Shumi Bose: Words relating to theory.

Education and receptive encounters

0:00Hello. Existence precedes essence, as Sartre probably almost said. Being before doing. Identity before action. This has been, really, the heart of education. In a school, which, as Joseph Pieper so persuasively argued, is etymologically rooted in the concept of leisure, we make space for becoming through setting our minds to receptive encounter with the stuff of the world, creating syllabus and courses of knowledge that encourage the discovery of self and other. It isn't really meant to be about just skills acquisition, beyond the role skills play in ongoing self-actualization.

0:30Through theoretical endeavor, framing the work of design through words, we acquire critical distance from the world, and ourselves, the better to imagine it anew, and maybe even better.

Introducing Shumi Bose

0:41In this episode of the A's for Architecture podcast, I spoke to Shumi Bose about her work as a curator, chief editor of KUSARC, senior lecturer in architecture at Central St. Martin's in London, and, I'd suggest, something like an activist not activist. Speaking here, Shumi makes a clear case for the role of critical distance as she has found it, and, I'd suggest, used it in her various roles and projects. We speak about Shumi's journey to architectural teaching and thought, her various initiatives in support of diversified knowledges and justice, and the spaces we can make to model integrity in our work. If you can, please support the A's for Architecture podcast via the Patreon or buy me a coffee links in the podcast description, where you will also find links to Shumi online.

1:23A's for Architecture, a podcast about architecture, buildings, urban culture and space. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the A's for Architecture podcast. I'm delighted today to be talking to Shumi Bose, not architect, architect, teacher, writer, activist, founder of many things, curator. Shumi, thank you so much for coming on. We're not talking about a book, and we're not talking about a project. We're talking about education. We're talking about ideas. Yeah. Thank you so much, Averis, for having me on, and for that very kind introduction.

1:55I was just grinning at the sort of number of titles you gave me, and I'm always at pains to describe what it is that I am, but perhaps all of those, that's one of them exactly. But yeah, absolutely pleased to be on here, and I suppose without a book or a project to point to, the medium, I suppose, that we'll be talking about is words, whether they're spoken or written or read. Or on placards.

Finding a path without designing buildings

2:28So, what's your background? How did you get to this position? So, you teach at Central St. Martins, you teach at the Architectural Association, and other places. Yes, that's right. It's a kind of roster. So, I teach, I do lots of things. Not so much that I'm a ground for hire. That used to be the case when I was younger, and figuring out how to be in the architecture world without designing buildings. So, for various reasons that I work out with my therapy, for various reasons, I had sort of fear of God when it came to imagining that something I might design would exist.

3:06So, that particular mode of authorship wasn't something that I wanted, but I knew that I wanted to understand the consequences of that. So, I don't know, this is definitely going to age me for your readers, but when I was at college, my nickname from, I think it was an affectionate nickname from one of my tutors was Alistair Campbell. Who, if you don't know, who, if you don't know, was a spin doctor in the UK Parliament, but would kind of make the story around whatever policy had been decided.

3:44And that was because I was surrounded with fantastically talented people. I studied at Central St. Martin's on a course that is now the architecture course, but at the time was a sort of multidisciplinary, end of the 90s moment of optimism. I was surrounded by fantastically talented people. And while I was, let's say, afraid to put my own designs forward, what I really enjoyed doing was trying to interpret what was going on with other people's work.

4:17So, I'd be there in crit saying, but maybe what they're trying to do is this, and it reminds me of that, hence the spin doctor thing. So, I was always interested in trying to understand why things happened and so what, right? I remember in the early days of blogging, I think my blog page was called Answer What, because it was about the consequence of what happened.

Growing up in Calcutta and Derbyshire

4:42I grew up in Calcutta with the sort of legacy of empire around me, lots of crumbling British buildings from when Calcutta was the seat of the British Raj. So, there are lots of questions to ask. Why is that building here? Why does it look like this? And why is it crumbling? And why are there air-conditioned malls coming up? And why is this part of town more expensive to live in than that one, even though that one's more beautiful? Why does this community live here and not there? All sorts of questions to ask of the place that I was growing up in.

5:22We moved from Calcutta to Derbyshire when I was a child. Which part? Chesterfield. Amazing. That's where my first daughter was born. Oh, you're joking. So many connections.

5:35Yes, home to the Crooked Spire, but not an awful lot else. And certainly coming from, well, that's unfair, but coming from Calcutta, it was a very quiet and different environment. So, again, all sorts of questions now to ask of myself. What am I doing here? Can I survive here? What can I hold on to here? So, I think it's through this questioning of context. What's around me and how I might relate to it, I think, is the thread.

