Hello everyone. Well, as you know, my name is Andres Hake and I'm the director of the Advanced Architectural Design Program and on behalf of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. I am very happy to welcome here Lola Sheppard, architect, thinker, professor and activist, I could say, and very well known as co-founder as well, together with Mason White of the Toronto-based Architectural Practice Lateral Office. Lola Sheppard's research work is placed at the intersection of architecture, infrastructures, climate and politics. It characterizes architecture as both the result and an actor in the evolution of extended historical networks and environmental domains. For her, the role of the architects is not to solve problems or not to solve simple problems, maybe, but rather rendering visible the forces at work within a site-specific climate and geography. I'm building up synergies between issues and opportunities and all this with a very particular focus on the context of the architect, Canada, that is attracting a big part of the work that Lateral Office and herself have been developing in the last years. Lola is a registered architect and she received her Bachelor of Science in Architecture and Bachelor of Architecture from McHeal University, as well as a Master of Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design. She's an associate professor at the School of Architecture, University of Waterloo, where she also serves as the undergraduate officer. She has taught at the University of Toronto, Ohio State University and California College of the Arts. Before funding Lateral Office, she worked in the offices of Jan Nouvelle in Paris, Peter Rose in Cambridge, and Alice and Maurice are in London. Since the co-author of books that have been incredibly influential and very influential here, especially since the co-author of pamphlet architecture number 30, titled Copeland Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism, published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2011, since being co-editor of the second issue of Bracket, titled Gouche Soft, published by Actare in 2012 and Bracket and Extremes in 2013. Her work has been often aware, I would say, since the recipient of the 2012 Reich Young Architects Award and the 2003 and 2004 Howard Lefebvre Fellowship from Ohio State University. In a recent conversation with Hans Sivalins, she claimed if you really want to engage with the issues at hand, you have to examine the larger economic infrastructural system to see where architecture might intervene. I still remember the impact that it had in many people and in me in particular Lateral Office contribution to the 2018 Seoul Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism. Their project states of this assembly, composed by a collection of impressive models and drawings, proposed seven forms of architecture of techno commons to collectively manage electronic waste. Lateral Office defines its mission as the exploration of architectural design as a research vehicle to engage with climate, with the societal, with the ecological and the political. The recent work and research focus on the way design mediates the relationships between public realm, infrastructure and environment. Lateral Office has been awarded with a 2016 National Urban Design Award with a 2013 Progressive Architecture Award. In 2011, they received the Holstein Foundation for Sustainable Construction Gold Award and the Merging Voices Award from the Architectural League of New York. Please join me in welcoming Lola Shepard tonight. Thank you for that very kind introduction. It's lovely to be here. I haven't Had the pleasure of being here for a while. I came recently for reviews and it was it was lovely to see some of the work happening So I wanted to use the lecture to position some arguments about the territories that architects might operate in both intellectually And physically and the agency by which they might do so. So I'm going to spend about eight minutes or ten minutes sort of positioning a set of ideas that have shaped some of our work and then spend the remaining time presenting a range of design research projects and installations. So there's a long history of projecting the direction of our discipline. Disciplinarity has traditionally been about knowledge production, but it was Foucault who first called attention to the discipline as a system of control in the production of discourse. English scholars Shumway and Messi Davidao unpacked the historical lineage of disciplinarity articulating the common connotations of discipline have until recently been entirely positive to call a branch of knowledge discipline is to imply that it is rigorous and legitimate. However, we regulate and control knowledge and training in disciplines produces the acceptance of certain disciplinary methods and truths. Interestingly, many of the metaphors that we use to talk about the idea of discipline are geographical ones. We talk about territories, fields, frontiers and it's been noted that the intellectual ecosystem has with time been carved up into separate institutional and professional niches whose boundaries reinforce different goals, different methods and different expertise. Disciplines differ significantly with regard to the permeability of their boundaries and many scholars would say that the permeability is a sort of measure of the kind of coherence in uniformity demanded of of a disciplines practitioners. And so when we speak of discipline, we don't speak simply about a body of knowledge but also a set of practices by which that knowledge is acquired, confirmed, implemented and reproduced. And I'll come back to this idea of sort of the practices by which we make work later. Architecture since the 1960s has been active in borrowing from other disciplines, although it's not clear to me how much that borrowing is reciprocated, whether other disciplines are as fascinated by us as we are by them. But of course, you know people like Charles Jenks in his famous diagram from 1971, architecture 2000s, 2000 predictions and methods was was precisely that, a sort of trying to chart the lineages of architecture, the where it had come from and where it might be leading. And I think this the sort of fascination for charting where we are going is part of what motivates many of us. Although the tug between the interior-oriented and exterior-oriented design persists, I would say that probably since the 1990s, we've seen a general momentum towards the disciplines exteriority. Various versions of disciplinary transgression exist. We talk about multi-inter, intra, post-disciplinarity and perhaps the most robust the idea of trans-disciplinary. Trans-disciplinary research responds, as one scholar pointed out, to the observation that the world has problems, but universities have departments. Suggesting that disciplinary, trans-disciplinary work is oriented towards sort of solving more complex issues that require multiple bodies of knowledge. There continues to be, and I think we see it particularly in schools, this kind of exciting, interbreeding among design and spatial disciplines, combinations of architecture, landscape, ecology, urbanism, engineering, material science, fabrication have offered fodder in the last two decades for new disciplinary pursuits and in some cases the launching even of new academic programs. This has yielded an opportunity for considering the expanded field for the design disciplines. The notion of the expanded field of course was introduced in many ways by Rosalind Krause's famous diagram from 1979 and her essay where she tried to sort of map out new understandings of sculptural practice. And this sort of diagram in that discourse had a huge impact, I would say, on architects as well. And so perhaps in a kind of homage to Krause in our book coupling that came out in 2011, we attempted to sort of chart an expanded field for architecture that in some ways was provoked by this sort of renewed interest in infrastructure of which we were a part and many other practices were sort of expanding the sort of boundaries of the discipline. And so it began with this question of how one position infrastructure within that of course is not traditionally understood as a sort of within the realm of architects. And so we then mapped out a kind of range of things that were outside. So the idea of infrastructure, programmed container, civic conduit, productive surface. And that in some ways architecture was all these sort of hybrid conditions. And so it begs the question of what are these sort of other environments which architecture might engage in. And for us in some ways it has been this interest in the kind of extrinsic forces that shape architecture. The ecologies, the energies, the economies, the flows of people, goods and networks which one might understand as velocities. That in some ways we're interested in the sort of things at the very sort of exterior perimeter that come to shape architecture. And much of our work has focused on regions where architecture radically confronts geography, territory and climate. Places where the very notion of site needs to be redefined. And so it's often been in the non-urban, the remote, the rural, the far flung. And our interest in these places is that in these contexts there's often no model for architecture. There is no model for public realm. And so the rules of engagement have to basically be, I don't want to say invented, but have to be teased out through intense research because there is no sort of given model that you can refer to. And so, as I say, it demands extensive research and it demands also a kind of shift from merely studying site and architecture as precedent to this sort of broader understanding of larger forces. So, if one looks outside the discipline, it's sort of, I think part of our interest is in, as Andre said, expanding the sort of agency of architecture. And it's done not to avoid the particularities of the discipline, but rather to expand and clarify the questions and ultimately the agency that it can have. And so how might one work in this way? We've started to talk about the idea of the undisciplined as a counter to not so much being transdisciplinary or anti-disciplinary, but to look and learn from the sort of, from an expanded field of questions to come back to the discipline and to use the methods we have trained as architects or planners or architects as the form of response. So the idea is to sort of find the answers within the discipline, but to perhaps find the questions outside of it. A century ago, Gropius tasked the architect in the scope of total architecture to understand design and fabrication processes in order to combine, quote, the qualities of an artist, a technician and a businessman. He sort of aspired to be able to design the fork that share the building in the city and he advocated against specialization. He argued that good architecture should be a project of life itself and that implies an intimate knowledge of the biological, the social, the technical and artistic problems. In some ways the sort of renewed interest that we're seeing in landscape and urbanism and fabrication and material research, architects sort of share this kind of desire for, you know, in some cases a kind of total scope or in others perhaps simply a kind of expanded scope. The risk one might say is that at least architects in a kind of tenuous position are we left as sort of a jack of all trades and master of none. And I think that I would counter that the answer lies in perhaps rethinking the role of the architect. And so what's interesting, when you look up the definition of the architect or what is an architect, you get the more conventional, a person who designs buildings and in many cases supervises their construction, a person who's responsible for inventing or realizing a particular idea or project, and then at least the Merriam-Webster dictionary gives related words. And for me this is where it gets interesting. Builder, maker, producer, captain, director, handler, leader, quarterback, contriver, formulator, spawner, arranger, hatcher, planner, plotter, schemer, finagler, which seems so much more interesting I have to say. And I think this idea of expanding the sort of scope of how we even understand our role is really interesting. And so the question is who might be role models? And for us, and there