Hunting Family Faculty Fellow
About
“Radical Vernacular”
Radical Vernacular is a transdisciplinary project that, in essence, probes the potential of vernacular forms to regulate our ever increasing energy consumption and dissipation in the service of climate change mitigation and social well-being. In our thermo-industrialized society such forms – be they linguistic, architectural, economic, ritualistic, or other marginalized knowledges – can be perceived as tactics of deceleration and emancipation from apparatuses of mass-standardization. They foreground local everyday use over excess productivity and symbolic accumulation. They also identify and enable realms of belonging, opening up questions of inclusion and site-specificity in an increasingly transient society. With this project, I explore whose agency is privileged by the efficiency of norms and standards, and who benefits from the resilience of singular variants by looking at practices of care, maintenance and mending, along with their respective modes of transmission and know-how. To curb the relentless incitement for innovation imposed by a logic of economic growth that is devastating our biological and cultural diversity, I focus on processes of exnovation that, far from being restrictive, offer an opulence of pleasures and creative engagements with life itself.
Mireille Roddier is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Women's & Gender Studies.
