 Okay. Welcome to everybody who is joining us today. Thank you so much for joining us as we take over the African Mobilities 2.0 podcast. Thank you to Dr. Umpoh Matsipa for hosting us and for joining in our conversation today. And thank you very much to Laila Katsalie for handling all the logistics and making so much of the work we do possible. So I will just start by saying that we are recording for anybody who is watching and for all the panelists. So just a few words about our organization and today's roundtable. So BSA plus GSAP stands for the Black Student Alliance at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation. BSA plus GSAP is more than what's called a cultural and identity based student organization, but is a working group of Black students and alumni across fields, professions and disciplines at Columbia whose work in some way relates to space, place, and architecture. We were brought together almost two and a half years ago by the Global Africa Labs Masterclass in Mobility and the Afro Imaginary, which was convened by Mario Gooden and Mabel Wilson. And through that meeting we founded the BSA. Today's conversation seeks to reflect on this week's episode of the African Mobilities 2.0 podcast called hashtag enclosure. And we also seek to reflect and discuss the current context of rebellion and institutional reckoning that we find ourselves in from our perspective as Black graduate students working on space, place, and architecture. So I'm going to do brief bios and then we'll just jump right into the questions. So Mpo Madsipa is a curator of African Mobilities, a researcher and lecturer at the School of Architecture and Planning and a researcher at the VITS Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of the VITS Wattersfran, South Africa. Ife Vanible is a PhD candidate in architectural history and theory at Columbia GSAP. Her work asks questions at the intersection of the design of architecture, law, and public policy, the performance of domesticity and respectability, and the politics, aesthetics, and materiality of the making of home. Malcolm Rio is a rising second year PhD student in architecture at Columbia GSAP. His research interests include issues of race, sexuality, kinship, and urbanism. For Kuening is a second year M.R.C. student at Columbia GSAP. His research work in KNUST, Kumasi, and the Royal College of Art. London encompasses responsive design, re-learning, remaking, and reorganizing the history of Blackness. Ochuka Okor is a rising third year M.R.C. student. She is from Nigeria with a background in advertising and mass communication. She is passionate about social justice and equity. Lastly, my name is Eliza Kelly. I'm a PhD candidate in the English Department and I work on place geography and architecture in Black literature and art. I'm a senior advisor to the BSA and I'll be moderating today's discussion. If you have any questions and you want to participate in Q&A, you can just type your questions into the chat and if time allows, we'll try to answer some of them at the end. Okay, so to start us off, can you give us a little context around the letter that has now been circulating? It's called On the Futility of Listening. What was the goal of the letter and how did it come about? What were some of the demands that you all made and how might the approach or align with efforts throughout the diaspora to decolonize the university, the curriculum, the field, etc? I think I can start with that question. I've got a lot of attention on letters written by what at times, by some, has been referred to as sort of activist student groups to various school administrations. I actually don't like to refer to the BSA-Blessed GSEP statement or really intervention as a letter. I prefer statement or even testimony. As the statement asserts, it really sort of bears witness and we waited a bit to BSA before issuing any response. So in the wake of letters from our dean at GSEP, in the wake of seeing other letters being produced who sort of wanted to uplift or amplify Black voices and all sorts of terms swirling in this sort of emergent lexicon. We saw lots of sort of BIPOC and lots of acronyms and allyship and terms swirling in the lexicon. I was personally a little suspicious of some of the newfound consciousness that many seem to be displaying. And in many ways for me, the intent of our statement was never to solicit any written response from the dean, but rather to really sort of incite action. And that sort of action from us, but an action also from obviously the institution itself. I saw this statement as an action in and of itself. And the signatures that we've amassed so far over 450, nearly 500 signatures so far to date. I really thought of people as sort of signing in as witnesses to our testimony. And them in and of themselves demonstrating through that act some commitment in their own to our call for transparency, our call for vision, our call for imagination, for audacious and imaginative action from the administration itself. I think for me really what the statement has sort of occasioned more broadly is like this desire to, unless not any response from the dean or the faculty or even the administration, but really more careful study of the institution itself. It's inner workings. Like in the meetings that we've had so far, I think we've learned a lot about how the school's administration actually functions, how it works, because it's always sort of working at something. It's always doing something. I think our statement was very sort of attentive to that, that it's not so much about inaction, it's about really sort of reflection on the actions that it's already perpetuated, that it has perpetuated. And to think about for us getting more inside access to how it actually works, how it functions. So in thinking about like decolonizing, then I'm thinking not so much about the university as such, but even just its curriculum, the way it thinks about how it teaches, the way it thinks about what constitutes the things that comprise the fields of study that exists at GSAT. I love this work of curriculum because it comes from the Latin foot to run, you know, comes from this word, which is a sort of racing chariot. So like envisioning these processes of decolonization, then I imagine a sort of liberation of the subjects that are deemed relevant to architectural studies, a sort of liberation of and a withdrawal from certain assumptions and biases and evasions, fostering more overall interactive and ongoing interrogation and serious shared study more than anything else. I'll stop there. I love what you said about the liberation of the subjects. Could you just unpack that a little bit more for us because I would love to hear sort of how you're thinking about that. Yeah, I think that there's a sort of cloistered sense, even within GSAP itself, which houses programs in architecture, urbanism, planning, real