critical theories of place studies

This website is home to a public history and digital humanities project that employs the method of counter-storytelling called critical theories of place studies.

As a collection of reparatory histories, it connects personal spaces of activism to heritage conservation focused on human liberation. It draws on the intersections of virtue ethics, decolonial studies, and women’s, gender, Africana, and indigenous studies.

Our current work includes the digital humanities project:

Womanism, positivism, and the origins of decolonial feminism

is an exploration of the place-based philosophies of women and non-binary individuals of the long nineteenth century. It situates them within the storied places where they courageously challenged the colonial/ modern gender system, or the oppressive structures of Eurocentric global capitalism that for five-hundred years destroyed communities, their cosmologies, and the planet.

Each counterstory relays how protagonists created anti-positivist spaces across various knowledge-areas in ways that may inform place-based virtue ethics.

This project examines the ways in which counterstories prompt us to contemplate virtue ethics in teaching design history, theory, and heritage conservation, and how they may inform the creation of safe settlement patterns rooted in design justice.

The evolving design-research project includes a travelling installation, a zine collection, teaching materials, a collection of storymaps, a full-length monograph, and more.