• PhD in Architecture, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (with Certificate: U-M Graduate Teacher, Center for Research on Learning and Teaching)
• MSc in Architectural Design Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• MArch in Urban Design, CEPT University, Ahmedabad
• BArch, South Gujarat University, Surat

• Academic Excellence Chair and Associate Professor of Architecture and Humanities, Avani Institute of Design, Calicut
• Associate Faculty Librarian of Digital Pedagogy, University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor
• Assistant Director of Academic Programming and Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities and Michigan Humanities Collaboratory, Ann Arbor
• Public Humanities Fellow, University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School, Ann Arbor
• Teaching Fellow, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and CEPT University, Ahmedabad
• PhD Researcher, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• Project Associate, Environmental Planning Collaborative, Ahmedabad
• Research Associate, School of Architecture, CEPT University, Ahmedabad
• Project Assistant, Jain Associates, Ahmedabad and Nagaur

Questions of participatory politics, social production of space, and queer-feminist histories, working with forms of knowledge and expertise across voice and social difference; Anti-colonial digital humanities pedagogy, digital arts, and digital storytelling; Public scholarship, community-engaged learning, and community archiving; Architecture, infrastructure, and the city. These research areas have extended into community- and discourse-building activities in the form of conferences, workshops, and invited talks. Selected engagements include the following:

Academic and Special Topic Editing

• “Digital Pedagogy as Feminist Worldmaking,” co-editor with Danica Savonick, SUNY Cortland, Reviews in DH (November 2024)
• “The Liberatory Legacy of bell hooks: Pedagogies and Praxes that Heal and Disrupt,” co-editor with Nikki Fragala Barnes, University of Central Florida; Summer L. Hamilton, Pennsylvania State University; Asma Neblett, The Graduate Center, CUNY; and Danica Savonick, SUNY Cortland, JITP Special Issue 23, December 2023.

Paper Presentations, Workshop Design and Lead, Panel Organization, and Invited Talks

• “Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed: Anti-Colonial DH Methods and Praxis” with Ashley Caranto Morford and Arun Jacob, DHSI University of Victoria, BC, June 2021-2024.
• “Care work as Method, Pedagogy, and Praxis,” School of Environment and Architecture (SEA) Mumbai Symposium, November 2023.
• “Queer Making,” A Research-Creation Episteme? Practice-based Research and Institutional Critique, Trent University, October 2023.
• “The Anti-Colonial DH School,” Critical Making and Social Justice, HASTAC 2023, Pratt Institute, NYC; Participants: Anne Cong-Huyen, Kush Patel; Ashley Caranto Morford, Arun Jacob, Latoya Lee, Michelle Lee Brown, Palashi Vaghela, June 2023.
• “Biographical Critiques as Critical Feminist DH Pedagogy” with Anne Cong-Huyen, Aditi Bhat, Gayatri Shanbhag, and M. Nithya Kirti, Global DH Symposium, Michigan State University, March 2023.
• “Queer Scaffolds,” University Arts London (UAL) FUEL4Design: Future Education and Literacy for Designers (convened by Betti Marenko, Silke Lange, Pras Gunasekera), June 2022.
• “Care Matters and Justice Dreams: Design Studio Framework, Works, and Insights for Anti-colonial Digital Humanities Praxis” with Sai Vidyasri Giridharan and Shamanth Joshi, Critical Digital Humanities International Conference, CDHI, Digital Humanities Network, University of Toronto. October 2022.
• “Introduction to Anti-colonial Digital Humanities Virtual Workshop” with Ashley Caranto Morford and Arun Jacob, Faculty Development Program, Office of the Provost, Columbia College-Chicago, May 2022.
• “Digital Threads: Anti-colonial Storytelling and Community Building Through Twine,” DH Unbound 2022; Participants: Natalia Toronchuk, Zeinab Farokhi, Anna Maria Kalinowski, Arun Jacob, Ashley Caranto Morford, Kush Patel, May 2022.
• “Defining the Transnational through Anti-colonial Digital Humanities Pedagogy” with Ashley Caranto Morford and Arun Jacob, Global DH Symposium, Michigan State University, March 2022.
• “Caregiving as Method,” Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) Panel and Workshop organized by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, and co-presented with Jay Cephas, Lilian Chee, Elis Mendoza, Ikem Stanley Okoye, Itohan Osayimwese, Peg Rawes, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, and Delia Wendel, September 2021.
• “Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed: Anti-Colonial DH Pedagogy as Care Work” with Ashley Caranto Morford and Arun Jacob, Making the Net Work, The Canadian Society of Digital Humanities/La Société Canadienne des Humanités Numériques (CSDH/SCHN), June 2021.
• “Framing Justice, Framing Survival: Questions of Safety in Design Pedagogies,” Just Environments: Transdisciplinary Border Crossings, Environmental Design Research Association 52 Detroit, May 2021.
• “Queer Disclosures, Queer Refusals: Notes on Survival Praxis in Architecture Academia.” Gender and Academic Leadership in Architecture in India Research Symposium. Avani Institute of Design, Calicut, March 2020.
• “Pedagogies of the Digitally Oppressed: Anti-Colonial Critiques and Transnational Collaborations within #OurDhIs Organizing” with Ashley Caranto Morford and Arun Jacob, Global DH Conference, Michigan State University, East Lansing. March 2019.