estate development, that there's an even sort of cloistered understanding of how those disciplines which make up the overall school operate. And that I think what architecture needs to do and feels that relate to space and place in architecture need to really think about existing practices that are involved in literature, that are involved in sort of all the many other disciplines across Colombia that engage ideas about space. I mean, we think about their sort of politics when we think about aesthetics, regimes of taste. When we think about development, how all of these things are connected to ideas about policy, about law, and that the school, I think in many ways what we're asking, is for them to begin to think critically about what constitutes the work and the areas of study that students should be exposed to when they're pursuing these fields. Right. So I want to discuss the enclosure episode recently that I mentioned. In that conversation between Justin Garrett Moore and Mario Gooden and Neville Wilson, Justin Garrett Moore said something really interesting. He said, racism is the infrastructure of our city, right? And he was referring to New York City, which is the home, obviously, of BSA plus GSAP and of Columbia University. But it's also the home to many other communities throughout the five boroughs and immediately surrounding Columbia's campus. And those relationships have been difficult and tenuous and deeply racialized from Columbia's displacement and settlement, the gentrification of Harlem that it's accelerated. Columbia's both a landlord in Harlem and also exists as a sort of real material space, a kind of compound, which despite having some public access like College Walk, which cuts right through campus, sort of architecturally announces itself as a fortified enclosure, right? As a privatized domain that requires special access, little ID cards, right? And so we might say that sort of racism is the infrastructure of this university, right? And of the university in general. So how do we thank the university in relation to the city as architects, planners, as, you know, thinkers of space and place? And how does that factor, if it does it all into BSA's vision for a new and different institution? I can jump in again, but I want to open it up to others who are here, but I can jump in. Yeah, I want to just start us off. Yeah. So yeah, in the podcast episode, there is this sort of sustained discussion around the notion of enclosure, about boundaries, about borders, protocols that either facilitate or delimit the mobility of either so-called white and black subjects and how these themes are perpetuated in constructions of a sense of American mobility, for example, or implicated in what is referred to as the sort of Afro-imaginary. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten and Undercomments kind of make a distinction between enclosure and what they refer to as the surround. So like, in thinking about this question, I was thinking about this idea of the surround and in their formulation, which they sort of credit the Black Panther party with sort of being the first theorists of the sort of revolution of the surround, that that proceeds enclosure as the common sort of beyond and beneath before and before enclosure. So when I think of sort of the idea of the cloistered sort of compound of the university itself, I like to think about this before and before that, which sort of predated already and came before and exists long after and always around the university. So Columbia was never, was not always where it is today, obviously, universities move around. It used to be further downtown in the 40s of the 40s. It was not until like the turn of the 20th century late 1890s where it moved from downtown uptown. And it very, it took a very sort of specific location there where it had the real estate options available in the northern part of the city. But there was already a very sort of strong indigenous and Black pre-existing community always there. And then that sort of physical move also was like attended by this rhetorical move where Columbia was not just Columbia University, but Columbia University in the city of New York, that it's very location there also presumed that it was in the city now, that it was more rightly in the city, which sort of makes the city the space where it's already Black and already indigenous. So it's already sort of announcing itself as being before the university already being Black, already being indigenous as the city. And with the design by a very prestigious firm, McKinney, White, became a sort of urban academic village. And it had this cloistered posture, but it was always and already not white. So I think something that I think is important for us to think about is how that surround is always sort of perpetuating, how that enclosure is always responding to its surroundings. It doesn't always announce itself as such, but it's always sort of responding to it. You know, there's a point in the text where in the undercomments where they say the surround sort of antagonizes the lager and antagonizes that entrenched position of the university. And I think as Black students, we're sort of outside, but we're also around, we're within, we're inside, we're beneath the university and sort of like the false images that the university tries to assert, our mission I think in many ways is to just always constantly unsettle that. That's why I think there's so much work that the university does. You know, I really keep thinking about the university and the work that it does, so much work that it actually has to actively do to invisibilize Black students, Black thought, Black theory, Black artists. And as we mentioned in the statement, that work is, it's really deliberate. It's carried out. It's ongoing by the university. It's not work that is taken lightly. It's active work. So I think it's true that something that Justin also says that the infrastructure of our own access and mobility through the university as students who get to be at TSAB in a way sort of simultaneously aligned with some of this infrastructure of destruction and harm and dispossession for other people. But I think what's important is that we keep moving them, like students who are inside keep moving, keep sort of shifting our place, you know, and our modes of study, how we reach out to other disciplines, how we think about other modes of study. That's why I think our demands for exchange in the statement are so crucial for sharing and study in close examination, interrogation, how we keep it moving in our own work so that every time it tries to enclose us in a decision, as they say, we're undecided. Every time it tries to represent our will, we're unwilling. Every time the university tries to take root, we're gone because we're already here. We're always sort of moving. And Elisa, your question made me think about how much that enclosure is also celebrated, especially among the Ivy League schools. I think about how many graduation and matriculation photos happen at the gate, at the Brown gate, at the Harvard gate, at the Columbia gate, that those become in a way an architectural investment, right? Alumni put money into celebrating their gates. And today, in the historic moment that we're in now, I see a new gate emerging, right? The gate of testing. As we talk about whether we're going back to school or not, you know, Columbia and many other schools are entertaining this idea, which is necessary in many ways of the bi-weekly testing for COVID and how a new kind of enclosure emerges from that, a bio-underclass for those who aren't able to test their antibodies to get these bi-weekly tests, and then those who become enclosed by their biology. