In this episode, I talk to Jose Brunner an Adjunct Professor for the Critical Ethnic Studies Program at the CCA, about his work on speculation, and practice in architecture. We talked about his research on the Border Phenomena that explores the anthropology of frontiers, and the agency of art and design at the boundary between nations. We discussed about what it is being a transborder citizen, and how this has informed his career and his teaching activities. We discussed how being from and at the border has a similar and familiar quality to queer identities, and Joey shared his perspective of having been grown in a binational and bicultural household. We talked about, how the border has changed through time and space, and how, for example experiencing 9/11 made a huge impact in border culture. We also talked about our interests in the border environment and how we study it and analyze it from diverse but similar perspectives. We also discussed about pedagogy, about the stories and histories that we teach, and encourage our students to tell. 

Recommendations. 

Dreaming America: Voices of Undocumented Youth in Maximum Security Detention,  Ed. by Seth Michelson. 

Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present.  Ed. by Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis, Mabel O. Wilson.  

The 13th - Netlfix 

Just Mercy - Prime Video 

Midnight Gospel - Netflix

Recorded 05/21

In this episode, I talk to Sophie Hochhäusl an Assistant Professor for Architectural History and Theory at the Weitzman School of Design, about the discourse on collectivity, dissent, and difference in architecture. We also discuss her work on modern architecture and urban culture in Austria, Germany, and the United States and the spatial histories of dissidence and resistance art, intersectional feminism, queer theory, and gender studies, as well as labor theory and environmental history. In our discussion, we commented on how the borders or the margins are spaces were resistance occurs and how these are spaces for dissent. We also talked about teaching the cannon and how to change the narratives we perpetuate in the classrooms, and how other media like children's books, like her own Pinsel, Paula and the chatting houses: Viennese architecture for small and tall people, could be helpful tools to teach architecture. 

Recommendations. 

Dark Times (Finstere Zeiten) By Elisabeth Freundlich 

The City We Became. By N.K. Jemisin 

Betty on HBO. A diverse group of young women navigate their lives through the male-dominated world of skateboarding in New York City. ‌Starring Dede Lovelace, Moonbear, Nina Moran, Ajani Russell, and Rachelle Vinberg, from Crystal Moselle’s original film Skate Kitchen. 

Euphoria on HBO, follows a group of high school students as they navigate love and friendships in a world of drugs, sex, trauma, and social media. Actor and singer Zendaya leads an ensemble cast including Hunter Schafer, Jacob Elordi, Algee Smith and Sydney Sweeney

Recorded:  June, 03. 2020. Part 2 of 2

In this second part of the episode with Machely Flores, we continue talking about forced disappearance and corruption in México and the United States. We talked about Black Lives Matter, the movement, and its relation to demands made in México by the mothers of disappeared people by the government in the state of Coahuila. We also talked about grassroots movements against social violence and the agency of citizens to reappropriate public space. We talked about Hamilton and the foundation of the US, the ideas behind it, and how as good as they were, they were not for everybody. We also talked about teaching history, western and non-western, feminist history, decolonial history, and other histories. 

Recommendations:

A History of Women in the West  by Michelle Perrot

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

Portrait of a Lady on Fire on Amazon Prime

The danger of a single story | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

El Dollop All things Comedy Podcast

Machely will be co-hosting with me every couple of months to do check-up episodes were we discuss current events. 

Recorded:  June, 03. 2020. Part 1 of 2

In this first part of the episode with Machely Flores, we talked about forced disappearance and corruption in México and the United States. We talked about Black Lives Matter, the movement, and its relation to demands made in México by the mothers of disappeared people by the government in the state of Coahuila. We also talked about grassroots movements against social violence and the agency of citizens to reappropriate public space. 

Machelly Flores Reyna 

Machely will be co-hosting with me every couple of months to do check-up episodes were we discuss current events. 

In this episode, I talk with Aldo Solano Rojas, a Mexican Art Historian and Ph.D. student from the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at UNAM about his book on the Playgrounds of modern México, the public space,  and the city. We also talked about centralism, the eternal fight between art historians and architectural historians and the the marginality of the history of urbanism, public spaces, and parks. We discussed figures like Luis Barragán, Mario Pani, and Jan Gehl among others. 

Please read his articles on coolhunter, and visit his Tumblr! 

Recommendations. 

Man and Play by Roger Callois

Netflix's Midnight Gospell

In this episode I talk to Elisheva Levy, a Ph.D. candidate at UPenn, about heteronormative households, the concept of "home"? We question nuclear families' normality while delving into ideas of pre-modern and modern communist habitat (while dealing with Marxist's concepts of primitive communism). Ideology and the lack of it in capitalism remain a discussion during the whole conversation, while we also talk about the possibilities of change of the paradigms of communal living for the future. 

Recommendations.

Alexandra Kollontai - was a Marxist revolutionary, first as a member of the Mensheviks, then from 1915 on as a Bolshevik (later Communist). Serving as the People's Commissar for Welfare in the Bolshevik government in 1917–1918, she became the first woman in history to become an official member of a governing cabinet. In 1922 Kollontai was appointed as a diplomatic counselor to the Soviet legation in Norway, and soon received a promotion to head the legation, one of the first women to hold such a position.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/index.htm

https://nyti.ms/29R2miP

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/08/alexandra-kollontai-soviet-womens-rights-revolution-zhenotdel-uzbekistan

https://spartacus-educational.com/RUSkollontai.htm

Survivor Israel 

Season 10

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1796301/episodes?season=10&ref_=tt_eps_sn_5

In this episode, I talk with Ali Alyousefi, a Ph.D. candidate at UPenn, about how literature, stories, poems, autobiographies, and other marginal texts are making a comeback to the field of History + Theory of Architecture. Concepts like Paul Preciado's "Autotheory" -Testo Junkie- that appears in texts like Argonauts and those discussed in feminist scholarship are touched upon. We discuss the state of the field and how the inclusion of these other genres is breaking the canon, making it more accessible to a broader public and hopefully more socially engaged. 

Recommendations

Cities of Salt is the first in a five-part series of novels set in an unnamed kingdom in the Arabian Peninsula in the 1930s; published in Arabic (as Mudun al-mtfh: al-tih) in 1984, in English in 1987.

Netflix's Babylon Berlin

URLS

https://www.design.upenn.edu/architecture/graduate/people/ali-alyousefi

https://alialyousefi.blogspot.com/

https://www.feministpress.org/books-n-z/testo-junkie

https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/argonauts

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/118591/cities-of-salt-by-abdelrahman-munif/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4378376/