Since joining Srishti Manipal in Monsoon 2021, I have led MA- and PhD-level courses in the arts and humanities as well as mentored both graduate and undergraduate students in the context of a digital humanities research lab called the Just Futures Co-lab. My experience of teaching studios and lab intensives has been particularly unique in this set, given the self-defined need for such spaces to be simultaneously specific in their conceptual framings and generative for each student’s transdisciplinary inquiry. Together, these courses have involved the fields and methods of digital storytelling, critical making, queer- and trans-feminist digital media and archival studies, art and architectural history and theory, and anti-colonial digital humanities.

Whilst the postgraduate courses remain open to students from MA and MDes concentrations, as well as individuals enrolled in the PGDP (Postgraduate Diploma) program, the PhD seminars continue to invite participation from individuals with backgrounds in contemporary art, art and architectural history, creative writing, journalism, critical technology studies, gender and sexuality studies, and digital and public humanities among others. Furthermore, my practice as PhD Supervisor involves advising and co-advising doctoral candidates in their research, as well as working with the PhD Academic Office on campus on various dimensions of program development from admissions to events and reviews to audits.

In terms of program-building, and during the academic year 2023–2024 in particular, I collaboratively led and instituted the MA Contemporary Art Practice program at Srishti Manipal; a first of its kind program in India that equips students with transdisciplinary skills and knowledge to engage in contemporary art, cultural production, and societal issues in the region and transnationally. Contemporaneously, I have also been working with other MA course leaders and heads of studies to develop the specificity of MA practice at Srishti Manipal and to give that specificity a framing and heuristic for orientation and review. My work in each of these roles is ongoing.

Recent Units Facilitated:

MA Contemporary Arts Practice:

• Archival Activism (Core Seminar) – Archives and Digital Storytelling
• Queer- and Trans-Feminist Digital Humanities and Critical Making (Transdisciplinary Research and Projects)

Doctoral Program in Art, Design, and Transdisciplinary Studies:

• Feminist and Queer Worldmaking (Seminar)

MA Technology and Change:

• Gender and Technology (Seminar)
• The Future as Techno-Utopia, Community, and Technological Self (Seminar)
• Care Matters and Justice Dreams (Studio)
• If Technology Will Not Save Us, What Will? (Seminar)
• Decolonizing Design? (Studio Integrated Seminar)
• Letters to Futures: Just Design Writing (Seminar)
• Just Futures Co-lab Lead and Stewardship (https://srishtimanipalinstitute.in/centers-and-labs/just-futures-co-lab.html) and PG Capstone Mentorship
• Introduction to Digital Storytelling Committed to Anti-Colonialism (MAHE Summer School)

1. Cover page of Shamanth Joshi’s Twine story called “Identity Games” (December 2021) [Private]. As a self-reflective account of how binary roles and bodies attached to video game characters have shaped their understanding of gender identity, Identity Games calls attention to how game design and designers play with us by reproducing cis-het logics in structure and representation.

2. Studio participants with visiting peers, undergraduate students, and faculty members during the semester-end studio exhibition (December 2022). The second iteration of Care Matters and Justice Dreams studio invited students to produce biographical critiques of care work involving technological systems, including, but not limited to, digital technologies that track, surveil, or characterize people’s lives around measures of health, gender, sexuality, labour, caste, and even dignity.

3. In this iteration of Care Matters and Justice Dreams studio (2023), we located ourselves in the overlaps between personal data, digital technologies, and the becoming of a human subject connected to workplace surveillance. Specifically, by engaging with gendered stories of technology, I asked: How might the digital humanities methods of weaving, coding, and storytelling help us unpack, visualize, and share the entwining of these complexities? What new tapestries of anti-surveillance ethics might emerge from a process of recounting, archiving, and transmitting information as weaving?

