Description:

For the last four decades, there has been an increasing interest by scientists and scholars in Indigenous knowledges. The Indigenous worldviews offer a new ecological ethic, which carries a heightened standard of care for all living things. The timing coincides with debates surrounding dominant models of practice, from architecture to ecology. The moment has been called the Transition Imaginary. The mobilizers are called transition activists, whose role it is, to question the structures of unsustainability that maintain the dominant ontology of devastation (Escobar, 2017). Transition activists are creating alternative models of practice that are collaborative, plural, participatory and distributed, and build on the interconnectedness of all life. This talk will introduce a few new methods to build our connection with place, increase our appreciation of the uniqueness of place, reduce the layers between our bodies and the earth, and inspire concepts of interactive responsibility.

About the speaker:

Wanda Dalla Costa, AIA, FRAIC, LEED A.P. is a member of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation. Her firm, Tawaw Architecture Collective has offices in both Phoenix and Calgary. At Arizona State University, she is the director and founder of the Indigenous Design Collaborative. Her teaching and research are focused on Indigenous ways of knowing, co-design methodologies, and the resiliency of vernacular architectures. Dalla Costa received an Honorary Doctorate in 2023 from Athabasca University. In 2022, she was also recognized as an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Architecture Institute of Canada, and in 2019, she was recognized as a YBCA 100 recipient by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, a list whichcelebrates people, organizations, and movements shifting culture through ideas, their art, and their activism.