WHEN:
Thursday, November 17, 2016
3:00PM – 6:00PM
WHERE:
Room L08 (Gropius), Gund Hall, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
EVENT DESCRIPTION:
How is “cultural heritage” fabricated and deployed in the “post-conflict environments” that are increasingly being established and managed across the globe? And what do the itineraries of cultural heritage in those environments indicate about the politics of post-conflict “peace-building” and “reconstruction”? This presentation will explore these questions by focusing on the culturescaping of Kosovo after 1999.
This event is hosted by MDes Risk & Resilience.
Andrew Herscher
Trained as an architect and historian of architecture, Andrew Herscher works on the spatial politics of violence, humanitarian and human rights issues, exile and migration, and contemporary art and architecture. His research, writing, and teaching is informed by his long-term participant-observation in Kosovo’s post-conflict environment, including work with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the United Nations Mission in Kosovo, and the Kosovo Cultural Heritage Project, a nongovernmental organization he co-founded and co-directed. During his time in Michigan, he has also been involved in a number of collaborative projects in Detroit, including the Detroit Unreal Estate Agency, an open-access platform for the study of urban crisis using Detroit as a focal point; Detroit Resists, a coalition of activists, artists, architects, and community members working on behalf of an inclusive, equitable, and democratic city; and the We the People of Detroit Community Research Collective. Among his publications are Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict, published by Stanford University Press in 2010, The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2012, and the forthcoming Displacements: Architecture and Refugee. At Michigan, he has appointments in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Department of the History of Art. In 2016-17 he is a Creative Cities Fellow at the Stanford Arts Institute at Stanford University.
