Applied Theory

The Applied Theory initiative attempts to intervene on our understanding of Theory as a highly specialized and purely contemplative activity that remains separate from practice. Instead, the initiative takes inspiration from the pre-Socratic notion of theoria as a cultural journey that is both political and sacred. Exploring the various ways that theory shows up in the world, the Applied Theory initiative examines various forms of knowledge production and seeks to reconnect the theoretical humanities to the communities that they hope to serve. The initiative is particularly invested in experimenting with the ways in which theory is lived and embodied through a myriad of material practices (in activism, agriculture, art, craft, ritual, etc.) and thus circulates outside the formal spaces of the academy. 

Built-environment Institute for Applied Studies in Africa and the Middle East

BIAS-AME is a continuing education institute that focuses on the Built Environment in Africa and the Middle East. Moving away from siloed educational models, it aims to reorient the pedagogical approach towards an interdisciplinary learning model that addresses historic and precarious urban landscapes, climate change, and spatial justice. It provides participants with both theoretical tools and practical skills to engage with the diverse challenges of on-ground problems. This multi-model pedagogical system deploys critical thinking, applied education, networking, capacity building, and creative forms of partnerships with other entities and institutions.

EVENTS

May 2024

Seminar, “Ethics and Philosophy of Practice in the Built Environment” 

April - May 2023

Workshop I, “Problem Design: The Problem of Conservation” with Stacey Moran and Adam Nocek

January 30 - February 3, 2023

"Cities Lab"

November 4, 2022

Guest Lecture, “The (re)Design of Higher Education,” Stacey Moran, Helwan University, Faculty of Applied Arts

September - October 2022

Public Talk, “Designing & its Problems,” Stacey Moran and Adam Nocek

Designing the Pluriversity

This participatory research project is inspired by Arturo Escobar’s work on design as a practice that recognizes the interconnectedness of knowledge, institutions, and lived experience. Escobar’s approach highlights how design—whether of objects, tools, policies, or educational frameworks—actively shapes ways of thinking and being. We apply this to the institutional structures of the university: if the traditional “uni-versity” is historically rooted in a universal framework, then the “pluri-versity” is a less constrained approach to knowledge and inquiry. Rather than presupposing a one-size-fits-all model of knowledge, this initiative examines how universities can encourage engagement with a range of knowledge traditions, cultivate expansive approaches to knowledge production that support academic excellence, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and responsiveness to global challenges.

“Designing the Pluriversity” has invited a group of international artists, scholars, activists, and educators to submit provocations that facilitate conversation and collaboration toward designing a pluriversity. We invite you to respond in any form—writing, art, or action—experimenting with new ways of thinking and learning together. This project imagines the university differently—a world where many worlds fit. Submissions are accepted on an ongoing basis and will be collected on the “Designing the Pluriversity” website.  

RUMINATIONS

In Michel de Montaigne’s Essais, he contrasts two types of pedagogy using food metaphors. On the one hand, the didactic mode of teaching “is a sign of rawness and indigestion to disgorge food just as we swallowed it. The stomach has not done its work.” In the philosophical mode of pedagogy, on the other hand, one chews slowly, digests fully and thus “changes the condition and form of what has been given it to cook” (I.26.151/134). Only the philosophical mode of pedagogy, Montaigne muses, is capable of producing “sociable wisdom” which creates an alliance between body and soul. 

This philosophical mode promotes health, according to Montaigne, because it “recouples” body and soul. This is precisely what philosophy is for: theory cannot be “detached from lived experience.” Philosophy is neither a subject studied in the academy nor a genre of writing with technical jargon, nor even a procedure of argumentation. For Montaigne, philosophy is a virtue that dwells in the soul and makes the body healthy,  producing the effect of “tranquility and gladness” on the practitioner.  

 Ruminations takes inspiration from Montaigne’s understanding of pedagogy and philosophy. We are a research group, a collective that creates “exploratory journeys” and aims at “sociable wisdom.” Ruminations proposes to think about the practices of nourishing ourselves and each other. And we wonder: How are thinking and eating entangled in/as rumination? Can ruminations in all its senses be experienced as sociable wisdom? This is a reading group that is as much about the food as it is about reading, writing, conversing, and thinking. 

EPISTOLARY EPISTEMOLOGIES

“Epistolary Epistemologies” is a feminist collective writing project that draws on the epistolary tradition to generate creative and reflective practices of feminist critique in the digital era. Integrating arts research and humanities, the project aims to create what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten outline scholarship as “a kind of sociality” and “activity of rehearsal,” that draws attention to the ways in which personal letter-writing is “already intellectual,” and needs no application to make it theoretical. This auto-theoretical practice explores how “the personal is theoretical.”