Hello! I am a designer, researcher, facilitator, and educator working for equity and social justice.
Working with design clients: Tools and advice for successful partnerships
“Working with design clients: Tools and advice for successful partnerships” is a practical guide to help design students and educators manage and operate student-run design firms in higher education. To be published in October 2024, I co-wrote this textbook with Meaghan Dee, Associate Professor at Virginia Tech University.
Director of Academic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
As the Director of Academic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Columbia College Chicago, I work “towards the structural transformation of the institution to reflect anti-racism in all of the ways we approach and reflect our scholarship, creative practices, and educational mission.”
Radically hopeful visions of anti-racist futures
During a final phase of an anti-racism team training at an arts and media college, Hillary Carey and I facilitated a collectively futuring process for the team in which we imagined an anti-racist future of the college. Our article about this project, “Radically hopeful visions: Futuring for institutional anti-racism work” was published in Futures journal in February 2024.
Politics of Design
This course examines the interrelationship of the politics of design across individuals, practices, organizations, institutions, and systems. By politics, we mean political beliefs, actions, practices, and policies as well as the arrangements of power and authority between actors (human and non-human) in society, not whether you identify as Republican or Democrat. How do design and designers intersect with social and cultural sources of power and authority?
Innovation & Impact: Cultivating Food Equity
Using entrepreneurial thinking to generate ideas that imagine a more equitable future food system, students learn to recognize and cultivate opportunities for a range of innovative projects such as business ventures, social and civic services, and creative projects in media, arts, and design. Designed as a transformative DEI educational experience, the class offers structures for students to assess, leverage and add to their own skills sets through transdisciplinary collaboration and proactive self-evaluation practices.