dark matter university

academia / community engagement (2020 - ongoing) BIPOC-led trans-disciplinary design “school”

Dark Matter University (DMU) was formed out of the larger organizing efforts of the Design as Protest Collective to build out an antiracist design justice school and alongside reinvigorated Black Lives Matter movement.

Leveraging existing inter-institutional connections and forming new ones, this group of Initiators saw in the confluence of the remote instructional paradigm of COVID and Black Lives Matter an opportunity to mount a radical, transdisciplinary anti-racist critique that could operate both “one foot in and one foot outside” of existing schools of Architecture and Design while centering equity, justice, and care in their work.

My contributions focused on the creation of the group but has included working with institutions to pilot a transinstitutional model of remote/hybrid pedagogy, including a course “Fugitive Practices” that will be taught in the Spring of 2021 between Yale and Howard University with co-faculty Curry Hackett (Howard). Students from both schools will learn and collectively share knoweledge in the same “space”.

The DMU Initiators included Venesa AliceaChuqui, Germane Barnes, Stephen Gray, Jerome Haferd, Mira Henry, Bryan C. Lee Jr., Justin Garrett Moore, Jennifer Newsom, Quilian Riano, and Tya Winn, and brought together multiple different constituencies.

Jerome Haferd