UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Penn State College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School’s spring Lecture and Exhibit Series continues on March 27 with a visit from Alison Hirsch, associate professor at the University of Southern California (USC), landscape theorist, historian and designer.
Hirsh will present a Department of Landscape Architecture Bracken Lecture, titled “Landscape and the Working Country,” at 4:30 p.m. in the Stuckeman Family Building Jury Space and via Zoom, before opening an exhibition of her work in the Stuckeman Family Building’s Rouse Gallery titled “The Other California: land, loss, labor, liberated futures along phantom shores.”
Hirsch’s lecture will focus on the relations of the body and land or place. The talk will start with an overview of some 1960s activist design practices that have transformed conventional practice before evolving into a focused look at the manifold nature of physical work, both how the physical process of building together has been a vehicle for liberatory agendas and how labor on land has been exploited as a form of violence targeted at specific — often racialized — bodies.
Hirsch will discuss how her activist design and pedagogical practice has used lessons learned from earlier activist practitioners to find avenues for justice, repair and liberation. As the director of the Landscape Architecture and Urbanism program at USC, Hirsch established the Landscape Justice Initiative as a platform to address questions of environmental, spatial and climate justice at local and systemic scales.