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think too, sort of embedded within the idea of like kind of settler enclosure is this notion that it's safe within the enclosure, right? That outside of the enclosure is where, you know, the surrounds, right? That that is sort of the space of danger that we have to fortify against, right? And I also think about those clear crime reports that we get in our emails every other day, right? That are kind of a constant announcement, right? Of a sort of constant confirmation of our safety within and only within the enclosure. So yeah, I think that's a really, really interesting point that you bring up. Something I wanted to, sorry, sorry. You want to go ahead? I just wanted to say that before we move on to the next thing that I thought that your discussion around racism as infrastructure was interesting. And I think that the relationship between racism and property and infrastructure is what helps us to think through this relationship between the university and its surrounds. And it ties back to one of ife's questions around curriculum that were taught architecture and planning through a very particular kind of genealogy that sidesteps histories of racialized dispossession of slavery of genocide so that we never fully understand the relationship between race and property. And then it becomes delegated to some kind of marginal specific concern as opposed to being a foundational moment in what constitutes the settler colony. And that's the moment of inversion, right? By invisibilizing histories of dispossession that then normalize the lager, that normalize the compound, and that make it the only imagined thing that is imaginable. So I think that in terms of how one begins to understand how this, how racism gets spatialized, it is through regimes of property to a degree. And also it's other, like the things that Rio mentioned, the way that it gets signified, the aesthetics that are attached to it as a kind of assault and a reinscription of this relation. And it's also not unique to Colombia or Ivy Leagues in the United States for that matter. Yeah, I think that we were talking about is really important, like the idea of racism and infrastructure. Just thinking about Colombia's campus itself as like you were talking, as Elisa was mentioning, it's fortified nature. And I think that they can argue that they're trying to provide privacy, you know? And I guess something that people or architects in the future or anybody now needs to think about is like not mistaking privacy and hostile architecture as the same thing, like preventing people from coming into somewhere just because you want to give that a sense of privacy. And then another thing that was in my mind was the Manhattanville campus in Harlem. It's open, but it's also kind of hostile at the same time. Like I feel like the community in Harlem don't want to, they don't interact with that building at all. And I guess this will be like a question for everybody too, like what can Colombia start to do? Or just anybody, like anybody that owns like an institution can start to do to not be hostile to the community, like even maintain a sense of privacy, but at the same time not put like an invisible barrier to the community, you know? But this is why I think it's so important what Elisa just mentioned about this idea about the the insights of the enclosure being safe, that this idea that the inside is actually a sanctuary or a refuge is a constructed fiction itself. Because just as we are black students inside the enclosure, it's not necessarily safe there. You know, that's a fiction that being on the inside is safe and that the outside is the threat. What happens when you're a black person, a black student working through ideas of race, space, architecture on the inside of that enclosure that perpetuates itself as safe. And just like Elisa mentioned, those Cleary reports are always pictures of young black or Latino bodies somehow threatening the spaces around the territory, which is meant to say that in the inside you're safe, you're okay, that those gates are a safe space and a safe territory. But I think what the university is simultaneously doing is obviously criminalizing the presence of others outside, but is equally sending a false message to those of us who are inside that it's safe. In reading, I think if I remember correctly, George lived its specialization of space and its specialization of race. It's basically the same ideas we're talking about, especially if you're dealing with, of course, the micro or the macro. So you're dealing with maybe the elevator space and every, as against the studio space, as against the campus and then even outside of the campus and how black bodies fit within the spaces and how the seemingly safe space, like you're saying, is what's on the inside, but it's basically outside of the black body, basically. It's how the perceptions are had is how people reacts to your presence or your absence or whatever it is. And even within, like I said, within the studio spaces, how are these even made safe in that, in that, in quotes, how is it made safe for the contemporary black person or black student or black in the tutor? Within, within that space. So I think it was an interesting conversation to be had, especially coming from, literally entering New York, March, early September, and then like experiencing the campus and even the studio space and how that various levels of dealing with other nationalities or ethnicities is almost similar, whether it's in the small space or within a large space. And to link this to the first question that kicked off this conversation, I mean, we, we bring this up in the question about the pipeline, right, going beyond this diversity pipeline. One of the few quotes that will always stick with me for the rest of my life is at another institution doing some work around race and diversity. A woman, we were talking about like this issue of bringing black students to MIT and what it would take to support them. And a graduate woman said, isn't even ethical