Spotlights and testimonials from students who have graduated from the Centre for Research Architecture. Before coming to Goldsmiths, I was working in Washington, D. It was during this time that I saw the devastating effects of climate change on American communities and the continued environmental injustices of capitalist extraction. Wanting to expand my practice into research, writing, and spatial analysis to dive further into these issues, I joined the CRA after reading about the course in the Guardian.
While my start was delayed due to Covid, the wait was worth it to have classes in person as I found the communal learning environment and peer discussions to be the most enriching aspect of the program. The course was split between spatial theory and studio Research Architecture , creating a balance between research and practice.
Through roundtable reviews, live investigations, work in progress presentations, and technical workshops, I learned methodologies, theoretical frameworks, and spatial understandings that coalesced in my dissertation research. My dissertation focused on biological patents and how they reshaped the landscape of American agriculture. Biological patents are a form of paperwork that permit the possession of living organisms through proprietary modes of abstraction.
This research looked to understand how paperwork abstracts our world and reasons ownership, including biological entities like the food we eat and the plants we tend.
With my deep knowledge of American federal governance, I started in Congress, where policy, made concrete through paperwork, opened the door to biological ownership. Our first case, Wild Hedges, studies the ecological and socio-political complexities of the prickly pear cactus and the cochineal insect across multiple geographies, communities and temporalities, and collectively experiments with the material possibilities of the cactusβin building, weaving and cookingβand of the cochinealβin dye-making and printingβin order to cultivate practices of care around changes in our environments.
