Knowledge Design: Making Urban Humanities

More info: http://happenings.ucla.edu/all/event/143342 Can an action-oriented methodology at the nexus of the humanities, design, and urbanism transform our ability to comprehend contemporary culture and urban space? A two-day symposium will be convened to explore the possibility of a field called “Urban Humanities.” We seek not only to forge new disciplinary alliances between design and the humanities, but also to propose the imperative of designing knowledge, of critical reflection on the methods behind our knowledge production. This symposium seeks to investigate epistemologies of making and action, to reclaim the empty terms “urban” and “interdisciplinary,” and to recuperate the status of method. A set of six provisional methodological models that might orient this nascent field have been identified whose merits and potentials will be debated: critical cartography, artistic research, speculative literature, transgressing media, reconfigured participation, and operative history.