to bring students to an institution that is just so poorly equipped to handle them. And I think what Ife was talking about that we're seeing how these institutions respond. We see how disciplines enclose themselves within their disciplinarity. We're seeing that this idea of just feeding black bodies into Columbia is not safe, right? In many ways, it gaslights certain students. It has them question either their position to Columbia, their own intelligence. And I think really challenging that idea that Columbia, because it architecturally presents itself as safe, because it situates itself within communities and has to fortify itself as kind of the standard of safety and of excellence, is itself intimately hostile for many students who enter into that space. Yeah, I'm actually thinking of something that Catherine McKittrick has said about basically that you know this sort of notion of a safe space, right? Is sort of the conceit of privilege, right? Because, you know, we know that the classroom is never a safe space, right? The classroom has never been a safe space. And so I think that that's like definitely a really interesting kind of discourse and kind of language that gets wielded very often when we think about the university and when we think about sort of diversity initiatives and like we were just talking about a second ago about transformation, right? So yeah, I think these are really great questions. Ife, something that you just mentioned, you mentioned that, you know, we are sort of within the university, right? We benefit from the university in a lot of ways. And so I'm interested in thinking about where are we positioned in this around, right? How are we positioned as both within, right, and outside? And sort of what does that, what is that positioning either allow or foreclose, right? And how does that impact how we imagine doing this kind of work differently, right? In this, in this sort of physical space of being in the middle of Harlem? Yeah. Yeah, I think in many ways it really begs us and it's, I think it's something that the BSA is sort of committed to is really sort of creating other spaces, creating spaces within the university itself, within the surrounds, within an exchange with the surround that enable us to think through these topics within and among ourselves. And this is why I keep saying that in many ways the statement was not necessarily looking for the answers from the institution itself, was not necessarily looking for the dean or the faculty or the administration to come up with the sort of solutions come up for the answers, come up with the answers. It's a, it's a charge to them. It's, you know, there's witness to their own failings, but I think in many ways also highlights the ways in which we as Black students enable spaces for ourselves to sort of express ourselves, to create space for us to begin to question and for us to study. I think what we're really sort of asking in many ways for the university to do is to sort of open itself up to processes of, of shared study, to dismantling its ideas about its sort of enclosed territories and domains, both in terms of the knowledge that it seeks to produce or regurgitate or perpetuate, but also about its spaces themselves. So I think the work that we're trying to do, the work that we're, that we're sort of aspiring to do as the BSA is to really sort of think about what those spaces are where we create room and territory for exploration and interrogation study. I mean, one of the things that I, that I found really fascinating about the BSA statement about the surrounds and an engagement with the surrounds is that it was also demanding an explosion of the categories that are even used to engage with what is considered the surrounds, that very quickly an engagement with the outside can be reduced to a very narrow scope of concerns. And, and one of the things that I'm really interested in as a practitioner based in South Africa, who sometimes spends time in New York and other places, is what are the conditions of possibility for imaginative work, right? So that we have a lot of challenges that we need to address as individuals, as communities, as collectives, but what are also the conditions of possibility for radically creative work and, and to abrogate that self, that space to ourselves. So that blackness is not consigned to having to resolve problems that we're not of our making, but actually creating the room, the resources, the space, the freedom and the freedom from, from victimization, the freedom from, you know, intimidation to imagine alternatives. So I think that this is quite an interesting declaration and an opening, but also an invitation to imagine something different than what currently exists. I mean, I think at GSEP already, I've heard some students in urban planning studio, for example, talk about going on a studio trip to Mozambique or to Kenya. And in many ways, the administration, the faculty, saying, well, we're going to Mozambique, we're going to Kenya, we're going to the continent, we're going to explore. But when they're there, it's a perpetuated narrative of dispossession. They take students to territories that they perceive as so-called slums. If they go to Turkey in a similar studio trip, they're similar material conditions, but they'll take them to the beach, where some of the most beautiful beaches exist, you know, in some of the other places. Those are not necessarily understood or regarded as part of the narrative that they would like to perpetuate, because the idea is that we're going to serve or aid black bodies whose narration is only narrowly circumscribed as being subjugated and dispossessed. Exactly, exactly. Just a quick comment on that. It's like they're different from what I'm hearing. It's just like they're different, like, levels to this alienation and just like walls that exist. And I'm just wondering if, oh, something I really liked about the Black faculties on learning whiteness too, is like all of this, it all happens to be an internal decision that people are conditioned to. Like, even if we, for instance, even if we like deal with the architecture, people on the inside are still thinking differently about this person. And we need to probably find a way to work on that, unlearn that behavior, unlearn this biases that are in people's minds or in the way curriculums work or the way, for instance, travel trips are like organized. If we unlearn that we're not just going here to fix these people, we're going here to learn from them, maybe there would be like a start of change somewhere. Just to add to Chico's point, which I strongly agree with, I would like to say that the institution of Colombia or let's say GESAP being founded in 1981 and all the way up to today, obviously, it takes a while to unlearn all these things that have been subconsciously unconsciously put into minds, into bodies and everything. And