheeling Utopia, a place with summertime sports, smoking and make-out sessions awaiting everyone, and campers experienced liberation and full inclusion as human beings. Their bonds endured as many migrated West to Berkeley, California — a hotbed of activism where friends from Camp Jened realized that disruption, civil disobedience, and political participation could change the future for millions.
Crip Camp is the story of one group of people and captures one moment in time. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of other equally important stories from the Disability Rights Movement that have not yet received adequate attention. We are committed to using the film’s platform to amplify additional narratives in the disability rights and disability justice communities – with a particular emphasis on stories surrounding people of color and other intersectionally marginalized communities. We stand by the creed of nothing about us, without us. For too long, too many were excluded, and it is time to broaden the number of voices and share the mic.
Friday, March 11
Join Ilana Curtis (MDes ‘23) Exhibition Manager of Now What?!, for an opening tour of the exhibition at the Boston Society of Architecture gallery on Friday, March 11 at 10am. The brief tour of the gallery will be followed by a virtual Q&A with two of the exhibition curators, Lori Brown and Sarah Rafson.
RSVP needed!
NOTE: The tour will meet at Gund front entrance at 9:30AM and commute together to the BSA gallery.
Now What?! Advocacy, Activism & Alliances in American Architecture Since 1968 is a traveling exhibition that tells the vibrant and largely unknown history of architects and designers whose work aligns with and advances the values of the civil rights, feminist, and LGBTQ movements of the last half century. After traveling to 11 cities, Boston will be the final stop for the exhibition, which has been especially designed and expanded to include local history and voices. This exhibition aims to both document untold stories and inspire a new generation of designers to look at the past, identify new ways forward, and see themselves as agents of change.
Where: Boston Society of Architects, 200 Congress St, Boston, MA 02210
Despite the decline in 2020, global energy-related CO2 emissions remained at 31.5 Gt, which contributed to CO2 reaching its highest-ever average annual concentration in the atmosphere of 412.5 parts per million in 2020 – around 50% higher than when the industrial revolution began. (IEA)
Nearly half of all global emissions come from our daily interaction with mundane things and our usage patterns. Effectively utilizing a product to its full life cycle, and beyond, and bringing it back into the use streams to be reused for a new or same purpose, is called circularity. Building this circular economy is truly difficult and requires changes in well-laid systems of consumption and production alike.
Our event invites leaders from various industries who shall provide a range of insights into the changes we need to make and how far are we in this roadmap to circularity. In the end, our goal is to comprehend - Is Circularity just a fad?
Panelist:
Lori Ferriss, Director of Sustainability and Climate Action at Goody Clancy
Sarah Levy, Founder of Boston's first zero-waste store - Cleenland (Nothing sold in containers)
Julie Janiski, Buro Happold Partner, Integrated Design Principal, Sustainability Leader