could be a far expanded list, but I think people like minister Fuller, who had this sort of amazing ability to think at an almost global scale, he invented his own field of synergetics. He developed the idea of the world game as a kind of method for sort of asking these huge questions. People like Cedric Price, who were able to sort of think about questions of infrastructure and economics and economic cycles, and also then tapping into kind of what was happening in terms of science and computers as sort of fodder for rethinking what architecture could be. People like Doxiadis, who's perhaps both more literally a planner but also had this kind of amazing ability to understand planning within broader understandings of culture and economics. And then more contemporarily, I think someone like Keller Easterling who really invokes architects to sort of understand the kind of hidden forces that shape our profession inadvertently and to kind of reclaim control for at least understanding those systems. So I guess the sort of last question is what might be the methods by which one engages in this sort of expanded territory and expanded agency? And we found I guess a few things that sort of motivate how we work. One is we're interested in questions which intertwine territory, environment, and typology. We use research to uncover the social, cultural, and economic forces which shape a spatial phenomena. We seek out overlooked potentials and we use drawings to spatialize phenomena that have yet to be documented. And we have found that often the answer lies not in a single solution but emerges from multiple possibilities. So I'm going to show several projects and hopefully some of this will maybe become clearer in terms of the intent. So the first project is the States of Disassembly, Territory, Toxicity, and Electronics, which Andres mentioned, which we developed for the Sol Biennale in 2017. And the theme of the Biennale was imminent commons. And of course, a commons is typically understood to describe international, supernational, and global resources. And they often make reference to the earth's natural resources such as the oceans, the atmosphere, outer space. The Antarctic is sort of well known as a kind of global commons. But in the context of the Biennale, they expanded to include questions of sensing, communicating, moving, making, and recycling. And so we got interested in the idea of recycling and then more particularly the idea of e-waste given that of course it was Korea and Korea as a major producer of electronics. And what we began to observe is that we live or our sort of territories are made up of three primary uses, sites of production, consumption, and waste. And so of course we're most familiar with the sites of consumption, the places where we live, where we play, where we work. And the city is the primary site of consumption. However, the sites of extraction, production, and post-consumption, i.e. waste, are the things that are generally out of view and on the periphery of where we inhabit. And Jennifer Gabbers in her book Digital Rubbish makes this sort of poignant comment, the digital revolution it turns out is littered with rubbish. And so we got interested in understanding the sort of geopolitics, socioeconomics, and logistics behind this. And the first thing was to understand what was e-waste. And so e-waste is not simply your phone or your computer, it's your fridge, it's your microwave, it's your stove probably. We have electronics in most of our devices.  And so we set out to kind of understand what was this kind of global flow of resources that go into the production and then the making and then the recycling of these materials. So the blue are the sites of extraction of gold, of copper, of platinum, etc. And the pink are the sites of waste recycling. So the thing to note is that there's only one or two sites in the sort of western or developed world that actually can accommodate e-waste recycling, Korea being actually one of the few. And so although it's actually technically illegal by UN conventions, we still ship our e-waste to developing nations where it's done, where it's recycled in kind of highly uncontrolled and toxic ways. And it's basically producing a kind of toxic colonialism. And so the, actually, I'll go back for one moment. So the primary sites for recycling are in China, in Karachi, in Pakistan, and in Ghana. And so one of these sites is Agbo Bloshi in Ghana. And this was a drawing done by someone else, but you see the kind of whole territory given over to e-waste recycling. But what's amazing is that there's a kind of entire city growing out. So you have mosques and churches and football patches and public baths. And so the question is, you know, what might be the public realm that would emerge if we were actually to sort of take responsibility for this e-waste, rather than offload it to other nations. And this is this public, well this, I wouldn't call it public realm, this is the sort of landscape that emerges in Ghana at the site of this e-waste production. So we made this sort of drawing that in some ways conflates the many sites that contribute to e-waste production. So sites of extraction, sorry I'll use my pointer, sites of extraction, smelters, sort of proper e-waste recycling, the informal e-waste, as simply kind of trying to map out this sort of landscape that emerges. And in some ways we were interested in asking what might be the new buildings, the new landscapes that might emerge in this sort of repatriated sort of technology and economy of e-waste. So we began and in the spirit of recycling we decided to recycle a lot of electronics. So we went to our local computer depot and hacked apart computers and keyboards and hard drives and then we sort of neutralized them and wanted to kind of incorporate them in this sort of spirit of recycling and I could once start to understand them as part of the architecture. And so I said in my last point of sort of methods this interest in, sometimes the answer lies not in a single solution but in many. We've perhaps, I was going to say unintentionally but I think it's actually fairly intentional. You'll see that many of the projects today, we deliberately actually developed many sort of responses to a question. And it's partly in recognizing that these questions are so complex that no single design problem will sort of produce a kind of satisfying response. So we developed in this case seven projects that were really demonstrated purely through model in addition to those drawings I showed earlier. And so I'm going to show just three of them very quickly to kind of give you a sense of some of the things we were interested in. So the first one is called the exchange campus and it was this idea of a kind of current, that the current global e-waste stream is dependent on the constant movement and shipping of e-waste. And so we were interested in locating a kind of exchange campus at the site of a port just before this e-waste gets distributed out to the world. And that there would be one side that would be for disassembly for storage and then the other side which would be a sort of new kind of university or campus with courtyards and classrooms and disassembly stations where new sort of knowledges of making electronics might emerge. So you see here this kind of spine that separates the sort of side that is the storage and kind of infrastructural port condition and then these sort of educational buildings and classrooms and workshops that would sit on the other side. And here's one of the sort of electronic pieces now understood as a lab building. The second project was called the We Market and it was a playoff the sort of idea of our big boxes and in particular things like Best Buy where we go to buy, you know, new electronics. And we were interested in could one imagine a kind of alternate Best Buy where one would go to buy components that were repurposed of post-consumer materials. And so it was really a kind of idea on the play of the big box. So there was a sort of loading zone and entry point. There was a kind of conveyor belt that is sort of hidden under here where goods would be moved about and then zones for public display. And then the third project that was part of this series we called the Theater of Disassembly. And it was playing off the sort of rise of hacker culture, the fascination in personal robotics and electronics, a little bit of the sort of hoarders, what is it called, reality TV as well. And the idea that the Theater of Disassembly would be a place where under one roof you could have sort of varying aspects of sort of post-consumer electronic entertainment. And so it was imagined as a series of stages and venues where you could have hacking battles, demo classes, disassembly events. And so here you see these sort of four theaters for disassembly that are hung in this kind of grid-like space. And that then on the ground floor was the space for storing all the e-waste. So the kind of public was immediately brought up through a set of platforms into this sort of performance space and the ground floor was left as a kind of logistical space. So of course these projects are not meant as literal solutions. They're really meant, I think as Andre very accurately said, they ask questions. They're partly saying what are the things we're overlooking, what are the kind of untapped programmatic opportunities, typological opportunities that emerge when one looks at something that begins as a kind of intense global network, but ultimately materializes in storage silos, in vaults for rare earths, in disassembly buildings, in warehouses, in port buildings, etc. So the second project that I want to show is a long-term project that we've been involved in called Many Norths that materialized in a book by the same title that came out in 2017. And part of our fascination with the North, as I say, is that there is no model for what to do in this context. And we got interested because of course most of our images, certainly probably yours and even in Canada, the North is the polar bears and the glaciers. But what you realize is there are people living there and they are tethered by infrastructures and networks, but always in this sort of intense dialogue with climate and geography. So the striking thing about the Canadian North is you have 115,000 people, probably barely a New York borough, spread over 5 million square kilometers. It's probably half the land mass of the United States. And you have these tiny dispersed communities, many of which are not connected by road, so the only way you can get to them is by plane or by boat. You also have, particularly in the Eastern Arctic, so this would be the sort of what one would call the kind of Eastern Arctic, an incredibly young population. It's the fastest growing population per capita in Canada. I believe that 50% of the population is under the age of 25, which is kind of mind blowing. And so you have these youth that are on the one hand going out hunting with their elders and then on the other hand on Facebook and listening to hip hop. And so they're producing this kind of amazing hybrid culture of tradition and modernity.  