This article looks at the way questions drive possibilities in design through the lens of contemporary efforts in design to reform policing and incarceration and abolitionist organizing to end them. It asks how… Continue reading
In 2018 and 2020, I had the opportunity to contribute to three books on contemporary issues in design research, practice, and politics: Tricky Design: The Ethics of Things, edited by Tom Fisher and… Continue reading
This article argues for an active role for theory in designing, especially feminist theory and cultural studies, both as a means of theorizing design through the work of designers and as a means… Continue reading
In fall 2010, I taught a course called Urban Services in which my students worked with students in the education program of a large non-profit organization in New York City that offers a range of… Continue reading
Safe Keeping (2011) is a tear-off book, based on the original interviews conducted for Safe Keeping (2002-3), placed around New York City on the 10th anniversary of September 11, 2001. This edition is… Continue reading
To be haunted and to write from that location, to take on the condition of what you study, is not a methodology or a consciousness you can simply adopt or adapt as… Continue reading
Introduction By Shana Agid, Michael Bennett, and Kate Drabinski Angela Davis begins her influential book Are Prisons Obsolete? by pointing out how naturalized the system of mass incarceration has become in the United States.… Continue reading
Within days of Hurricane Katrina’s historic and devastative landfall on the Gulf Coast of the United States, New Orleans already had a new jail. Fashioned from the empty hulk of the bus depot,… Continue reading
On December 31, 1993, three young people were killed in a farmhouse in Humbolt, Nebraska. Brandon Teena, a white transgender man, Lisa Lambert, a white single mother who lived in the farmhouse,… Continue reading
Introduction: Teaching Beyond “Tolerance” By Shana Agid and Erica Rand Love Is All Around? At the close of its 2007 summer session—just before we went to final copy on this issue—the U.S.… Continue reading