Diagrams of Power Dialogues #2:
Urban Space, Data, Resistance and Community-building
Panelists: Josh Akers, Alex Hill, Terra Graziani and Sheila Sampath
Saturday, September 15
12 p.m.
Onsite Gallery, 199 Richmond St. W.
Free
Join us for a roundtable where our invited participants will discuss their experiences and recent work including resisting gentrification, using data and mapping as a research tool and building community.
Resisting gentrification and displacement needs different kinds of actions including rent strikes, community organizing, sharing information, or building support across locations. Data and mapping is one way of supporting these actions by helping analyze patterns, identify bad property owners/managers and share information (e.g. policy, economic, demographic, spatial). We will talk about how designers, activists and researchers, using these tools and others, work in communities to make them more resilient to bad urban policy, real estate speculators and predatory landlords. We will look at how to be accountable to the residents being represented and what tools, processes and methods have been used to make a positive contribution to these movements.
Joshua Akers is an Assistant Professor of Geography and Urban and Regional Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. His research and writing examines the intersection of markets and policy and their material impacts on urban neighborhoods and everyday life. He is the founder and director of the Urban Praxis Workshop, a community-led research initiative, which collaborates with organizations and activists in Detroit focused on housing and tenancy issues. Part of this work is found at propertypraxis.org. He is an Associate Editor at Metropolitics, a journal of public scholarship.
Alex B. Hill works to address the impacts of health disparities and chronic diseases through data analysis and community engagement strategies. His personal research is focused on food access, health disparities, and racial justice. Alex's projects and research center on the need for greater community involvement at all levels and specifically highlight the intersections of power, privilege, and race.
Terra Graziani is a researcher and tenants' rights activist based in Los Angeles, CA. She founded and directs the Los Angeles chapter of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a digital storytelling collective documenting dispossession and resistance in solidarity with gentrifying communities through research, oral history, and data work - and before this organized with AEMP in the San Francisco Bay Area. Terra is a graduate student in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles studying housing as the site of racial capitalist violence.
Sheila Sampath is an artist, educator and activist designer with a background in community organizing. She is the principal and creative director of The Public, a social justice design studio working to democratize design practices for community self-determination; the editorial and art director of Shameless magazine, a national feminist magazine for teen girls and trans youth, and an assistant professor of alternative and speculative practices at OCAD University in the Faculty of Design. Her first book, Letters Lived, was published in 2013, and her art practice explores memory, diaspora, and intergenerational trauma.
Diagrams of Power showcases art and design works using data, diagrams, maps and visualizations as ways of challenging dominant narratives and supporting the resilience of marginalized communities.
Featuring work by Joshua Akers, The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, Josh Begley, Joseph Beuys, Vincent Brown, Bureau d'études, Department of Unusual Certainties, W. E. B. Du Bois, Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, Forensic Architecture, Iconoclasistas, Julie Mehretu, Lize Mogel, Ogimaa Mikana, Margaret Pearce, Laura Poitras, Philippe Rekacewicz and Visualizing Impact.
Exhibition runs July 11 to September 29, 2018.
Support
Diagrams of Power is produced with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, OCAD University's Office of the Faculty of Design, Public Visualization Lab, Nexus Investments, Multi Touch Digital and Microsoft.
Diagram of Power's public workshops and research engagement events is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.