It's also a place where modernity has really been foisted upon an Indigenous people. We've always sort of loved this photo. It's a building by a Quebec architect who I had the pleasure of interviewing. He built several of these kind of crazy lunar schools. And then you have these sort of young Inuit youth of the 70s, you know, dressed in the kind of style of the day. And this conflation of sort of different notions of modernity in this kind of intense landscape is fascinating. It's also a place where we've imposed, I mean I say we Southern Canada have imposed models of architecture, language, education, and usually with tremendous social and cultural harm. And then simultaneously there's this kind of amazing sort of hybridization of culture and technology. So they still go out hunting on the land but they now have snowmobiles and GPS. And they're sort of fearless in their willingness to combine these sort of worlds. So the book was in a way the product of five or six years of research. And in a way sought to kind of challenge both how architecture has been documented in the north, which to a large degree it hasn't really, but it has largely been a sort of technological understanding of architecture. But I think more broadly to perhaps challenge architects regardless of the context to kind of expand the things that they look at, the tools that we might employ to document phenomena. So the research was organized in five themes and chapters. Urbanism, architecture, mobility, monitoring both military and research monitoring and resources. And we were interested in the idea of a kind of multitude of voices and a multitude of methods for documenting this complex environment. So we made, actually I'll go back to this. And so there were several kind of influences that came from outside of architecture. One is Glenn Gould's idea of the north. Glenn Gould was actually a famous pianist, but he did these amazing recordings where he would interview people in the north and he would overlay their sort of stories and narratives so that it is somewhere between a kind of musical score and voices come in and out of focus in this kind of recording. But it's this idea that there are multiple narratives and each person has a very different understanding of the north. The second influence, which I'll expand on in a minute, was a geographer from Quebec called Louis-Henard Melin who talked about Canadian Nordicity and he famously said there are many Norse in this north and I'll come back to this. And then a third influence was the famous film by Zacharias Knack at the Fast Runner, which is the only Inuk film to have won a Palme d'Or at Cannes, which really speaks to kind of indigenous ingenuity in the face of kind of climate and how culture adapts. So, Amla, the title of our book, Many Norse, comes from this statement there are many Norse in the north and he was interested in trying to kind of quantify quite scientifically different Norse based on a set of polar values that had to do with economics, infrastructure, access to resources, et cetera, and I won't get into it too much, but he created these kind of different qualities of north. What's also interesting is that he talked about the idea of places getting denortified, that as they developed economically they might lose their northern qualities, which raises this interesting question of, you know, is geography sort of in the eye of the beholder? So, we set out early on to kind of define the idea of north in our own terms. So, you can understand it in terms of political terms, so are three northern provinces. You can understand it in terms of ethnographic regions. You can understand it in terms of where the tree line ends, where the permafrost ends or begins, I should say. Permafrost is where the ground is permanently frozen and so it changes fundamentally how you build. You could define it by the eco zone. You could define it by where the roads end. You could define it as I'm landed in this idea of a middle north, far north and extreme north. And you're left with this perplexing question that there is no singular north and that each, depending on what you're looking at, the territory may need to get redefined. So, as part of these kind of multiple ways of trying to document the context, we made timelines that introduce each chapter that try and understand policy and innovations and events. At the end of the book, instead of a sort of typical index, we actually have a sort of tech matrix which sort of includes all the sort of technologies from perplanes to hammers to buildings where architecture is understood as merely one technology among many for inhabiting the north. So, I'm going to show you a few case studies to try and give you a sense of some of the things we're interested in. So, the first, in the category of urbanism, we looked at the question of land form. And so, we've actually documented, because we must be compulsive, every single town north of 60 and tried to kind of unpack their morphology and what gave them shape. And so, some for instance are really defined by extraordinary geography which forces communities to sort of hug the coast in this kind of highly concentrated linear way. In other cases, communities are navigating this kind of crazy pockmarked landscape and actually end up with this sort of strange dispersed condition as they negotiate geography. And what's interesting is many of these communities with climate change are actually, the land is eroding so severely that entire towns need to be relocated and this is happening in Alaska as well. In mobility, we set out to understand things like sea lift which is the means by which goods are delivered. So, if you live in a Caluit which is the capital of Nunavut and you want a sofa bed from Ikea, you get it once a year in October when the boat comes to deliver it. Or if you want dog food or you want anything that's more than perishable goods it's all delivered by sea lift. So, we set out to kind of understand where the southern points of kind of connection were what the routes were. And so, you'll see that in every case study there's always a kind of regional scale map and then there's often a kind of calendar and then there's this kind of zooming in to understand what it means at the local. So, the reality is that most of these communities don't have a proper port so you have to dock the boat in the middle of the bay and then with a second boat you have to go back and forth and it takes four days when it should take a couple of hours. And so, here are these barges bringing in these sea cans of goods that will keep them going through the whole year. And many of these sea cans end up left in the communities and then they get repurposed as sort of workshops and storage so they become inadvertently part of the urban fabric. In mobility and monitoring we also looked at indigenous practices such as the Inuit trails. We leveraged the work of an anthropologist who had been mapping with elders the Inuit trails to sort of understand the network. So, in this case, one of the things is that in most of this is not our own fieldwork. Each of these drawings is probably someone's entire PhD dissertation and so there's no way we could cover the scope of things we wanted to cover but part of what we saw our role is in trying to spatialize things that others may write about or describe verbally but that no one actually has spatialized. And the argument is that if we can spatialize it then we can potentially factor it into design thinking. So, oh sorry, oops, I'm going to go back one too. So the Inuit have this kind of amazing way of navigating the land using topography and ridges and they basically read the land like a map. They have many different terms for understanding kinds of snow and the landforms produced. We looked at what they pack on a trip and all the tools and equipment. We looked at monitoring at a kind of huge scale, something like the dew line, which is the set of military bases that were built by the Americans in Northern Canada during the Cold War. And so the map one typically finds some version of this which is the many dots where there were radars, some man, some unmanned but those dots actually were places with very specific geographies with a whole set of buildings. In some cases there were up to 80 people that would stay there for a whole year. They had theaters and cinemas and often they sowed the seeds of future Northern communities. And I should say it was actually the biggest building construction project ever undertaken virtually in the world. The amount of goods and materials required to kind of build these 35 or more military outposts was mind-boggling. So they developed kind of building types and they're these sort of crazy infrastructures that remain, many are being dismantled. A few remain in kind of unmanned operation but they come with a kind of architecture and culture that is embedded. And so here's one of these now in a state of disrepair. And then the last case study that I'll show you is taken from the chapter looking at resources. So we looked at diamond mining and things like the crazy engineering required for that but then we also looked at a kind of amazing practice done in northern Quebec. So this is kind of the tip of Quebec in the Hudson's Bay where they go hunting for mussels. And so in the summer they harvest the mussels by the coast and in the winter when the bay is frozen they go out on the land. So what's amazing is the ocean or the bay becomes a kind of frozen ice shelf and there's a tide of about 40 feet that comes and goes. So they dig a hole in the ice, they take their sled and use it as a ladder and they basically crawl under the ice ceiling and they harvest the mussels and then they come back out and they have to do this all within about a three hour time span. So this is the kind of architecture of the landscape when the water is down. People stay on top to kind of let them know if the tides are coming back because you would drown so they have to move quickly. This is a photo, not ours, of an elder and his grandson harvesting these mussels which I considered a delicacy. And so what's fascinating for us is not all these projects lead to or not all this documentation of course leads to architecture but it is this argument that these are part of the things that are shaping indirectly the kind of physical environments, the places people go, the way they navigate and understand the land. And so if we can expand the things we look at and document as I said we can sort of change perhaps the things we include in design thinking. So I'm going to show one project that actually preceded the book but was happening in parallel with much of the research. It's called the Arctic Food Network and it began with and sort of much has been written about this huge food insecurity in the north. So you have incredibly high cost of food. So a food basket is like what you need to sort of survive. So here it would be the cost for a month of bread and milk and cheese and so forth. And so what you see is in Norway the cost of food of your monthly salary is a mirror, I don't know, 16% and none of it it's 55%. So you have the highest rates of unemployment in the country and the highest costs of food and a kind of loss of traditional knowledge of going out hunting and so forth. And what's happening is there's a kind of importation of southern food and so there's high rates of obesity and diabetes and so forth. So we were interested not in, you know, there's no going back, they will continue to eat southern food but could one, was there a place where architecture could intervene to somehow redress the balance a little bit? So we looked at what were the kind of food resources that they have, what they call country food or traditional food. We set out to understand the kind of infrastructures that they currently use to store food so community freezers, there are a few greenhouses, hunting cabins, underground freezers that are actually dug into the ice and then wayfinding means. And so these are some of the cabins, these are further south, you wouldn't get them at this density in the far north. These are these kind of amazing underground freezers that were dug by hand back in the day. There's country food markets, there's such a demand for country food that there are sort of informal country food markets where people trade things they've hunted but as you can see there's no infrastructure for it to happen and then the kind of practice of going out on the land and hunting and sharing with the community. So this was the work of this anthropologist I mentioned that had mapped out the Inuit trail and where they've historically gone and then this is us mapping all the kind of resources, food resources from meat to seafood to plants and berries that they eat and what we started to do is map out where the food was, where the communities were which are the dots and where the trails were which came from the anthropologist map and what we were interested in is could one imagine a kind of system of trade and exchange that would increase the kind of access to country food such that you could have greater access over longer durations. So the idea is that if one town for instance had access to caribou and another to Arctic char, could they trade? And so we imagine this as a kind of what we call the kind of Arctic network or Arctic highway which could grow incrementally, you could begin by building infrastructure at one hub and progressively it could expand as needed and no hub was further than a three or four hour snowmobile ride away so it was possible to kind of go from one node to