Landscape theorist, historian, and designer Alison Hirsch visits the Stuckeman School's spring Lecture and Exhibit Series to will present “Landscape and the Working Country” as a Department of Landscape Architecture Bracken Lecture in the Stuckeman Family Building Jury Space and via Zoom.
Immediately following her talk, Hirsch will open an exhibition of her work titled “The Other California: Land, loss, labor, liberated futures along phantom shores,” which will run in the Rouse Gallery until April 25.
Hirsch’s lecture will focus on the relations of the body and land or place. The talk will start with an overview of some 1960s activist design practices that have transformed conventional practice before evolving into a focused look at the manifold nature of physical work, both how the physical process of building together has been a vehicle for liberatory agendas and how labor on land has been exploited as a form of violence targeted at specific — i.e. racialized — bodies.
Hirsch will discuss how her activist design and pedagogical practice has used lessons learned from earlier activist practitioners to find avenues for justice, repair and liberation. As the director of the Landscape Architecture and Urbanism program at the University of Southern California, Hirsch established the Landscape Justice Initiative as a platform to address questions of environmental, spatial and climate justice at local and systemic scales.
Before joining the faculty at USC, Hirsch taught landscape architecture theory and design at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, University of Virginia and the University of Toronto. She was a recipient of the 2017-18 Prince Charitable Trusts/Rolland Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
Hirsch’s research areas include cultural landscapes, working landscapes, spatial politics of landscape architecture, contested landscapes, activist design methods and landscape's intersections with performance and choreography.