6:07Not that it's always been personal, but, for instance, you know, Chesterfield, the town that I was transplanted to after Calcutta is a Roman town. How much of that can I see? What's this new, very postmodern precinct doing? I mean, I remember I used to catch the train from Chesterfield to Sheffield to get copies of Blueprint at the time. Deanne Sajic was editing, and Deanne Sajic had a sort of punky history and was connected to Oz magazine.

6:43I think I wanted to be a hippie when I was a teenager, so I found this connection very fascinating of counterculture and architectural or design thinking. So, I don't think I've ever made that connection before, but the possibility of thinking about stuff, space and stuff, in a way that was critically reflective, was sort of inherently important because of the way that I was moved around.

7:15And then, yeah, at college, it was about making sense of other people's work. So, again, more of a sort of critical contextual act. I realized very quickly after I graduated that my job application came from my bookshelf. I looked on my bookshelf. I looked at the publishers that I thought were making things that I was buying or coveting and wrote to them and said, how do I help you do your thing? This was at a time when people interned for free, which I did, which I really, that's a position of privilege that I wouldn't advocate any employer kind of perpetuate now.

7:59It's not fair to ask people to work for free, least of all students or young people who are trying to make their way. Nonetheless, that is what I did alongside my studies. So, I was working in magazines, journals, book publishers, always thinking and talking about architecture rather than getting into the practice of making it. I think the first book I worked on editorially was the Collected Lectures of Alan Colune. So, immediately being thrown into a particularly ripe moment of architectural theory writing and I couldn't have, I felt so lucky.

8:39I was like, wow, I get to be in this world. I don't know if I just necessarily feel exactly the same now, but it was always about the whys and what thens rather than the how to make it happen. Sorry, that's a long answer. It's a lovely answer. Do you feel like as a, I don't know, emigre, is that right? Initially, you've kind of retained a sense of, because I can only imagine an Indian girl moving to Chesterfield feels at some level quite detached from that and can see it at distance.

9:18And that you've retained that sense of sort of self-othering now, like to look at architecture or look at the built environment effectively requires a sort of stepping away. Well, Ambrose, you think, I think this is like my, this is a free therapy session again. You're stepping in for my guy.

Double distancing and sense making

9:37Anyway, I haven't been, I think you're absolutely right. I haven't been fully disclosed in the fact that, in the fact that I was born in the UK. We moved to India when I was six and then we moved back, yeah, just after I turned six. And then we moved back for high school. So around about the time I was 12. So, so yes, the double distancing, then I would say, because when we moved to India again,

10:07to the former seat of the British Raj, my family and cousins, again, I hope affectionately, referred to me as British. And they'd say things like, your people destroyed our country and your people took the diamonds out of the Taj Mahal. And, you know, it's our jewels on the crown and things like this. And that was a very disorienting experience being in India saying, but I look like you. But this is a radio program, I should say. I'm a brown woman. And so this was a very displacing moment.

10:43I remember being a child thinking, okay, so where shall I live? Maybe over Russia, somewhere in the middle. No, seriously, I would look at the globe and try to think maybe that bit in the middle. Or I thought, and again, this is the innocent idiocy of children, or I thought Singapore, because it feels a bit Western and a bit Eastern. And that's how I felt. So without any knowledge of authoritarian politics, I thought that'll be where I'd fit.

11:16So yes, this double distance thing allowed me to, my inner monologue when I was in India was always explaining the context that I saw to my English primary school teacher, obviously in my mind. And I was always trying to make sense of, okay, so this is what's happening here. This is a rickshaw, et cetera, et cetera. And likewise, when I was in Derbyshire, I had an inner dialogue with a friend's family that I'd grown up with, and indeed my formative years, really the years that formed me as a human, saying, well, you know, these kids dress like that because they listen to that music.

11:56And they hang out in this bar because it feels like this, and this sort of sense-making from a certain distance is probably something that does, I don't know how consciously, but somehow does come into what I do. And maybe that's also about this insistence on working at a kind of critical distance in the sense that I loathe to get involved in the making of, but I'm happy to talk about, you know?

12:34I was thinking about theory, I'm often called on to explain to my students why, and I've been thinking about what this distance allows. Yes, both on an interpersonal, both on a personal level in terms of thinking about how I am situated towards a city or towards a discipline, but also in terms of the job that I do, which is not necessarily involved in the making of, but in the talking about or framing or presenting one.