the next. And so we developed a kind of kit of parts that included community kitchens, greenhouses, ice fishing huts, storage, aquaculture meshes, etc. And the idea was to, you know, we recognized we couldn't possibly know what individual communities needed and so if one could imagine a kit of parts, communities could tell us, well we'd like a community kitchen and a storage facility. Someone else might want an outpost or a wayfinding for Wi-Fi which you just, you, when people go navigating out on the land. So we started to kind of create a calendar of the dark is what's currently accessible and the hatch is how we imagined you could extend the sort of access to food, to a food group and where the sort of infrastructures might offer this greater access through greenhouses would extend growing seasons or places to smoke fish where you could store it for longer, etc. So this was one of these sort of outposts, a collection of sort of several of these buildings. And so in a town you might have a larger cluster of a kind of greenhouse, a shared market and a community kitchen out further on the land. In between two communities you might have a kind of shed and a kitchen. And one of the things we were interested in is not simply a kind of cultural hybridization but also a technological one. And so we were interested in could you on the one hand use very simple lumber. On the other hand use sort of CNC joints that would allow you to kind of assemble frames fairly easily. On the one hand could you use the kind of tradition of snowpack walls to allow insulation in the winter and ventilation in the summer. But then on a kind of higher tech end could you imagine installing solar panels which is already happening in many buildings in the north to allow access to kind of Wi-Fi and so forth. So this idea of merging sort of traditional and contemporary methods also interested in kind of traditional assembly methods. So when they make their sleds they actually tie them rather than nailing them and so we were interested in could that practice get incorporated. So this was the interior view of one of these community kitchens. And really I mean one of the things in the north at least in Canada in the Canadian north is the only discussion is how quickly and cheaply can you build it. And the idea that that architecture could be something that is a kind of tool of cultural empowerment that it sort of marks place and marks community is almost not part of the discussion. And so for us this is what oops sorry some of these structures could hopefully do. The other thing we were interested in was the logistics. So how you could bring it out onto the land given that there are no roads how you could assemble it fairly easily with a few people. What were the kind of and then the last thing was sort of the economics of this. So in a current model we import food and the further north you go the more expensive it is. And so we were interested could this sort of architecture be entrepreneurial and actually generate a kind of micro economy where on the one hand you could trade things locally but you might even export some of these things to the south and create sort of small scale employment. So some of this work I'm not going to get through all of it but got sort of materialized in our submission for the Venice Biennale in 2014 that was called Arctic Adaptations Nunavut at 15. And I don't want to really talk about it in too much detail but we were interested in how could you document the kind of past present and future of this territory which is transforming so rapidly. So there were sort of three components. The first was a set of carvings and so we had sort of selected seminal buildings that had shaped the Canadian north either because they were significant icons or because they were housing prototypes that were deployed by the hundreds across communities. And then we worked with Inuit carved or we didn't work with. We developed workshops with Inuit carvers and had them do these sort of amazing sculptures of these buildings. So each carving is done by a different sculptor in various communities across the north. For the present day condition we wanted to kind of create a sort of bar relief map of every community in Nunavut. So we made these sort of quarry and shields that marked geography and mapped every single building. So we've actually literally constructed every or modeled every single building in Nunavut to understand the kind of spatial patterns of these communities and we called these the kind of moons of Nunavut. And then the sort of projective component was done working with students in schools across Canada looking at questions like housing. This was a project done with students at U of T. Where we projected on sort of we made maps at various scales. So regional, local, etc. And everything that was dynamic and ephemeral was projected on through a set of videos. So climate, snow, ice, people's movements, snowmobile trails, etc. would get mapped on sort of digitally. Do I have time for one? Okay, so I'll close with one last project called Making Camp which was developed actually for the Chicago Biennale. The Biennales have been very productive for us. They offer very good deadlines. That was looking at the idea of camping as a sort of cultural phenomena. And also embracing this idea of the kind of domesticated wilderness. And it began with the sort of famous Rainer-Bannum sort of observation about how we shape environment. And he talks about it in the architecture of the well-tempered environment that there are two ways that we sort of shape our environment. One is the sort of metaphor, the model of the campfire where we basically by producing heat generate comfort and that acts as a kind of force of attraction to and that the desirable zone is right near the campfire and that of course the less desirable zone is in the tailwinds. The other model is that of the tent which is really one of shielding of keeping out the environment. If one is about sort of manufacturing an environment, the other is about keeping the environment out. And I think part of our interest in the idea of camping is in a way it gets to the almost the idea of the sort of primitive hut. Like what is the most essential thing that we need to survive or inhabit in our environment. And we also realize there's a lot of innovations in tents. Like you can get just about any shape and form and material of tent and there's also a lot of innovations on gear. But there is very little innovation when it comes to camp. And what's interesting is that we've actually replicated suburban models of housing on our campsite. So these are two Canadian campsites and you see the kind of cul-de-sacs and the campgrounds. And then the third realization. So I'm Canadian and I'm pretty sure you need to go camping to maintain your Canadian passport. And I had never been camping until my husband who's American took me. And you know you imagine you're going out into the wilderness and it's going to be you're going to commune with nature and then you get there and this is what you see. And you're like this is not what I signed up for. And so there was this realization that camping has become a kind, I mean they're the hardcore people that do go out back and they bring all their gear and they see no one for four days and I see someone in the audience I'm pretty sure is one of those. But most people actually are sort of interested in it being a kind of communal activity and so this was another one of our starting points. So we started by mapping the sort of policies and legislation and the kind of advent of the car and all the things that have sort of shaped recreational culture in North America. We mapped out all the sort of technical innovations and then we basically in the sort of spirit of serial responses wanted to imagine five new camp grounds that offered literally new grounds on which you could camp and new experiences. And so since most campsites if you've ever been to one they give you a little brochure and they tell you where to go and where to find things. We made our own. We're ready to like market this. And for the Biennale we decided to kind of document all this primarily through models. So we imagined a kind of site that conflated a bit like the Seoul Biennale is sort of multiple sites and I mean they would never exist this close to each other in real life but five different projects on five different prototypical grounds and we were interested in the kind of immersive nature of the model also as a potential. So I'm going to show just two or three very quickly again just to give you the spirit of them one was called closed loop and it was the idea of being able to go camping on wetlands and in the middle of lakes which is of course a ground you can't normally occupy but that these are very fragile ecologies and so the idea was that you would create this kind of collective infrastructure and the other thing we were interested in is the kind of rituals of camping so making a campfire, getting water doing your dishes, setting up your tent and we were interested in could you reduce the amount of gear you would need to bring so a lot of the infrastructure sort of built into the campsite so you know there were collective fire pits your tents were actually in this kind of collective curtain and if the curtain was up you knew it was unused if it was pulled down it meant someone was occupying it there was a kind of artificial wetland where you would go and dump your sort of dirty water and it would be cleaned before it was put back into the natural water system and then this was the kind of point for getting fresh water and so this is the kind of manual the gear you need to bring and don't need to bring and how many campsites and the model of this kind of new ground and a view of what it might look like being able to kind of canoe in so the idea also is that you could leave your car completely and kind of paddle in or walk in and have a kind of much more immersive experience with the landscapes this is this kind of artificial wetland the second one was called Lookout Tower and it was the idea of could one take the kind of distributed campsites and actually start to kind of stack them vertically so that you could get a kind of immersive relationship to the forest so again the kind of manual and this a kind of interest in how ephemeral could this tower be and so again your tent could actually deploy out of the sort of platform each platform was a campsite and then this kind of very thin mesh that simply meant you wouldn't fall out and then the last one or the third out of the series of five was called Off Grid and it was this idea of a kind of endless grid of poles that had multiple functions so at the entrance of the campsite you would get the tarps to make your tents you could get tarps to collect water you could get surfaces to actually the surfaces were already built in for Wi-Fi because one of the strange things about our national parks is we go to a way to get we go there to get away from it all but now they're offering you Wi-Fi so you can check yourself on every few minutes which I haven't figured that one out but anyways so this idea that you could kind of plug in where you wanted you could form a cluster with a set of friends and that these other infrastructures sort of gave you water and electricity and Wi-Fi as you needed it and so this was a kind of fragmentary view of the model maybe I'll end literally this is a super fast one that's a kind of we've started doing some public installations that pick up many of these sort of interest in kind of the user being able to kind of engage their environment and engage the kind of climate so this was built in Montreal as a temporary installation it has since traveled all over the world but downtown Montreal although fairly vibrant has a lot of vacant lots and so the client was interested it was a municipal client year round and so we were interested in questions of seriality in people like the music of Steve Reich in images like the cover from Joy Division's Unknown Pleasure is this idea of a kind of spatializing sound the brief asked for dealing with sound and light to kind of bring people out in the winter and so we're always interested in kind of a simple singular thing be repeated to kind of create variation so we got interested in the idea of the seesaw as a kind of fairly simple and