even currently, when you look at the trend of the project being put on our daily, etc., it's more, you are easily able to identify the ones on the African continent because there's a certain narrative being fed to even the way the spaces are organized and even the red rings are put out, even the way the materiality is almost like it's more of like, you know, we will improve, but just within this small gap for now, and then how the rest of the world still speeds ahead with innovation, with technology, and everything. So it's very important for faculty, it's very important curriculum to understand where we are currently and then begin to address that, like you said, for which my point of help, but from a point of understanding the history, understanding current trends, understanding the culture and how culture changes almost every 10 years or five years or 15 years, and addressing that in architectural design and not always being, we know what we are doing, you have to learn so much. And if I can also just jump on this train, that I think along the same lines, unlearning this kind of peculiar narrative that the discipline creates, I think we've all experienced that in a really flat read sometimes, there's this idea that black students need to do black work, they need to talk about black things like urbanism or the urban poor, there's this assumption that that is the work they're most interested in, and I think, Bo, what you're talking about this imaginative creative impulse is often not seen as innately coming from black students, yet it's constantly happening, like I think about how we were just using the term safe space, and I could not imagine a world without Amarsha P. Johnson or Sylvia Rivera or my black and brown trans sisters and brothers who did all of that work to bring the idea of a safe space into architectural discourse, the architectural discourse didn't produce that, they adopted that and somehow applied it within their own discipline. And I think, again, the way in which the discipline can even critique itself is something that we're responding to. I'm teaching a class at RISD and we looked at Frank Gehry's prison studio and how he imagined the end of the sentencing process, right? He comes in at the end of the pipeline when all of that injustice has more or less culminated to being sent into a prison, and he in like the studio looks at that as the architectural intervention, right? And he has a review, the kind of typical review where you stand in front of, you know, a huge jury all dressed in black kind of pointing at your flaws. And one of my questions is, why aren't you looking at the courthouse? I mean, why aren't you looking at the way in which the courthouse is structured, which is very much the same way that the architectural review is structured. I think there is this limit in the discipline to really see how it has not only consistently produced these systemic injustices, but how it continues to operate within that logic, even when it's talking about something like prison reform. I mean, what Rio is saying makes me think more deeply about, you know, even a redefinition of blackness or an insistence of blackness as something that is rich and generative and complex and layered, and that this position of being both inside and outside in the surround and the enclosure and moving between them and the violence that that entails, but also the incredible kind of de-sedimentation, the footwork, the exuberance, the creativity that's required in order to be able to sustain life through this movement is a rapture in or potential rapture in the way we think curriculum. So the letter that you discuss seems to me to be an opening into a consideration about something far more interesting than simply a list of complaints about what the institution is not doing right, and also the desire for conditions of possibility. Exactly. Yeah, I think that's fundamentally the recognition, the recognition of those conditions, right? Exactly. I mean, I think that's what is fundamental about the statement in many ways, is asking for the institution to do that work of recognition and self-reflection, to become self-aware, to examine itself, so that we included a series of so-called demands, but it's really the sort of impetus, the drive behind the piece in many ways in my own mind is about just that, those conditions of possibility, that the institution begins to think and look at itself fearlessly and audaciously and boldly and without hesitation. To do that means that, you know, in some meetings we kept hearing some administrators say, well then it wouldn't be GSAP, it wouldn't be GSAP, and there's this sort of investment in the sort of image of GSAP. It's a similar investment that I see in investment in whiteness itself, that there's an investment in whiteness. There is an investment in maintaining those narratives, and there's an investment in maintaining a sort of image of GSAP, but not necessarily an investment in action and transformation and in self-reflection and self-study of itself, that would ask the questions that Rio just posed, for example, why not look at the courthouse, not why not look at the structures that predate, why not historicize and locate and situate and contextualize, why be so sort of resistant to that, but so committed to an investment in an image or an idea that's a fiction. Yeah, I think that when we are thinking about sort of this redefinition of blackness and thinking about the radical imagination and how often those things sort of get cleaved apart by these institutions, and I'm thinking about like on the one hand there is the content of what you design or what you are working on. There is, you can say, I don't do prisons, I don't do courthouses, but I think there's also something really important which is like the sort of the way that you design, the way that the kind of modes, and that's where I think radical imagination is so important to kind of bring into the conversation, and I'm reminded here of something that Mabel raised in the enclosure's conversation, but that I've heard her say before many times, which is that the protests, protesting stops the circulation of capital, it disrupts capital and protests re-territorialize the city, and Mario offered us the language of sort of a renegotiation through improvisation. So there's a different mode, a different way of being, a different way of conceptualizing space as a whole, that's not just thinking about content. And I think in a way like this pandemic has disrupted the circulation of capital too, and that has made possible institutional reckoning, but I think from a creative standpoint, I'm wondering like what can we learn about planning and architecture from protests, right, from the kinds of mobility and mobilization that protests affect? I wonder if they are almost diametrically opposed in some ways. I think about like the recent invention of