4. This zine of archival metadata connecting the personal to the structural via the institutional was co-produced by members of the Office of Anti-Inequity and Anti-Exclusive Excellence from February 28, 2022, to March 25, 2022. It was one of the three core forms of representing and translating the structuring questions of the working group Scaffolds, with the other two materials being an annotated layering of the institution’s vision and mission statements with call for further dialogue as a public performance and an open letter to institutional leadership, indexing each of these citations.

5. Seminars integrated into the MA studio and Just Futures Co-lab program constitute a space for engaged scholarship and pedagogy, complementing and deepening discourse building in art, design, and critical digital humanities at the post-graduate level at SMI.

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1610-8871

Website: https://whospeaksandacts.net/

Selected Publications

Journal Articles

• “Pulling Closer: Caregiving as Method Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3,” co-authored with Delia Duong Ba Wendel, PLATFORM, November-December 2023.
• “Kinship as Keyword,” gta papers 7: Care, edited by Gabrielle Schaad, Torsten Lange (Institute for History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zurich), December 2022.
• “Framing Survival: Questions of Safe Space in Design Pedagogies” in collaboration with Johnson Jament and Merin Mathew, Pedagogies For A Broken World, JAE (Journal of Architectural Education) 76:2, edited by Jay Cephas, Igor Marjanović, Ana Miljački, October 2022.
• “Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed: Futurities, Imaginings, Responsibilities, and Ethics for Anti-Colonial DH Praxis,” co-authored with Ashley Caranto Morford and Arun Jacob, Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, May 2021.
• “Dodgy Scholars: Resisting the Neoliberal Academy” with Blu Buchanan, Public Scholarship, Place, and Proximity, PUBLIC: A Journal of Imagining America (Erica Kohl-Arenas and Robyn M. Rodriguez editors), Volume 5, Issue 1 (2018).

Edited Journal Issues:

• “The Liberatory Legacy of bell hooks: Pedagogies and Praxes that Heal and Disrupt” with Nikki Fragala Barnes, Summer L. Hamilton, Asma Neblett, Kush Patel, and Danica Savonick, Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (JITP) Issue 23 (December 2023). https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/projects/jitp-23
• “Pulling Closer: Caregiving as Method Part 1, Part 2,
  and Part 3” with Delia Duong Be Wendel, PLATFORM (November–December 2023). https://www.platformspace.net/

Book Chapters

• “Workshops in Anti-Colonial Digital Humanities: Towards Building Relationships with Critical University and Community Movements,” co-authored with Ashley Caranto Morford and Arun Jacob, Digital Humanities Workshops: Lessons Learned, edited by Laura Estill and Jennifer Guiliano, Routledge UK, February 2023, pp. 117-127.
• “Precarious Labor and Radical Care in Libraries,” co-authored with Anne Cong-Huyen, Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Science through Critical Race Theory, edited by Sofia Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight, The MIT Press, April 2021, pp. 263-282.
• “Queer Disclosures, Queer Refusals: Notes on Survival Praxis in Architecture and Academia,” Gender and Academic Leadership in Architecture in India, Research Symposium Proceedings edited by Kush Patel and Soumini Raja, Calicut: Avani Institute of Design, March 2021, pp. 119-129.

Books

• Anti-colonial Relations: Co-liberating Worlds in Digital Humanities Pedagogy and Praxis (eds. With Ashley Caranto Morford and Arun Jacob), punctum Books, USA (Under Contract).
• Gender and Academic Leadership in Architecture in India (ed. with Soumini Raja), Calicut: Avani Institute of Design, March 2021. ISBN: 978-93-5445-910-8.

Open Educational Resources

• “Anti-colonial Orientations for Digital Humanities Work: Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed Collective,” co-authored with Ashley Caranto Morford and Arun Jacob, Unit 1: Introduction to Social Justice in the Digital Humanities, #DariahTeach: Open Access Resources for the Digital Arts and Humanities (March 2024), https://teach.dariah.eu/

Public Writings and Digital Media

• “Care,” Teacher of the Ear Podcast, Hybrid Pedagogy Episode with Ashley Caranto Morford, Arun Jacob, and Chris Friend, November 2021: https://hybridpedagogy.org/care/
• “Instant Proceedings: Roundtable, Feminist Networks and Academic Leadership,” Gender and Academic Leadership in Architecture in India Symposium, edited by Madhavi Desai, Anuradha Chatterjee, and Kush Patel. Calicut: Avani Institute of Design, 2020.