intuitive thing that could allow for formal and informal play so we built these sort of enormous seesaws of different scales that as users interacted with them would emit sound and light and so it formed both a kind of individual instrument but also a collective instrument and so this is it installed all 30 of them and this kind of new topography that emerges as people use it this is it in the kind of midst of a snowstorm it was kind of amazing people came out in all seasons so I'm going to end it there but I think for us this question of what are the sort of territories I mean this is obviously some of these installations are much more local and dealing with less complex challenges but I think this kind of ongoing question in how the user regardless of kind of scale becomes part of the sort of that the architect has to kind of respond to that user as well and imagine kind of new opportunities is a kind of recurrent interest so I'll end it there before we open it to the audience I would like to ask you about a few things that were very important during your presentation it's quite an amazing body of work but also quite an amazing awareness of where you are and how you're situated in the field and what is the challenges that you're introducing one of the things that is quite amazing is that you're proposing architecture as a practice that is articulating things that often were seen like very detached to each other like climate networks infrastructures kind of practices or rituals you said at one point performances are something that is your practices kind of putting together, rearticulating thinking ways of reassemble or reassembling them how do you see your practices that is operating kind of connecting or thinking the way these different categories spatial but also material categories get together I mean I think one of our part of the answer lies in an interest I think we have in sort of thinking across scales and so being able to kind of on the one hand make a map at a geographic or regional scale that understands whether it's monitoring or patterns of movement but understanding that each of those points on a kind of map regardless of how big it is has a kind of highly local reality and I think that that is I think that notions of climate or networks it's really hard to kind of think at a continental scale or even at the scale of a whole province but once you sort of recognize that these things hit down I think it's easier to kind of then figure out how to engage and I think that's where as architects we can sort of think about something like climate change or networks because and I think this is where you can look outside the discipline but in the end we're trained to design at a certain scale and you need to kind of figure out what is the territory of operating then as a designer but in a way I think that's something that is very present in your work like there was a moment in more north that you're saying but all these realities they come down to this and you were showing these places and it's a term that has a trajectory in architecture like if we were finding where place was basically used it's very much in a very different tradition you also have like a way of reading is something that is very dynamic for instance even building configurations or configurations within different in between different buildings is something that you're describing as something that changes for instance many of these arctic towns it's something that you were explaining that was changing in the last years you were talking also of kind of this materiality that is prepared also for a performance that will make it evolve in a way your focus on buildings is also identifying that buildings are something that are changing are dynamic are performing it's very different to the notion of place as something that is a static that is kept by buildings basically I mean I think that's an ongoing interest that we've had in all projects in regards to whether we're working in the Canadian north in that context where architecture has really been a colonial tool imposed where literally they would teach Inuit how to live how to use the kitchen in an appropriate western manner it's really fraught and so the idea that and we're not alone social scientists and others are talking about this as well that architecture and housing needs to be flexible but also in a context when in any town of 500 people things have to do double duty or things need to work in a network and we're doing work right now in Newfoundland which is not as far north but has a similar condition of many small rural villages it's sort of unimaginable to say every town will get a school and a cultural center and a community center so this interest in how things can work as a network is interesting and hence they have to be dynamic and whether that means literally things that are reconfigurable or simply that they are flexible and can anticipate change over time different ways one can understand that but I think that's an ongoing interest another topic that I think we sort of miss is the question of politics in many different moments you were claiming for the field to dedicate time to find where its agency could be gained there's moments that you're talking of technology and infrastructures and what's the way to turn them accountable there's another notion of politics that has to do with rendering things visible and even the use of the metaphor of the theater as a way to expose things and to open them to a public discussion you're talking about new notions of publicness so the discussion that you're proposing is very much embedding many different notions of politics but all of them are kind of embedded within design embedded in the devices or in the way all these networks infrastructures, climates are kind of articulated what is the way that you're working with this with politics at this point that's an interesting question I mean I I don't know that the projects are overtly political but I do, I mean we certainly from very early on recognized that we were interested in the public realm precisely because it is this arena of whether the public realm is Montreal or the north or a place of disassembly of electronics because I think that I mean I think part of what's interesting about the public realm is the sort of you have to design for contingency you can't you don't know what will happen whether it's an economic change a cultural change how a user will or many users will transform the space in kind of unintended and unexpected ways and so I think that this question of how whether it's a building or a public space or a landscape or these things has been an ongoing interest I mean I think in the north I still don't know if the work is political per se but it certainly wants to be a call to action to say that design matters and is a right and that we need to kind of recognize the power that design has so perhaps there there's a kind of I'm not sure that we're reaching any politicians years yet but there's certainly I think the idea that the architect is a kind of advocate is important and I think many many architects are doing that in different ways so in a way there's two kind of sides of it in the way that you're explaining it one is about the role of architects a role that it's in the intersection in your case of research and activism but also design something that is quite unique I must say and it's responding to kind of external of the world but also a way that your way of discussing the field which maybe you can refer to but there's a second one that has to do with with evolution of human funded institutions like many of the realities you're talking about are kind of questioning nation states are describing geographies as something that is being redefined you're working with processes that are also challenging the way politics are institutionalized like for instance toxicity and I'm thinking also Triennial on the way toxicity was challenging borders which is something that you served so somehow by looking at infrastructures and processes like the ones that the e-waste for instance you're also questioning the kind of how current nation-based or state-based institutions are when we're dealing with geographies so maybe you can tell us a little bit about these two sides how many political institutions are sort of being questioned now and also what is the way that you see the field evolving in your case your position in the field or the way you practice introducing activism as part of your endeavor I mean I think one of the challenges of globalization is that so well there's a sense that it's sort of at a scale beyond which we can comprehend or engage in or have agency in I mean I don't even mean as architects I just mean as citizens and it also you know the e-waste one sort of makes us most eligible where these things are happening you buy your cell phone but the materials have come from China they've been assembled back to Taiwan so the sense of where things are made and the impacts whether positive or negative are very hard to read which I think was very different 50 years ago when you the shirt you bought was made in the city was assembled in the garment district and then you bought it in your local store I mean I think perhaps one of the things we're interested in in this idea of kind of finding is that that is the moment where you can comprehend what is happening and you can also recalibrate it potentially and in that sense you know I wouldn't be so bombastic to say you can I'm not sure you can I don't know if I want to say you can challenge the global systems but you can at least sort of perhaps recalibrate them in subtle ways and it's the same argument about sort of political activism but in the end it happens at the kind of I think there's increasingly a sense that it happens at the grassroots and at the local that that's where one has agency and I think one could make similar arguments but how do you see your work operating in the discussion of globalization because I think that you also propose something different to this vision of the global as a unified system even the representation of these inter-escalar relationships are avoiding showing gloves let's say and it's rather particular very specific connections that happen to be trans-territorial let's say but are very particular and in no way you would claim that they're universal so I think that that's something very different to the way globalization was discussed a few years ago and I think maybe in some ways it's the idea of the many norths that depending on what you're looking at the territory changes so even within global networks the global network for manufacturing a phone is going to be very different than the global network and trajectories and points connected in buying your Kiwi at your local grocery store so you're right there's a kind of and I think it's interesting in light of some of the discussions by Neil Brenner and others this sort of idea where there's this desire to kind of map literally the kind of globe as a singular thing and I have to say I find those drawings and maps and the writing fascinating but also slightly disempowering because I don't know what one does at that scale and so even to understand what is the international network of your Kiwi then one can start to say well do I engage in the farm do I engage in the store do I engage in its transportation and you could do that across me so I do think this the global has all sorts of specificities depending on what you're looking at I really liked your work about the camping site because I experienced similar things and I was wondering like national parks approaching you to like perhaps getting it built and what is the next plan for that so it's interesting actually we did the exhibition for the Chicago Biennale and we showed it at University of Toronto and it got picked up by the CBC which is I guess like the NPR here and then somehow Parks Canada heard about it and they came and I was having this discussion with one of the students earlier so I sort of even I think like we're out there like no one's going to take this seriously so we gave them a tour of the exhibition and they said this is exactly what we've been talking about which was sort of not reassuring but reaffirming is the better word and so we were in long discussions with them things in all things federal work very slowly and are