In their seminar, "Unwalling Citizenship," Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman will discuss their work on "citizenship culture" at the United States-Mexico border, and the network of civic spaces they have co-developed with border communities to cultivate regional and global solidarities. They ask, in this increasingly walled world, and with the surge of anti-immigrant sentiment everywhere: can the idea of citizenship be recuperated for more emancipatory and inclusive democratic agendas?

Teddy Cruz (MDes Harvard University) is a Professor of Public Culture and Urbanization in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. Fonna Forman (PhD University of Chicago) is a Professor of Political Theory at the University of California, San Diego, and Founding Director of the UCSD Center on Global Justice. Together they are principals in Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, a research-based political and architectural practice in San Diego investigating borders, informal urbanization, climate resilience, civic infrastructure and public culture. They lead a variety of urban research agendas and civic/public interventions in the San Diego-Tijuana border region and beyond.

Their work has been exhibited widely, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; M+ Hong Kong, the 2016 Shenzhen Biennial of Urbanism and Architecture, and representing the United States in the 2018 Venice Architectural Biennale. They have two new monographs: Spatializing Justice: Building Blocks and Socializing Architecture: Top-Down / Bottom-Up (both with MIT Press and Hatje Cantz); and a third forthcoming: Unwalling Citizenship (Verso). 

This seminar is a discussion of pre-circulated work. It can be found on the GIDEST site for attendees to read in advance.

This event is part of the bi-weekly GIDEST Seminars presented by the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography & Social Thought.