Kristine Miller
Landscape Architecture, College of Design
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

IAS Faculty Fellow, Fall 2020

Memoir as a Mode of Inquiry and Expression in Environmental Design and Planning for Social Justice

As an IAS Residential Fellow, I will be working in collaboration with Professor Gail Dubrow to deepen and complicate my understanding of how story and memoir might inform equity-driven environmental design scholarship, teaching and learning, and action. Understanding one’s own standpoint and biases in relation to others who occupy similar and different social positions is critical to the work of social justice. However, there are remarkably few examples of this kind of reflective scholarship within environmental design. What models might be drawn from fields with more robust traditions of reflexivity, such as anthropology and literature?  What teaching methods best invite students and design professionals to examine their own positionality and understanding of what is possible within their fields? Which stories are mine to tell? Essays written during my IAS fellowship will become chapters in Introduction to Design Equity, an open access book for students and professionals that maps design processes and products against racial equity research.
 

Kristine Miller is a Professor in Landscape Architecture at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches courses in cultural landscape studies and design and social equity. She has published three books on design, public space, politics, and identity: Designs on the Public: The Private Lives of New York's Public Spaces (UMN Press, 2007), Almost Home: The Public Work of Gertrude Jekyll, (UVA Press, 2013), and Introduction to Design Equity, (UMN Libraries Publishing, 2018). 

This series features an IAS Residential Fellow—a Faculty Fellow, Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellow, or Community of Scholars Fellow. Each profile is written by the participant as a way to share their projects, goals, and experiences as part of their time at the IAS.