During the month of October 2024, Kenneth Bailey (Founder and Co-Director, ds4si) and Judith Leemann (Ecologies of Thought Lead, ds4si & Professor, Fine Arts 3D, MassArt) of The Design Studio for Social Intervention join as Visiting Fellows at Northeastern University’s Arts & Humanities Social Action Lab, in a collaboration with Kris Manjapra, Stearns Professor of History and Global Studies.

They will host a first StudyLab at the Center for Design, October 2-4, and a second one in Uphams Corner at the ds4si storefront space, 545 Columbia Road, Dorchester, October 24-26.

Coming together around the provocation, “For the Vibrancy of Needs,” the residency encompasses StudyLabs and public events for faculty, students, community, and staff,  in a cross- and anti-disciplinary inquiry into theories and embodiments of justice rooted in experiences of common need. Drawing diversely on aesthetics, somatics, design methodologies, art-making, close reading, counter-archiving, and activism, the inquiry sites itself precisely at the border of the university and the community in which it is embedded, with an aim to transforming and re-imagining the relations this border tries to fix.

Towards a anti-disciplinary exploration of the shapes, textures and temporalities of need and against regimes of enclosure and carcerality, this period of shared study aims to disrupt the siloed methods and protocols of academic study, smearing the lines between science, tech, arts, and humanities, and loosening the very ethic of academic study itself. 

Who are we called to become when we study the vibrancy of needs? Whom are we studying for, and with whom all do we study? How do we study and to what end, in the context of regimes that obscure our interdependence, mutual need, and interrelation?

This Residency is generously supported by contributions from the Provost Office, CSSH, CAMD, the Department of Cultures, Societies, and Global Studies, and the History Department.