About the Course
New York City has historically drawn those figures and incubated those fancies that simply don’t fit anywhere else. This inaugural offering from METRO’s Cross-Reference Coalition celebrates our geographic anomalies, pushes against automation’s flattening fakery, and addresses the erasure of difference and the prioritization of profitable utility in our current political climate, by examining and appreciating The Misfit.
We’ll explore collection items that simply won’t fit on shelves or in boxes, objects and identities that defy classification, storage formats that condense and compress (as well as the things that leak outside!), and institutions that deliberately defy professional standards. We’ll engage with texts from archival studies, art history, and anthropology to media studies, material science, and electrical engineering. We’ll visit virtuoso boxmakers and imagine speculative deaccessioning policies and unpack compression protocols and, ultimately, work together to create a patchworked and prismatic publication of mutualistic mis-fit parts.
Goals
- To validate, celebrate, and critically examine the misfit (n) as an entity — and misfit (v) as a strategy — at a time when compliance and standardization are ever-more forcefully imposed; and when difference is commonly feared, pathologized, and eradicated by decree
- To appreciate how knowledge institutions* — organizations dependent upon ordering infrastructures — have grappled with noncompliant things, people, and ideas; and to imagine how they could more constructively, boldly, and creatively do so
- To highlight the wealth and variety of knowledge institutions in our metropolitan region — and to demonstrate how New York City can serve as a national and global beacon, an embodiment of the vital importance of trusted public knowledge, of robust investment in cultural institutions, and of mutual aid, solidarity, and coalition-building
- To juxtapose (or cross-reference!) institutions, collections, and ideas — and explore their prismatic refractions
- To discover what new knowledges and creative practices might emerge through integrative thinking and interdisciplinary, inter-institutional collaboration
- To seek commonalities and complementarities — from the individual to the institutional scale — and to build foundations for future partnerships
- To experiment with more humane, creative, principled, and generative models of “making knowledge public” – from idea-germination, through peer review, through the fabrication and distribution of a material artifact or experience
*How are we defining knowledge institutions? Capaciously, in true cross-referenced fashion! Let’s think about what the entire GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums), the education sector, and other civic institutions — the post office! public housing! — could do together.
Our Publication
One of our goals for this class is create a publication that embodies or activates “misfit” as a method, a citation protocol*, an aesthetic, a materiality, a placement, an epistemology, etc — and that constitutes a mutualistic set of misfit parts. [*how do we, as misfits, situate ourselves within a network of reference, an ethos of acknowledgment?]
About the Cohort
We’ve got a fantastic cohort for this first class: 17 participants representing a range of organizations: the After Violence Project, the Brooklyn Public Library, the CUNY Grad Center, the New York City College of Technology, the New York City Department of Records, the New York City Department of Transportation, New York City Public Schools, New York University, the Parsons School of Design, Poets House, the Pratt Institute, the Prime Produce Apprentice Cooperative, the Queens Public Library, and a range of arts and design organizations.
About the Syllabus
I make every effort to map out the entire semester before the “semester” begins, so we all know what we’re in for. Yet we might need to make a few small alterations to our schedule: we might host a guest who’s passing through town, I might seek your input on texts or activities that better speak to your needs and interests, I might decide to cut a couple of our readings or substitute new material that’s published over the course of the semester, etc. Any changes will be noted, with plenty of advance notice, on our class website. And any revisions will only maintain or decrease, never increase, your workload!
If you’re accustomed to syllabi that consist of little more than a weekly schedule and a list of readings, our website might look a bit – or a lot! – intimidating. Fear not! Most of what you see here is my attempt to provide context and intellectual framing! I explain why I’ve chosen particular texts, and what I hope you’ll gain from reading, watching, or listening to them. I offer tips regarding what to focus on. I pose questions that I hope you’ll keep in mind as you engage. In short, the voluminous text you’ll see under each bullet point is intended to serve as a friendly guide to your weekly preparations. It’ll ideally make your reading more directed and meaningful.
What’s more: I try to assemble lists of varying lengths, intensities, and formats. You won’t be reading four dense academic articles in a single week. On occasion, I’ll encourage you simply to skim or browse or “check out” some resources; in those cases, I mostly want you to know those resources exist, and to appreciate the breadth of what they have to offer so you can potentially return to them later. I’m hoping these materials prove useful for your own research – or inspire a new interest, or introduce you to some cool new stuff, or connect you to a new community! Sometimes, rather than assigning a whole book, I invite you to read a review or an interview with the author. And I occasionally recommend videos or podcasts in lieu of written texts. I invite you to walk or lie on your chaise lounge or sit in a park or ride your Peloton or row a boat while you watch and listen to these materials.
Finally, you don’t have to read any of this stuff. Nobody’s tracking you! Yet I did choose these texts because I find them informative and provocative and exciting — and I think that, collectively, they’ll help us cultivate a prismatic view of each week’s theme. They’ll also prepare us to be engaged, generous guests and hosts to the folks who have kindly agreed to join us each week — and to be intellectually accountable to one another.
