buildings landscape and cultures field school
Research • SURF Award • McNair Fellowship
UW-Milwaukee • Research Mentor: Arijit Sen • 2015-2017
“Pouring over hours of audio footage, peeking and squinting into the blue lines of the computer screen, distinguishing between guidelines and wall lines in autoCAD drawings, and playing with the documentary software - we are dreaming new worlds, composing new stories. We are music makers and dreamers. Yet that process of telling stories – choosing one from the many stories – makes the task difficult and awesome.
Stories have real power and as we ponder over the mines of digital data, our minds soar into the world of stories. We pick and choose, bite and spit, remember and remind. We have to do a good job – walk that tightrope – not too tight not too loose. Just enough to make space for the next story to snuggle up to us and change our tale in unpredictable ways. “
Arijit Sen
To imagine, to manifest, and to create as a designer is not a visionary speculation about how people should live. Rather, it is an engagement with people and an attachment to their well-being within a given environment. Design is not the exercise of power over others. Rather it is the exercise of power with community members and their stories and inspirations of hope. My research in the span of 3 years as part of the Buildings Landscapes and Cultures Field School aimed to show that designers must learn how to engage professionally and ethically with community members through a participatory ethnographic technique of oral storytelling, to embody or develop pathos for specific peoples and their living spaces, and to better facilitate communities in shaping design proposals that reflect their collective identities and sense of belonging.
ENJOY SOME SELECTED WORKS FROM THE ARCHIVE: Historical documentations, photography, and all
This commitment resulted in multiple essays and research dissemination, such as: panels, conferences, readings, and workshops.
Finding “Home”: Formulating Creative Civic Engagement in Community Health - Imagining America 2016 - University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
A Place to Belong - McNair Symposium, Summer 2016 - University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
Symbolic Ethnicity: Cultural Assimilation of the Hmong - AMSL Conference 2016 - University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
Hmong Stories: Identity Workshop - Midwest Asian American Student Union Conference 2016 - University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Hmong Stories: Narratives of Washington Park – National Conference of Undergraduate Research 2016 - University of North Carolina Asheville