In this course, we will learn about and work through practices of making as part of social and political movements. This will include examining historical and contemporary examples of visual culture, organizational forms, and systems and services created through movements to meet the needs and enact the visions of the people who build them. Through reading, viewing, listening, and practice, the class will engage with the contexts and histories of political movements for freedom to design and make printed work and / or infrastructural proposals. Class time will be divided between discussions of readings and other references, field trips to archives and exhibitions, and learning to make simple bindings and set and print type. Larger conceptual questions that underpin our work will include: How can we draw on and learn from histories of political expression and infrastructure-building to imagine contemporary possibilities of this work?, What does it mean to make politically- or socially-engaged infrastructures and materials to mobilize and support people?, What is the relationship of printed material to sharing information and organizing in digital times? 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.

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.