protest spaces, the desire to you know not infringe on people's right to gather, but to also allow capital to flow. I was in Chicago during the 16 shot protest and they moved like the protest off of Michigan Avenue so that the protest could happen, right, but that people who wanted to shop on that street could still shop, and I mean that inherently is the opposite of a protest, right, the point is to disrupt. And I wonder if architecture just isn't able to like design for that because the whole point of a protest is to do the opposite, it's to however you're thinking it's going to work, you want to disrupt it, break that flow, you know, systemically change its imaginary. And I think we see even in Zuccotti Park, right, where Occupy Wall Street was very large and kind of disrupted the flow of Wall Street has now become like redesigned to accommodate small scale protests. So I don't know, I wonder if they're opposed. I'm not saying they are, but I wonder if they are opposed. That's interesting. I'm always unstruck by this notion of improvisation though, because improvisation can notice that there's like this making moves without preparation that there's no planning. But I think something that's interesting in the protests and I think well what happens is the traditional media coverage shows sort of figures in the street, buys in the street signs, but then there's all this other stuff happening, this other planning that's happening, the things that happen to enable that movement and in many ways it's because those bodies were able to be mobilized because there's already this ongoing planning long before. So people were sort of ready to take to the streets to get busy and like have to be out in the streets. So I'm always sort of struck by like an idea about the ongoing underlying fugitive planning that was always going on underneath before we actually see the bodies in the street. And I think maybe that's part of where architecture can kind of where are we as designers, people think about space who actually at times want to try to produce spaces that we can think about the sort of self-organized insurgent work where planning is sort of going on like all the time. And I think that thinking about that, thinking about the sort of ongoing active antagonistic uncertainty that's not always on display, that's not always immediately visible and present is where we sort of think about where our work lies. So that's why I keep thinking that the BSA is just constantly doing this work of creating spaces like this, of creating spaces for knowledge production that we're just constantly always doing this work that may not be seen. We had many messages early on about what you have to distribute your programming on the GSAP student listserv or the all-school listserv. And we kept saying, well, maybe we don't want to reach the all-school listserv. And they kept saying, you have a greater reach. More people will know what you're doing. And it was like, well, maybe we don't want that. Maybe this is a space for us. Maybe this is, and that's okay. This is a space where we're working and where we're constantly planning before things are visibly and physically sort of materially mobilized, that we're always thinking about this before and for. I mean, one of the things that this tension brings to me between the sort of star architect and collective work is even the identity and the imagination of what a planner is and what an architect is, right? Because in terms of the way that architecture history is taught, it's always some great white male who's having heroic visions about the future. And everybody has to live in that vision. And it reminds me also of the image of the great white hunter in colonial Africa, right? Where he's just surrounded by trophies and natives. But he's the one who's gone into the darkness and found value and is bringing it back to empire. So the idea of this kind of visionary, heroic, white male heteronormative figure is so much at the core of architecture that it makes it really difficult to start to imagine other kinds of practice. And that relates to your idea of insurgent planning, right? That it kind of, it fragments this idea of the unitary soul heroic designer. And, and rather thinks about how planning is something that is that can happen collectively. Planning that is something that is not so much based on on very specific and narrow definition of expertise. Insurgent planning is also a kind of recognition of different modes of knowledge. So, so to think about protest and insurgency as modes of inquiry, as approaches, as opposed to the production of a sort of like unitary space might be might be generative. So that we begin to rethink the figure of the architect, the figure of the planner, and their own place to the space that is required that is imagined as the surround. Yeah, that makes me think of the idea of insurgent occupation right here in anthropological discourse, right? But that, and it's funny what you say about improvisation, because I've always learned that improvisation actually requires a tremendous amount of planning, right? The foundation of improvisation, right? And often like clandestine practice, right? Clandestine sort of planning. And yeah, I think, I think that's, I think it's really interesting too to think about kind of the, the, the collective, right? And so, so what does it mean to kind of massify the, the planner or the architect, right? What does it mean to think about people sort of making and planning together, not just that sort of individual sovereign subject, which I think is, is a really, really great point. Okay, so any, any last comments about that? Elisa, I would say that it's, it's not just about sort of participatory community planning, but also a kind of radical reimagination of what is the community, right? So before we began, began our webinar, I was talking about how I felt a need for community that satisfied in my immediate location. And so to think about ways of building networks that go beyond our immediate geographic location is also a different way of thinking about collective life and collective strategies that they might be approaches, modes of doing, of knowing, of making outside of your immediate environment that could, that could introduce a completely different way of approaching space or approaching or thinking about social relations or how to organize collective living and designing. That's all I wanted to, yeah. Okay, so I guess we don't have a lot of time left, so I will move on to our last question, which I wanted to sort of ask, and hopefully this question will bring together a lot of the things we've already been, been discussing, but I did want to ask this question about home, which is the the topic of our symposium that has been now indefinitely postponed, and perhaps is actually happening, you know, in different kind of decentralized ways right now. But