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Monthly Archives: 03/2019

Populism, Art and the City Students Published in Journal of Urban Cultural Studies

Posted on by sarahhwang@berkeley.edu

UCB STUDENTS AND FACULTY CAN NOW CHECK OUT THIS JOURNAL FROM OSKICAT.

2018 Populism, Art, and the City students, Jeff Garnand, Tania Osorio Harp, Xander Lenc and Connie Zheng, published their papers in the September 2018 issue of the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies. These articles are an extension of their final projects for the Spring 2018 GUH Core Seminar Course co-taught by Jason Luger (City and Regional Planning) and Angela Marino (Theater, Dance & Performance Studies), who co-wrote an introductory article for the issue about the course as interdisciplinary pedagogy for our time. Read the abstract and contributor bios below to get an overview of this special issue! If you would like to find the published issue, you can do so here

Abstract and Introduction from Jason Luger's and Angela Marino's "Populism, art and the city: An interdisciplinary pedagogy for our time"

Populism on the far left and the far right is reshaping the contemporary city and the urban condition. In this special short-form section, we put forward populism, art and the city as a linked theoretical and methodological framework through the UC Berkeley Global Urban Humanities Initiative. Our conversations brought together new research in urban studies, art, architecture, public policy, and performance studies into what many people described as a decidedly populist age. Following a short introduction, we share a collection of four papers from such conversations that offer ‘focus sites’ from San Francisco to Palm Springs, Hong Kong to Mexico City, with a diverse set of theoretical proposals that branch from our discussions and shared readings in art, populism, and the city.

About the contributors

Jeff Garnand is a PhD student in the Department of City and Regional Planning studying the spatial aspects of techniques of poverty management and the punitive and more ambivalent approaches of state and private actors toward homelessness and the unhoused community in US cities. He earned a Masters of City Planning from UC Berkeley in 2016, and has a background in activism around homelessness and policing.

Xander Lenc is a graduate student pursuing a PhD in Geography, a DE in Science and Technology Studies, and a certificate in the Global Urban Humanities. Their dissertation work asks how labor and disease in California prisons interface with the state's racial landscape. In a parallel project with the Global Urban Humanities Initiative, they draw on queer theory to understand how time and indigeneity are articulated in the deserts of the American Southwest. They are also working on a project on race and the cultural uses of Bigfoot in Northern California. In their spare time, they work with the editorial team of the graduate humanities and social sciences journal Qui Parle and push for housing affordability on the board of the Berkeley Student Cooperative. They are a Graduate Student Fellow with the National Science Foundation and an incoming 2020 Graduate Fellow with the Global Urban Humanities Initiative.

Tania Osorio Harp is a graduate student pursuing a MS in Architecture at UC Berkeley where her research and practice focuses on the appropriation of spaces with a special emphasis on the history of Mexico City. In 2012, she co-founded the architectural office APRDELESP as an ongoing research initiative on space and its appropriation processes which functioned through ELHC, a network of subspaces—experimental, physical and/or digital 1:1 models that ran as independent economic systems within the urban framework and worked as public infrastructure for the office. 

Connie Zheng is an artist and writer currently pursuing her MFA in Art Practice at UC Berkeley. She uses the dialogue between text, drawing, painting and time-based media as a conduit through which to consider the environment of the media and the media of the environment, and these investigations tend to center on the visual culture around environmental crisis and economies of waste and creative reuse. She received her BA in Economics and English from Brown University and worked as a researcher before beginning graduate school.