In our increasingly walled world, one experiencing a surge of anti-immigrant sentiment everywhere, can the idea of citizenship be recuperated for more emancipatory and inclusive democratic agendas?
In the sixth session of Cornell’s Reimagining Citizenship speaker series, Teddy Cruz (Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego) and Fonna Forman (Political Science, University of California, San Diego) will discuss their work on “citizenship culture" at the U.S.-Mexico border and the network of civic spaces they have co-developed with border communities to cultivate regional and global solidarities.
Merging the fields of architecture and urbanism, political theory and urban policy, and visual arts and public culture, Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman is a research-based architectural practice that investigates issues of borders, informal urbanization, civic infrastructure, and public culture, with a special emphasis on Latin American cities. Their work has been exhibited widely in cultural venues across the world, including the Museum of Modern Art; San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum; Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt; and M+ Hong Kong. Dr. Cruz and Dr. Forman, who represented the United States in the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, also have two monographs forthcoming: “Top-Down/Bottom-Up: The Research and Practice of Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman” and “The Political Equator: Unwalling Citizenship.”
The series “Reimagining Citizenship” features scholars, writers, and artists whose work interrogates the limits and possibilities of legal, social, and cultural belonging. Through book talks, roundtables, and presentations, we consider how multidisciplinary, multispecies approaches to the study of migration open up new understandings of citizenship, borders, and social transformation. Organized through Cornell University’s Migrations Global Grand Challenge.