burdened with multiple layers that so I'm not sure where it's going if it's going anywhere but it was interesting that they were having very similar discussions about how to kind of transform the experience of the campground they're doing it at a more at the scale of like rethinking the sort of you know moving from the tent to structures and so forth but they were also interested actually in these sort of collective structures so there was a resonance I don't know if it's going anywhere though I wondered if you could comment on the kind of layers of ownership within many of these projects so existing again on these international commons but then dealing with national organizations like Canada National Parks but also interacting with communities like Native American communities that see themselves or sometimes set themselves apart and so how do you see these projects if they do manifest in the real world as physical projects interacting with those layers of ownership who builds them and who owns them once they're finished it's an interesting question and I think we had our eyes somewhat opened in the Arctic food network which began as a kind of speculative project we reached out to northern partners and got funding and got a certain amount of buy-in actually and actually got a second award that basically would have allowed us to pretty much build it and we could have done all the work pro bono and it hit a few hiccups one was a question of governance who was going to maintain it but I think the larger challenge we realized was that it sort of had to this was a project like the very early days of our work on the north at least in terms of design is we we did some pretty thorough research and I still think that it actually resonates with a lot of issues and various NGO groups said this is right on but it didn't really come from the community and I think that that was always going to be a challenge and so in our work now we partner from the get-go with an Inuit group or we're trying to work on a health center in the Northwest Territories with a different indigenous group and I don't know if those will see the light of day but I think that you have to kind of buy trust even if the response is right I think it's a very different process of arriving at an answer so that would be in that case in some of these other larger questions like the e-waste I think one would probably need to do you'd need to find sort of stakeholders that are interested and a little bit forward-thinking but I think in all these kinds of projects and I think this is true of most projects in most places these days you need endurance you need there's a lot of kind of negotiation there's a lot of kind of building trust and one of the challenges in the North is actually people keep shifting roles so you go up you build a connection with someone in charge of I don't know housing and then they leave or they get transferred to some other department and so you have to kind of rebuild that sort of trust of like well who are you especially as a southerner in their eyes but yeah I think there's a level of advocacy that's almost parallel to the design advocacy that is required in almost any project anywhere so my question is somewhat sociologic in your description of the Inuit communities I heard no mention of structures dedicated to schooling and education healthcare access to healthcare professionals and access to civic and civil authorities proximate civic and civil authorities would you please elaborate on that sure so in fact a lot of the projects we've granted so in the early days a lot of the speculative projects we did actually dealt with that both for the Venice Biennale in fact the five themes that students and architects worked on one was healthcare one was arts and culture one was recreation so and many of our own projects have looked at this question so and our current work you know is looking for instance at a new model of what they call a wellness center because the notion of healthcare is a highly medicalized one in Canada and in the States whereas their understanding of wellness is much more of wellness and culture and being out on the land and transferring knowledge much more than a kind of medical practice so we're working on a project with one group on that and a similar type of thing in the Callaway so those projects are in two early days to really be able to share but you're right I mean these are huge issues and I think the most daunting one and it's the one that actually slightly scares me but you know the housing conditions I'm pretty sure from Alaska all the way to Greenland are pretty dire for many indigenous groups is it for the recording? Medical emergencies dealt with heart attack strokes serious injuries particularly during the time of the year when helicopters or airplanes can't reach the affected people so not unlike that shipping map the health map would look not that different except it would be by plane in Medevac so for instance with health there are regional centers there are a couple of larger northern regional centers so that would be your first point of call and then if you're having a really serious issue you actually get sent to Edmonton or Calgary and it has huge cost issues it has huge social issues so if you're a woman for instance and you need a C-section which is hardly that's fairly common you basically have to get sent to Ottawa which is the equivalent of for you guys being sent to like Mexico to get a C-section so you're like separated from your family you're in a kind of foreign condition and those are things that we've looked at and we've mapped and we have done some early very early in the early days we did some speculative projects looking at that a little bit I mean some of these things I think have to be recognized or outside the scope of architecture some of these are policy issues some of them are some of them are just the physical realities that you'll never have a hospital in every community it's physically and cost wise impossible but I think considering these things I think is crucial and I think it brings up these opportunities for alternate notions of health for instance which speak to wellness and would require a totally different architecture which I think is interesting you know it wouldn't be a sort of sanitary medicalized notion of a building it would be a very different one which I think are untapped opportunities but in a way these three questions these three last questions are showing that from the perspective of your work traditional fields of criticality like for instance gender studies or studies of publicness or public space or post-colonial studies are something that could be approached from a different perspective from a territorial one from a material one that is incorporating networks distances I wonder what's the way that that is also kind of fueled back from your work what is the way that from this very detailed work on particular communities the way they're constituted their architecture their infrastructures there's also an opportunity to contribute for instance for the advantage of post-colonial studies for instance or gender studies I think that's an interesting question I mean certainly in well not just in Canada I mean there's a whole strain of discourse and research on indigenous research methodologies that you know trends I mean whether we're talking about indigenous people in New Zealand or Canada or America and I think the idea of sort of decolonizing research and decolonizing design is certainly something that we've actually been dealing with much more recently and developing sort of new tools actually I realize I didn't even show it on the Arctic Food Network but we've pushed it further but you know tools for even how to engage the community in getting feedback in building a kind of conversation about what they might want and so changing a little bit the sort of at least in the early stage is the role of the architect I mean at some point I still think we have expertise that you know is necessary but but I do think this question of sort of decolonizing both how we research and how we then design and I I would say if I were you know self-critical I don't know that the many Norths does that yet I think it came out of a very early I mean even though it was a very long project to put together I wonder if we were to do it in four years whether some of the drawings or I mean one thing I didn't say is that there's actually a lot of interviews also with scholars with indigenous hunters so there is this idea of kind of voices on the ground or people that run the planes or build the roads in the North so it starts to do that but I think it would probably get pushed much further so to bring it back to the beginning of the lecture you spoke of this idea of the undisciplined practice and I wanted to kind of rack your brain on how you would manifest that literally into your own practice because if I understand correctly it's a firm of architects but do you have any kind of goals or hopes of forming a supergroup of people from multiple disciplines able to kind of tackle these larger issues outside the scope of just architecture yeah I think we are interestingly trying to do it but project by project I mean I think that each project, each question each geography probably demands its own expertise so if you were doing an indigenous health center in the north you'd want someone who knew about indigenous health you'd want elders you'd want geologists perhaps I don't know whereas if you were doing the e-waste project it would be an entirely so I think this interesting kind of tactical collaborations and folding in knowledge responding to kind of what's needed is more likely than a kind of supergroup although it is interesting I've been sort of working on this sort of research proposal at my university and realizing there's all these people doing work on the north in completely different disciplines that I had no idea just because they're in other buildings sometimes in other campuses and so I think that certainly this idea of building think tanks or at least kind of structures for collaboration and ongoing exchange is of interest but you think it's also a discussion about the discipline of design or the field of design because you're very careful also on referring your practice as a research design practice and do you think that there's already the beginning of what could be seen like a defined field that is finding its vocabulary and it's kind of getting together and having a collective discussion gaining the possibility of accumulating already kind of finds and because that would be really something that could give an amazing dimension to what you're doing like this is funding kind of a field I would say I mean I actually would love to see whether it's in the form of simply a conference or a network of people that had really honest conversations about what design research is we were having this informally but when you submit your research proposals to social scientists or engineers it's it's very humbling because they really grill you on what are your methods and what are your theoretical frameworks and what are the outcomes that you anticipate in ways not measurable in the sense of you know numerical but they they're they're trained in ways that are much more precise than I would say at least those of us coming out of design you know history theory or material science I think are different and we use the we all use the term or many of us use the term design research and I'm left increasingly wondering like what do we mean and I think to have honest conversations about what is research as you know as versus speculation like for me some of these projects are probably more design speculations that ask questions and so it's a fine line for me we like to think about them as research but I think one could hold oneself to ask about that and so I think that someone should organize a conference on this because I think it's an important topic so we can leave it here thank you so much thank you


