The

Sheila Sheikh: "The compass of worlds: designing the pluriverse from Palestine".

Physical location
ENSAPLV, room to be defined

© Shela Sheikh

Open conference in English organized by Brent Patterson as part of his teaching at ENSA Paris-la Villette and ENSA Paris-Malaquais, in particular the “Territoires de l’écologie politique” Master’s seminar.

This conference proposes to consider Palestine as a compass for the practice of design and education, two fields relevant to the study and practice of architecture, without being entirely assimilable.
Revisiting her reading of the Sakiya project in the collective work Terres et liberté: Manifeste antiraciste pour une écologie de la libération, Sheila Sheikh situates this experimental pedagogical space outside Ramallah between “decolonial ecology” and what Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar calls “design for the pluriverse”: an alternative vision of design and practice that enables “a world composed of many worlds”, including a range of epistemologies rooted in place and grounded in experience. The triangulation between France, Palestine and Colombia will also provide insight into the possibilities and challenges of decolonial thought and practice for Paris-based students.

Biographical highlights

Shela Sheikh is Senior Lecturer in International Politics and Director of Research at The University of London Institute in Paris. Her research and teaching are in the fields of post/decolonial cultural studies and environmental humanities. With Malcom Ferdinand, she co-edited issue 1 of Plurivers: revue d’écologies décoloniales, a multilingual journal published byObservatoire Terre-Monde. With Ros Gray and Jennifer Gabrys, she is editor of the ” Planetarities ” series with Goldsmiths/MIT Press. With Ros Gray, she edited “The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions”, special issue of Third Text (2018). She is currently preparing a monograph entitled Rehearsing Environmental Justice: People’s Tribunals, Staged Hearings, Potential Histories.

Event