SUNDAY ACTIVITIES
Join our graduate student–led urban walk through North Philadelphia, here participants will explore how communities shape, defend, and reimagine neighborhood open spaces.
Tour Details: Map
Duration: 1.5 hours
Distance: Approximately 3 miles
During the walk, we will visit several important community spaces, including: Live Do Grow Farm, founded by Urban Creators, Norris Square and Las Parcelas, stewarded by Xiente, Open Kitchen Sculpture Garden, and Cesar Iglesias Garden, a guerrilla garden initiated by local socialist organizers that centers Indigenous and Latino communities Along the route, we will observe Philadelphia’s varied strategies for open space management and examine the ongoing negotiations and tensions between City governance and community uses. We encourage participants to wear loose, comfortable clothing and comfortable walking shoes, and to bring water for the duration of the tour. This walk covers approximately 3 miles over some uneven or broken city sidewalks and neighborhood streets. We look forward to exploring North Philadelphia together.
(Organized by Sterling Johnson and Kelly Haggerty)
This affect theatre workshop will introduce theatrical vocabularies (movement, spatial relationship, light, sound, text, costume, etc.) as tools for relating to empirical material in more affective and embodied ways. Participants can expect to explore their research areas by moving their bodies, playing with objects that interest them, and trying out different ways of performing text from their research or fieldwork. It’s a good idea to dress comfortably and bring water. We will start with a simple physical warmup.
If you plan to attend this workshop, please put together approximately one page of some text from your research material. It can be from interview transcripts, field notes, newspaper articles, etc. Feel free to include any text that intrigues you—a poem, a passage from a novel, a theoretical text, or even a cookbook recipe. If you can print a hard copy, that’s great, but we will all take time together to copy the most compelling lines or phrases onto paper. Please add your page to this folder so that I can get a sense of what the room is interested in.
If possible and convenient, bring some objects. Generative objects are clothing/costume pieces, props, light sources, or any object that is directly related to your research. Bring in things that feel theatrical to you or interest you for whatever reason: color, shape, weight, texture, pattern, function. I will supply some things, and we won’t use everything, but the more choices we have to work with, the better. If the object is fragile or too special to be handled by other workshop participants, it can stay at home. I look forward to the discoveries we will make together, and I thank you for your courage and curiosity.
(Organized by: Caroline Heins (they/them) and Tyler Munn)
This retreat space is an invitation to stay with the ideas that moved you across the weekend, perhaps ideas or arguments that kept coming up or connections or questions you are still grappling with. We’ll begin with a short collective brainstorming exercise using the sticky notes distributed at check-in: each person is invited to bring one or two ideas from each or any their sessions that feel particularly alive or exciting, and together we’ll see what patterns have been gathering across rooms and conversations.
From there, we’ll use these emergent threads as a point of departure for collective thinking about a shared project: how do we write together across the lines that usually separate critical geography from bodies/health/environment scholarship? What would it mean to make the case that health and embodiment are not a subfield but a through-line across all of human geography? This will be a fun, informal drafting space. Come with your ideas, your work-in-progress, or simply your presence.