I am honored to introduce Joy Boyer, who is a program director in the NHGRI Division of Genomics and Society, who will moderate the first Q&A session for today. As a program director in the NHGRI Division of Genomics and Society, Joy oversees a portfolio of research, training, and career development grants related to the ethical, legal, and social implications of genomic research. Over to you, Joy. Thank you, Chris, and thanks to all the speakers today, and particularly our morning speakers, Marius, Michael, and Chris. I wanted to take just a few minutes. There's been just a very rich discussion in the Q&A. And a number of these questions are focused more on the ethical issues around eugenics than the historical issues per se. And I just wanted to say a few words to try to address these. The top question is asking about a GWAS study that was done on homosexual behavior. I'm assuming this is the Ghana et al paper that was published in Science. Whether that paper should be retracted, whether the authors should apologize for the paper. And I think this highlights the fact that eugenics is not just in our past. It's very much in our present. And I think there are awareness of the role it's played is important, but equally important is to ask questions like that. How is it playing out now in our lives? And I think there were a number of questions about where do you draw the line between eugenics and genetic counseling or gene therapy? And I think I can't answer those questions, but I think those are questions that we as a community and as humanity need to be addressing. So I thank you for those questions. I think the historians that we have on the panel right now would probably rather address more historical issues than focusing so much on the ethical issues. But at this point, I would open it up to the panelists if there are particular questions you would like to ask each other or if you would like to take on some of the more ethical issues and bringing eugenics into the present day, I think, is kind of the gist of so many of the questions. So I would open up the floor to the panelists at this point. Marius. Yes. Thank you, Joy, very much indeed, and thank you, Michael, for your wonderful presentation. And thank you, Chris, for sharing with me the panel. First thing I should like to say to compliment what you just said, Joy, is that while the conversation at the moment seems to be so locating in the present and it is driven by bioethical concerns, I think what we need to do at the same time is infuse a sense of historical reckoning and responsibility in our discussions so that we can understand better where certain ideas are coming from and how people can make an informed decision based on the particular situation, which is clearly eugenic, has a clear eugenic past, but probably, and in most cases, it's clearly the case, it's not known by the individual in case or by the society at large. So while we're pushing forward, it's basically a synergy between historical knowledge and scientific research and ethical concerns, as Michael pointed out so nice in his paper. Eugenics was not only created to justify a racially and socially exploitative system, it was also created to lock people into the bottom of it. It locked people of colour, it locked people with disability, it locked women, so it locked people with various sexual orientations. So all of these concerns remain very powerful and as you said, eugenics has come alive again during the pandemic, but then all of these issues that we addressed today, I suppose, can be rewritten to understand the implications today. Ultimately, the purpose is to understand better what happened in the past to come up with better solutions for the future and we cannot disentangle history from this and geneticists and bioethicists should know the importance and acknowledge the importance of the past in this respect as much as historians are trying so hard to go into the archives to recuperate the voice of the victims of sterilizations, for example, as Michael pointed out. So while some of the conversation today is extremely geared towards ethics and towards genetics and genomics, there is also something lurking in the back of that conversation that we historians have the responsibility to push forward and alert people who otherwise may be misinformed or may be simply misdirected. So we live in a very complex situation at the moment where we can see all of these ideas coming back and we can see some of the concerns that we thought we addressed in the past scientifically. Whether we're talking about abortion, we're talking about prenatal screening, we're talking about how do we care about someone with disability. All of these issues which were at the front and centre of debates on bioethics 20 years ago remain extremely present and I think the current pandemic only exacerbated the need to return to these issues and it explored them historically. And so we need to go back to what Michael suggested, we need to go back to those cases and learn from those as much as we need to go to the core of the scientific debate about human heredity and try to tease out those important lessons. Thank you, Marius. I think that's an excellent point and really speaks to the whole purpose of the meeting. Michael? I would just add that that's very well put, Marius, you said it brilliantly. I would just also reinforce the notion that we can't decouple the history from the current ethical debates and we can't think about making decisions about reproductive technologies and about abortion and other things without situating them in the social and cultural context within which they're made, which are deeply informed by that history, whether people are conscious of it or not. The histories that we're outlining here in our presentations should have created, in a sense, the context within which those decisions are being made. And so it's imperative to discuss them and think critically about them. Thank you, Michael. I think as Marius. Now, I just wanted to react to something Chris has pointed out in his presentation. Now, I think the difficulty for us, all of us, whether you are a historian or sociologist or a geneticist or a pastor in a church, I suppose the difficulty is that how do we come together to write a strategy for everyone, for everyone to use and return to time and time again as different issues regarding eugenics come up in their lives. They will be confronted with eugenics at some point in their lives. How are they prepared to engage with those issues? I think we know that we could do a bit more to prepare those who aren't able to be prepared because they don't have the time to read or they don't all the books about this topic or the other topic, or they simply consider that to be an problematic issue. Now, we, the scholarly community, amongst many other responsibilities from civic and moral and scientific, we have also the responsibility to try to formulate a strategy. And this is something what Chris was pointing out in the discussion of is the fifth myth about the role of science here, role of science. We will take it very seriously because science can provide wonderful answers to great problems characterizing our societies from human genome to ecology and environmentalism, but at the same time, that comes with this extraordinary responsibility. And we are part of that. We are not detached. We are not free of responsibility. And that has to be addressed directly and heads on, I think. Yeah, thank you, Marius. I would also add quickly that I think the history can inform discussions about eugenics in other ways as well, including, and it was mentioned as one of the myths that was framed as, you know, did eugenics persist after the Nazis, after Nazi Germany? Of course, the answer is yes. And I think we can, if we look at the history and think critically about the history, we can see that eugenics extended beyond state coercion, beyond state control, beyond state sponsored programs and that, you know, it's much more diffuse and pervasive in society. And that's sort of one of the reasons why ideas about eugenics and actions that we might consider eugenics persist even in the 20th century. So I just wanted to add to Michael's great point, which is to say that I think one of the tasks of historians and of the scholarly community is to really address eugenics in its fullness so that we have a usable, workable definition, which embraces a number of modalities, practices, time periods and functions, and that at the same time with a general theory, with a general framework for eugenics, we do not lose the kind of context and historical specificity, which is so important. And this is the dynamic. This is the dilemma because eugenics is essentially a protean system of ideas and a protean structure of practices and has undergone countless reformations and much of the discussions of eugenics in the post after the Second World War are promoting practices by only defining eugenics one way. So we have to be very careful that we have a broad enough definition of eugenics, a broad enough account of the support of eugenics, a broad enough account of the expertise and ideas aligned with eugenics, while also not losing that kind of complexity and historical specificity and ethical exactitude that is really necessary to make comparisons and to confront these ideas and these practices in the present day. That's great. I'm going to take the moderator's prerogative and ask a question that I think is reflecting of some of the questions that have been raised in the Q&A. And that is how how do current geneticists deal with the subtle ways that eugenics ideas creep into science today?  And I think I would ask you just looking at this from a historical perspective, is is that kind of activity something that should be done? Is that useful? Is is addressing just one paper? What we need to do or do we need to really be looking at the broader issues, genetic determinism and or genetic exceptionalism and biological determinism that still permeate genetics and science as a whole? So I would turn that over to you. You want to go, Chris, want to go first? I was going to ask it, Marius, if you wanted to go for it. OK, I can do it. And also, right, also, Michael, you can because you a lot of these issues as well. So I was just going to make a really quick point that. You know, I think we need to move beyond what I would call etiquette, you know, beyond sort of superficial engagements and, you know, really engage in the difficult conversations around eugenics, like the ones we're having here today. Of course. Yeah, well, I'll let Marius jump in. Well, my take on it will be simply to reflect immediately on the possibility of these type of studies being very popular and ask myself, why is that popular? The scientists have been doing this kind of and quite prominent scientists. I mean, in some cases, we have very important names. Some of them were mentioned today. Others are mentioned in the scientific historical documents accompanying this symposium. And people can look up online for that. So the very prominent names here who are always sometimes, you know, referred in connection to eugenics. So we know these sort of things to happen, but I and my take here is simply as a as an intellectual historian dealing with the legacies of eugenics is to reflect immediately on how relevant that is and how important it is to people. Because if it is very important to some people and it has traction and echoes widely and it in a percolates through so many other issues, then I'm getting very worried. And then I need and I think one of the facets of our effort here or one of the aims of our collective effort here, we reacted to this. We were we are not only at the forefront of genomics, but also we want to be the vanguard of anti eugenics presence in science. And to do that, you react immediately with whatever you have to debunk this mantle and confront the type of lingering thoughts that continues to permeate certain scientific practices, whether we're talking about a particular group of people.  