that symposium sought to grapple with both sort of conceptual and material questions of housing, home, and shelter. Our call asked, what does home mean today in a world that once wrenched apart and compressed by imperialism, globalization, capitalism, and migration? What does home mean today in the shadow of climate crisis, homelessness, and vast wealth disparity? What does home mean for black people living in the wake of an institution that once considered them property, commodities, objects, in the inventory of someone else's home, an institution where personhood was determined by land ownership, expropriation, enclosure, and settlement? How do we contend today with the practice of building and living on stolen land? And in the midst of these realities and histories, how has home been forged, invented, and made? And so, you know, I sort of want to bring this up because as we're in dialogue with the undercommons and with Moten and Harney, you know, they really trouble the notion of home on the grounds of ownership and enclosure and property, which are all things that we've been talking about today. That's sort of the very notion of home contains within it exclusion and individuation. So in a recent episode of the Millennials Are Killing Capitalism podcast, Moten says, the general understanding of home in America is your home is your castle and it's your sovereign space. You put a fence around it and barbed wire if you can get some and you got some goddamn surveillance equipment and some dogs and whatever the hell you can do to make sure that nobody comes up in your home, right? But then he explains that he says when I was a kid, my experience of home and what makes me love home and feel that I miss home was the experience of the constant violation of the boundaries of so-called home. My mom was a school teacher and she had certain students who had come to my house and they were like my older siblings, one in particular, Mike Davis, who was like my brother. And the greatest feeling in the world for me was to hear or see Mike walk through the front door without knocking, right? So for Moten and Harney, sort of homelessness is the condition of sharing, right? So relinquishing ownership, relinquishing the built expression of the individual sovereign subject and enclosed family unit, right? So I guess I would leave us with the question of sort of how can we as thinkers and critics but also practitioners of space-making and home-making and policy-making think about the concept of ownership and perhaps thinking about inhabitation and architecture outside of ownership and settlement and is that possible, right? I think that's also on the table. I think one of the first letters that I saw from a GSAP body responding to the dean used this language about, in one of their sort of primary demands, they used this language about barriers for black and indigenous and people of color to be part of our institution. And as soon as I sort of read that framing this notion of our, I immediately knew that the statement had not been written by any black folks, you know, they immediately, there was a sense of ownership of the institution, but that they were trying to say should be made available to others for entry, for engagement. And it was amazing to me that that language was being used, that it hadn't been picked up, it could have been changed to, you know, into the universe. It could have been a very simple sort of rhetorical shift, but this idea that it was ours was immediately visible to me. And in that, they're establishing and re-establishing the boundaries and borders of that which they seek to open up. They're doing exactly the opposite work. So for me, and that thinking was, you know, if we think about ourselves as students in a sense of being in a home away from home, for many, you know, that this stance of ownership that comes from other students, that comes from alumni, faculty, administration, who feel they actually have ownership over parts of the university or the entire institution itself, continuously sees black folks as outsiders. And even in that statement just perpetuates that making outside of black folks. So when Mohan and Harni make that point about sort of the boundaries of home, that must be continuously transgressed, that home is not a sovereign place, it's not a space where you have your fence, but a violated thing, I think is what we need to explore, like those violations, those transgressions. So that even if we maintain some idea about what home is, we do so by thinking how do we violate those rigid boundaries and the rigid boundaries that they're supposed to represent? Like, how do we as black students benefit from the university, but that we can also be on the run inside? How can we be homeless in a sense in those spaces? And I think that's where I think our work exists, sort of being on the run, sort of not thinking about sort of being fugitive in many ways of what they, what they sort of propose. I think that's what we're asking in the statement in a sense, how and what we study is conceived about how it's arranged, how the school can start to think about giving itself away, you know, Moten and Harney talk about, you know, giving your home away continuously, but how can we make space or room for the institution think about how to give itself away, how to let itself open up, how to let itself go, how to relinquish, how to unsettle itself, how to engage in sharing, how to think beyond itself, so that we're not talking about that it wouldn't be GSAT, but that we're talking about creating a possibility for it to be something else. You know, there's this section in the under comments about debt, and I always think about it in this, about debt and study, and I think about it in relationship to this question of home as well and the relationship between the university and to policy in many ways. And they had the same way they say the student is not home, the student is out of time, out of place, there's no credit, there's bad debt, but the student is a bad debtor, and it's fine. The student runs from credit, it runs from the testing, you know, this is why I always say I think everyone should do a PhD, because we're not necessarily handled in the same way in terms of, you know, the credits and your grades and your regimes and those regimes of sort of testing we are, but I think being able to have that space to do that study, to be paid to study, I think is that's what I see in this work, you know, so the student does not intend to pay, you know, we keep cracking at the debts and we don't intend to pay. And I think that's kind of where I feel like our sort of home away from home as students at the university can ask for those constant violations, constant transgressions against those boundaries. I mean, one of the things that conversations that I had much more recently with Abdul Malik Simone was this idea of transitoriness