This seminar explores the African archival imagination as a dynamic site of creative practice and critical intervention, moving beyond traditional conceptions of archives as bureaucratic repositories of colonial or state records to examine how diverse African societies generate, preserve, and reinterpret history through expansive artistic forms. Drawing on case studies from across the continent, students engage multisensory modes of knowledge production—from photography and fashion to speculative science fiction—considering how acts of meaning and making are grounded in rigorous historical research. The course reimagines the archive not as a static container of documents but as a cultural palimpsest, a layered terrain of memory in which visual and material culture function as living archival witnesses to collective experience. Through sustained practices of slow looking and deep listening, students approach creative genres as methodological tools for rethinking the archive amid imperial and neocolonial encounters. This Making + Meaning: HISTORY calls into question Eurocentric assumptions about time and space that shape our concepts of history, particularly in design history and cultural theory. In keeping with this framework, this seminar asks students to consider how temporal and spatial logics structure archival practice, historical narrative, and aesthetic production across African contexts. The seminar includes museum and gallery visits, guest speakers, and culminates in a multimedia research project. Students are encouraged to integrate knowledge from their studio and seminar experiences in this Making + Meaning course, synthesizing creative experimentation with historical inquiry.

Making + Meaning: Fashioning the Otherworld is a hands-on studio and seminar where students collaboratively create personae — not only through building backstories and narratives, but also by crafting masks, accessories, props, costumes, and performative gestures to build these worlds. This hybrid studio-seminar will explore the role of fashion and performance in forging alternative worlds, queering norms, and opening up spaces for otherness. Through textual analysis and hands-on practice, the course examines the political work at the intersections of costume, fashion, and performance through the eyes of artists and designers birthing new personas through the act of extreme self-fashioning, masquerade, dressing up, and renaming. This course brings together the research and resources of faculty working in fashion theory and contemporary art practice, whose work explores the grotesque, abject, and monstrous in contemporary art, performance, and fashion. Making+ Meaning: HISTORY calls into question our assumptions about time and space that form our concepts of history, in particular design history and cultural theory. We will ask what makes, and distinguishes, facts and values. We will imagine alternative futures and consider what it means to “make” our present. Concepts such as contingency, teleology, and progress will be introduced. The course places particular emphasis on imaginaries of time and space that not only make themselves felt in how history is told, but also affects how we encounter other histories. Students are encouraged to integrate the knowledge they acquire from their studio and seminar experiences in this Making + Meaning course.