work — Nelesi Rodriguez: Bits of Self

Co-facilitated with dancer and educator Vanessa Vargas at Pioneer Works, 2017

Our bodies help us recognize, understand, navigate, and even create the urban space: the blue dot in Google Maps, traces of bodies in space that provide us with clues for our own movement, metaphors we use to talk about the city and its systems, and even measurement units. At the same time, cities can have a particularly interesting effect in bodies’ self-awareness and their interactions with the environment, other bodies, and themselves: think sidewalks, elevators, benches in public spaces, but also workspaces, supermarkets, and spaces for prayer and meditation.

How can using our bodies as mapping tools transform our knowledge and experience? And what if we look at our bodies as territories? In this workshop, we use cartography as a framework to explore corporeal and social practices in the urban space.

The workshop begins by creating a shared understanding of what maps, bodies, and territories are and can be in the context of our workshop. Then, through a series of guided exercises that include listening, walking, moving and talking, participants explore how their bodies can serve as cartographic tools; helping them orient in, recognize, make sense of, and produce space.

This workshop was co-developed with Prof. Michele Kahane and co-facilitated with Prof. Mary Watson, Dean of the New School for Public Engagement, The New School.

2017 Imagining America National Gathering. UCDAVIS, California.

Workshop description

This workshop explores how people involved in social engaged teaching and public scholarship can better document their work. This is important not only for academics whose work must be assessed within often narrow evaluation frameworks, but also for students, partners, and communities who understand the potential of documentation as a critical form of public engagement itself.

The New School Collaboratory is a university-wide initiative that focuses on this question of documentation of socially engaged learning and scholarship. The initiative aims to enhance the University’s efforts to foster meaningful, efficacious, and sustainable engagements with communities and external partners, as well as making these projects visible for evaluation in an academic context. The Collaboratory has hosted a community of practice and action research to provide a context to explore ways to enhance our academic community’s efforts to achieve excellence in socially engaged learning and public scholarship. More recently, The New School Collaboratory launched a website that showcases diverse representations of socially engaged projects, pedagogies, research and resources, in order to improve knowledge, reflection, collaboration and resource-sharing across the University and community partners.

Workshop slides and resources available upon request.

More on The New School Collaboratory here.