These are recurrently happening. How do we react to that joy is one matters at the moment, because we know of scientists, we always, various scientists, we always continue to do that. And now with CRISPR and gene editing and various papers being published on even more genetic determinism and the possibility of suggesting to people that, you know, your destiny is in your genes. That has become such a powerful story that to engage with that forcefully requires an entire arsenal of arguments. So that particular paper you mentioned is, in my opinion, only one part of a very complex story, notwithstanding, you know, the criticism it received, I think, from our point of view, from what we're discussing today and tomorrow, is that how we react to that type of argument is what we need to proceed and reflect individually and collectively. And I think we did provide the three of us today this morning. We provided some indication where or to which direction we may take this conversation. I hope there will be others who can, you know, help us work with us and suggest better ways of dealing with these issues. I just wanted to add to what Mari is saying, which I fully agree with and to also emphasize the second part of your question statement, Joy, which is to say that these these issues, it's not one particular paper, but these kinds of issues are all part of wider discussions about genetic exceptionalism that genetic determinism. These are conversations that the LC research community has had for more than 30 years, that the bioethics community has also had, you know, for more than 30 years. I think at root, the we just need to have a wider series of conversations, which lead to wider cultural changes about how we talk about genetics and how we talk about genes and how we talk about it basically the how we pathologize any perceivable difference all of it and how we normalize and ableize various individuals, various bodies at various groups. And I think this is all it's not simply one paper. This paper is is needs to be discussed among a variety of dialogues which take into account, I think, and which try to move forward just very basic educational principles which emphasize pluralism and which emphasize participation and which emphasize and which as much as possible avoid what I call an ontological dehumanization of groups and people. Yeah, I think this is the key word. Sorry to jump in dehumanization, Chris.  I think that has to be stated very clearly. And as Chris put it out there, ultimately. Regrettably, many of this eugenic behavior or much of this eugenic behavior that we see today remains embedded in certain trajectories of thoughts that have to be expunged. And we have to excise that kind of thinking, not only from the government action, not only from the type of conversation we have publicly, but ultimately also from the way research is being conducted and the way scientific communities uncontrollably sometimes and uncritically continue certain patterns of behavior and thought because they never look back at their discipline and react critically towards the foundation of their own discipline and has to be pushed forward with as much conviction as possible. I think. Great. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to turn to some of the questions that have come in from the meeting participants. The first one is from Sarah Chestnut. And she suggests that she'd be interested in hearing more about how eugenics played a role in America's mass in incarceration complex. So, Chris, did you want to answer that? I see you're unmuted. Oh, I think this is actually more of a Michael question, although it depends on, yeah. So, Michael, do you mind perhaps starting our discussion of this? Sure. I mean, I think that I spoke to it a bit in the video or in my presentation. I, you know, I. Certainly incarcerated populations, even very recently, have been targeted for for sterilization or surreptitious sterilization and things like Norplant in the 1990s were popular for a while among people who were interested in limiting the reproduction of people receiving or receiving benefits and things. So there's there's a number of ways in which eugenic ideas have been kind of racialized and modernized and have been where have worked their way into the social welfare system and into. Incarceration, incarcerate the carceral settings. You know, and I mean, as I stated in the talk, there's, you know, kind of the one of the really direct results of eugenics, I think, was that the massive institutionalization of a broad range of people in the first 50 years or 60 years of the 20th century. And so. Yeah, I would just leave it there for now. If somebody else wants to. Marius. Yeah, very briefly, I would like to ask something and thank you for the question. I think the first thing to be said is that eugenics provided a very interesting justification for incarceration, not just in America, but everywhere by simply suggesting that we can separate criminals from the rest of society. And by doing that, we protect, we protect the majority of the people, we protect the society from its criminals, asocials, these genetic elements.  They did the same with the criminals. So from early on, there is a very interesting connection between eugenics and incarceration as a practice and then between eugenics and legal legal sciences. So obviously, to find the legal foundation, how that incarceration becomes possible. And that's a very interesting interplay between eugenics and legal systems, not just in the United States of America, but across the world. In connection to that comes the second point. Most of the early cases, as we know, of both sterilization and incarceration of criminals happens within the discussion about penal colonies, incarceration and prisons. So it's very interesting, particularly in the American context, we have a wealth of historical information that could be very useful to those of us looking back, trying to see how, you know, America became basically in a paraphrase in Karl Marxi in a very weird way, the prison of people. It has the largest incarceration system in the world. If I'm not mistaken, maybe I am mistaken, but last time I checked. So how did we get to this point? And eugenics and here, of course, is the term is applied to legal reformers, legal experts, superintendents, people who run prisons and people who wrote the legal foundations of various directions in our system. They all believed that they can do something about about these people. So yeah, eugenics played a very important role. And this is only based barely scratch the surface of this very important history. Michael obviously knows much more about it, but there will be a very short answer to a very complex and important question. I think an equally short answer to this complex question is another is just reminding everyone of another tenant of the eugenic mindset, which is to say that there are easy solutions to complex social problems. And I think that's something to really emphasize. I also think there's a broader question, which I'm not expert enough to answer about the pattern of justice in the United States, often sometimes being modeled on on retribution as justice rather than remunerative justice. So I think that's also something to keep in mind most broadly. And I think, too, I would just briefly add, and of course, you can't make a one to one correlation. People didn't leave institutions and enter jails and prisons. But as the institutionalization accelerated in the last second half of the 20th century, massive incarceration increased and and jails and prisons in places like Chicago and L.A. and New York, you know, have it's been found that anywhere between 40 and 60 percent of the incarcerated people in those settings have some sort of mental health problem or condition. And so, as I said, while you can't make a simple one to one sort of correlation of moving people out of one institution into another, you know, I think part of the more complex legacies of eugenics is the rise of mass incarceration and the movement of mental health care for certain segments of the population into those carceral settings as and I think which is sort of underlined by what Marius said about the justifications, you know, for removing so-called criminal types from society that has a very long history in the United States. Another question from Derek Schultz. Was there a complete consensus among eugenicists regarding what traits were desirable for the human race and who was unfit? Yeah, another another brilliant question. Thank you very much. Wow. No, that's the short answer. And we might be puzzled because, of course, when we hear someone talking by eugenics, the first impression regrettably, the first impression we get is it was an homogeneous movement and everybody more or less agreed about either positive or negative methods of improving the human race and improvement in in quotation marks and race. So but it wasn't like that. Not only did they diverge radically over ideological, political, religious beliefs, but they also disagreed over which are the traits that constitute there were there were some basic things they agreed on, things related to social standing, intellectual achievement, of course, the color of the skin. We have not perhaps enough insisting on this aspect. It was always, of course, the white people who without explicit reference to some of them.  So you had all of this. There are some basic criteria what constituted the traits worthy of reproduction and worth worthy of pursuing from a journey point of view, as much as there were basic concerns about the negative traits, what constitute the unfit and Michael and Chris mentioned already, we talked about feeble mindedness, we talked about criminality. We mentioned a socials, alcoholics. So they did they did create a list. There is a list of things you are there are desires and things or a list of traits which were undesired. And but there was there was disagreement in some cases, very significant one. The moment when, for example, and I don't want to monopolize this conversation, I'll be very quick in the footnote, the moment when genetics in a way clearly wants to separate from from eugenics. This is the crux of their disagreement, which are the traits because, of course, the eugenicists of all fashion eugenicists who didn't have much knowledge of genetics would have a very different list about what is worthy, more culturally and socially and religiously biased towards what constitutes a worthy person, whilst that someone with a good knowledge of genetics would actually be very easily would be very easy for for that person to debunk the old fashioned eugenic arguments about worthiness and underworthiness. However, they they did agree on some basic things. And so that's something we need to keep in mind that a, it wasn't without disagreement. And B, what they agreed upon was regrettably more important than what they disagreed upon. Yeah, that's very well put, and I would just quickly add, I know we're out of time, but I would quickly add that and Comfort has written about this and called it medical eugenics. But I think that and I made the point in my talk briefly that the creation of those tools and statistics and laboratory tests and intelligence tests and psychiatric and psychological evaluations are part of what revealed so-called defectiveness to eugenicists. And and so that was one way that they reached a sort of loose kind of consensus about who would be considered defective. And also, I think I would just briefly add to that they had complex understandings of race so that, you know, Jewish people or Southern Eastern Europeans could be considered of a different race and genetically unfit, you know.  I would just add also, because we're out of time, I think the the bewildering variety of traits, many of which are nonsensical that eugenicists use is part of the the malicious power of eugenics, its adaptability. And I think, given that as well, the idea that at the core of all of these discussion of traits is this idea, this mistaken idea that differences pathology, and that's really what what grounded all of these discussions. And, you know, and as Mike points out very well, you know, this is also a big discussion, a core discussion about ability and disability, which is at the root of many of these discussions and which allows eugenics to to continually manifest itself in differing ideas and practices and to continue and to discontinue with with little interruption in many cases. That's what I will add. Thank you, Chris, Marius and Michael. This has been a terrific start to the meeting. And thank you to all the participants for your questions. I have a feeling that these are going to be questions that are going to be discussed and it explored throughout the next two days. So again, thank you, everyone. And I'm going to turn it over to Chris, I think, to tell us what we're doing now. So there will be a break until one o'clock in the afternoon Eastern Standard Time. So we will break for about one hour. Thank you.