and how in the majority world increasingly large numbers of people experience life on the move. And how this idea of bodies in motion requires a radical re-conceptualization of space and an understanding of cities as porous, and that porosity is a condition that enables people to make life. And I thought that that was quite interesting in terms of your idea of letting go, of recognizing the possessive as something that actually produces constraints. And that makes it difficult to actually imagine something new. But I also was thinking from a much more personal point of view about my own relationship in South Africa to landscape. So it had never, ever occurred to me in my entire architecture education to become a landscape architect. And I couldn't understand why after I went to a Walter Hood lecture. And it was because there is also this idea that there are certain people who have the right to command large swathes of territory and to imagine what this territory will be and how it will be arranged. So somebody who's grown up in a colonial environment, I'll spend my childhood in a colonial environment. This idea of being the custodian of territory is so alien to my own sort of like sense of self that it was very difficult for me to imagine this as a practice and also why I became an architect. But my point is that there's something about being a custodian of ownership of thinking that you have the power to allow or to disallow entry and access that is fundamentally rooted in a kind of colonial logic. And so in order to enable more circulation, more porosity, more freedom, more creativity, one would actually need to rethink this boundary that people are so intent on maintaining. So I think I absolutely agree with you. And I don't think that it's a uniquely Columbia issue. I think it's also in the logic of many, many, many, many institutions across the world that this idea of what does it mean to be public facing? And what are the ethics of that engagement? It's something that requires ongoing engagement and also a commitment as Black faculty have said, not just in Columbia but also elsewhere, commitments to dismantling these structures, these colonial logics that produce this condition. And if I may, I want to say like I'm still surprised, I mean I'm not surprised because of the professionalization of architecture at least in the US that we still talk about like the single family as the standard of home. None of my MR courses really taught me about kinship or home. It was until the post-professional degree where I studied ballroom culture. I studied about being casted out from your home, your biological home and how you need to make a home. And I think this is again one limit or one place we need to unlearn about what we consider to be the home. And it's no surprise that we only talk about the most professional understanding of a home, looking at a home as a financial investment that will return money. I mean that's how we approach the home. And just to echo, this has a lot of parallel to our own Secretary of State's idea of what a human right is. He recently came out and said that private property is the foremost human right in the world. And that I think architects and architectural practice needs to ask, do we want to align ourselves to that kind of future where we continue to just see home in that lens? Or do we want to really investigate like the plurality of what a home can be, especially, you know, being students in New York where many of us will always have a roommate or have to divide like a closet. We don't live in the kind of idea that architecture still maintains of this single unit with this affordable living room space, right? Okay, any final thoughts or Chuka or Farouk? Sorry. Go ahead, go ahead. Yes, I think my final thoughts have to deal with the sounds and the idea of home expressed at length by Efe and my other companions. It's always an ongoing, I think, evolving conversation, especially some of us who have already dealt with housing, affordable housing, or about to deal with housing again in the housing labs, et cetera, or even in readings and stuff. But with regards to black bodies, it's always very, I'll say a very interesting conversation to have to start off with because obviously there's issues of having low-cost housing or affordable housing or project housing that's for a certain color of people. And then when other people try to maybe exceed that or try to accept higher forms of living or better forms of living, there's some level of restriction or some level of white flight associated with that. So with regards to housing, I think design these things, design these spaces, so I think that's a little, hello? Yeah, we love that. Hello? Farouk, your video is frozen. So if you turn it off and then speak the rest of your statement, we may get the fidelity that we need to hear your voice, but maybe try again now. Sorry, can anybody hear me? Now we can. Is it right now? Sorry. Now I don't remember where I was lost at, but if you can hear me, just give me a thumbs up or something. Okay, yeah. So in putting out writings, in putting out dissertations, putting out design, or even symposia, I think it's important to unlearn basically the things that have been purified by either the colonialists or imperialists about how we should live and also look for it to basically how the 21st century and beyond is going to accept Black body here. I just quickly wanted to add that everyone has had really amazing thoughts and I really resonate with the idea of that challenging ownership and I think that's a problem just in every aspect of life, even just down to space. A lot of people have this idea of I own this space and like Info said challenging, the porosity of ownership needs to be implemented. For instance, people think that an example would be like, oh, go back to your country, you don't belong here because they feel like they own this, they own this, they own America, they own this space or that moment that they're standing like I own this space and this should not be violated, but I think that everyone needs to challenge that ownership. Like who told you you own this space? Who told you you own that thing? What made you believe that you own this institution or you own this path that you're walking on? I mean somebody else built this school, somebody else built that space so just taking a step back and challenging like what is mine and what is yours would probably help people move forward and like understanding each other I guess. Yeah and enclosure is designed to maintain and express ownership and privacy and private property. Okay I think that on that note we should end we're a little bit over time. Thank you so much to all of our participants. Thanks again to Lila. Thank you so much to Impul. So yeah I think this is recorded so it should be, I hope, archived somewhere and we'll try to let you know. Okay, thanks.