2024-present
RESEARCH
My dissertation research centers on the 1972 People’s Blockade of Arms to Indochina, a semi-centralized campaign of human blockades at domestic US naval ports, munitions plants, and military rail lines, protesting the United States’ air wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
If you were involved in a blockade and are interested in telling me about your experiences, or if you were active military on a ship, train, or other site that was blockaded by civilians around 1971-2, please email me here.
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2023-2026
WRITING
An essay on waste, reclamation, and settler aesthetics in Newtown Odyssey.
Following my review (see below) of Newtown Odyssey: An open-air opera for, about, and on a creek, I conducted interviews with the opera’s composer and librettist. Those interviews informed my fortchoming article “Citizen Scientist 1 Returns,” which explores the character Citizen Scientist 1 as a paranoid figure of settler colonization. Newtown Odyssey, I argue, illustrates the intimate connections between waste and reclamation, both of which may function under settler colonialism as territorial capture. Forthcoming Spring 2027 in LA+: Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture.
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2017-2023
RESEARCH
Through a study of two series of landscape photographs by twenty-first century American artists, I proposes a theory of “anti-assimilationist landscape”: a politicized rejection of the conventions of landscape imagery and the repressive systems of land ownership, gender, and nation-building it sustains. Collier Schorr and David Benjamin Sherry make landscape images in sites with histories of gendered settler-colonial and white supremacist violence. The essay argues that their works function as both interpretation of those sites and a queer reclamation of them, enacting a political ecology of difference that invites a politics beyond the liberal-democratic notion of citizenship and the fascist notion of ‘blood and soil.’ Arguing for its applicability to landscape architecture theory and practice, I contrast this anti-assimilationist mode to the turn-of-the-millennium concept of ‘eco-revelation,’ proposing instead a queer aesthetics of obscuring and the potential of ‘becoming illegible’ as an environmentalist practice.
You can read the article in Journal of Landscape Architecture: “Anti-Assimilationist Landscape: Becoming Illegible as Queer Resistance to State Power.
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2018
EXHIBITION
Unrestrooms, an unfinished survey of gender and public space was an exhibition of recent architectural investigations of the gendered space of the public restroom. It opened in March 2018 at Front/Space, a noncommercial storefront gallery in the Crossroads district of Kansas City, MO. The exhibition was curated by Bad Little Brother (Ben Barsotti Scott and Julie Shapiro) and featured a site-specific installation that rendered the standard dimensions of public toilet stalls in outrageous, glittering tinsel. Projects were solicited through an open call. The exhibition was organized into three themes: “Queering Architectural Type,” “Rest and Unrest,” and “Can ‘Tactical Urbanism’ be Queered?” The exhibition included a reading room with resources on gender in architecture, case studies in public restroom design, and information on local LGBTQIA+ resources.
On March 31st, 2018, Bad Little Brother and Front/Space partnered with the Kansas City Center for Inclusion to present a panel discussion on inclusive restroom design. The panel brought together local architects and activists to discuss recent developments in inclusive restroom design, with a particular focus on ensuring access among trans and gender non-conforming users.
In conjunction with Unrestrooms, Bad Little Brother self-published our 2018 interview with Jordan Martins, executive director of Comfort Station Logan Square, an arts organization housed in a former public restroom featured in the exhibition. You can read the interview here.
Press: “At An Exhibit in Kansas City, Designers Begin Solving America’s Public Bathroom Problem” (KCUR)
2022
TEACHING
In Spring 2022, I designed and taught an advanced undergraduate seminar on contemporary architectural theory. 379-AH Contemporary Architecture Criticism & Theory at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). You can access the full syllabus here.
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2020
WRITING
A provocation written with Julie Shapiro as Bad Little Brother. You can read the full text here.
“Write your own manifesto....Just make sure you use a pencil, so you can always get it... you know... right” -Laurie Anderson, Dark Angel
The success of this figure shows us that professional architectural work has already decoupled from architectural licensure. The hyperprofessional has no need for licensure, except as a tool wielded tactically by a subordinated local practitioner. His aims are global and licensure is always local. Ironically, this figure demonstrates that interpreting and navigating regulatory systems can be both sustaining work and aesthetic practice. The hyperprofessional funnels these goals through the existing structures of global capital; can an anti-capitalist design invert his proprietary attitude, sharing and receiving knowledge freely rather than guarding it jealously?
2016
EXHIBITION
Between 1950 and 1980, the US National Park Service added 168 park units to its system, and more than doubled attendance at its sites nationwide. This remarkable expansion included the reimagining of the role of NPS in urban and suburban areas. The 1962 establishment of the National Capital Region under NPS management reflects a new investment in planning parks parks at a regional scale (with an eye for urban and suburban accessibility). Similarly, the 1960s saw a reassessment of programming and management of Washington DC’s parks, as National Capital Parks (also managed by NPS) sought to better serve Washington’s Black population.
The exhibition Yes, it can be done! charted this moment of tumult and optimism through three case studies: Anacostia Park, in Southeast Washington, DC; Greenbelt Park, in Greenbelt, Maryland; and Grant Village, in Yellowstone National Park. Together these parks illustrate shifting attitudes towards conservation and visitor engagement in the mid-twentieth century United States.
This was the first exhibition of works from the Benjamin C. Howland papers, which were donated to the University of Virginia in 2016. I was the exhibition designer and curator. In 2015, I led the effort to document all materials in the collection before their donation to the Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.
2018
COMPETITION ENTRY
In 2018, Bad Little Brother (Ben Barsotti Scott and Julie Shapiro) collaborated with fashion designer Peggy Noland to propose a fantastical machine for construction on an open lot in Los Angeles’s Silver Lake neighborhood. Our proposal received an honorable mention from the commissioning organization, Materials and Applications.
Simple Made-Up Machines is an inefficient system for building, operated by outsized and outrageous workers. It is leisurely, roundabout, luxurious, and entertaining. Like a Rube Goldberg machine, it sets chains of events in motion. But it is non-linear: distractible and spontaneous, sometimes repetitive and additive. It is built and lived in at the same time—construction and habitation inspire each other through festive improvisations.
Simple Made-Up Machines is an inefficient system for building, operated by outsized and outrageous workers. It is leisurely, roundabout, luxurious, and entertaining. Like a Rube Goldberg machine, it sets chains of events in motion. But it is non-linear: distractible and spontaneous, sometimes repetitive and additive. It is built and lived in at the same time—construction and habitation inspire each other through festive improvisations.