13:15Do you think it's akin to the sort of character of the historian, in a way, this distancing? I love that phrase you used, sense-making from a certain distance, because obviously you teach history and theory. Do you feel like there's a kind of relationship, a propinquity there as well? To explain, I'm kind of writing a book at the moment on the London Docklands, and London Docklands under Margaret Thatcher's kind of regime. And all of the literature that I've encountered is embedded in the politics of that, but I'm not too young for that, just.

13:52And so I feel like I can stand back from it and actually look at it architecturally, spatially and thematically and theoretically, because I have no dog in that fight. I was born when she was elected, but that all washed over me as a kid. Do you feel like as a historian or a writer around the, heritage is a clumsy word, but you know, the history of architecture, you can retain that level of distancing as well?

History, memory, and critical distance

14:17Well, it's a funny thing, lots of things going around in my mind. I do remember Margaret Thatcher coming to my primary school in West Yorkshire. I must have been about four years old. And I remember her going to the hospital, the NHS hospital, when my dad worked. I don't think my dad was at pains to speak with her. He did end up working, though, with Tony Benn and Chesterfield later on. But, yeah, those old enough will read politics through that.

14:52But distance, it's on the one hand useful, as you say, one cannot have perspective about any distance. And that is something that we can come back to in terms of maybe talking about how decisions are made editorially. Who do you ask to talk about something? What distance do you want from an issue? On the other hand, I wouldn't want to emphasize too much the distance between theory and practice or politics and place, right?

15:24Because they are innately entangled. They're entangled before, during, and after the moment of production. And so I wouldn't necessarily... I don't know if I can stand by a statement like one always needs distance. I think that it helps, obviously. And one thing that I would say to any class that I'm talking to about history, it's fun with younger students, particularly with a diverse sort of language background,

16:00that the word for history and story in so many languages is the same. Obviously, Latin languages, storia and history are linked, but it's true in many different languages. Or you see that there are slight differences between the word for story and history. And that in itself is interesting to look at because it causes you to acknowledge that, of course, if somebody's writing a story about something, that's received information.

16:32And therefore, it depends if you want to scrutinize that distance. And again, whether you're talking about who wrote the Gospels or to what degree oral tradition then becomes written and how to make things, how things are passed through various cycles of validation and transformation.

16:56Scrutinizing that distance is maybe what's interesting to me. If that's an opinion, where does that come from? How is it kind of perceived? And how far is it actually from the actuality? I think that's what makes history such an interesting pursuit. Because it's not the past. We're not talking about the facts of the past. The past exists or did exist.

17:26But that's the sort of history is an act of relating to the past. Theory is an act of making sense of phenomena, right? So these are active things. Negotiating that distance and to what extent you want to scrutinize it, extend it, get closer to it, is an active pursuit. I think that's what makes it so fascinating. And perhaps, you know, to some people, not someone, not everybody, not everything has to be everybody's bag. You know, you find those history or theory papers that are about the spelling of a particular word in the correspondence of someone to someone.

18:06And you just think, who the fuck cares? But someone cares. And I love that somebody is allowed to care and scrutinize the difference between, you know, the spelling of a word in one sense and another and what it meant. I think it's a good world when one is allowed to sort of negotiate that distance on one's own terms. Because meaning can be found there and there is stuff to be shared. I just find I even feel romantic saying this because increasingly such pursuits, unless they can be placed on some kind of value metric that makes sense to other people, are not defensible.

18:52Yeah. I forgot what your question was, but a distance set me off. That's a good enough question. That's a good enough answer. We'll go with that. We'll go with that. I do like this. I always like to think of it as sort of luxuriating in language. And you see that there is a significant stream in architectural philosophy, not least through someone like Martin Heidegger, where a word or words become absolutely instrumental in the unpacking of a particular idea. So I was wondering about this, yeah, I was wondering about this kind of relationship to language and how you see the role of language and particularly in your case, the written word, although you speak publicly quite a lot.

19:33It's role within architectural production.

The role of the writer in architecture

19:37Like what is the role of the writer of architecture, both as the kind of historian, the kind of the communicator of the formal story, but also more broadly popularly in the sort of public discourse. Like what is the effect of the writer? And I guess I sort of ask this because it's the second stream of our previous communications, this active turning against the thinker architect within education and quite clearly within practice as well or the profession more generally.

20:12Yeah, it's obviously it's slightly a set up question in the sense that there's no like, no, no, no, it's fine. The best ones are because it opens up a sort of distance for us to navigate. But the value of writer is going to be a hard one to quantify, isn't it? And it's something that's certainly maybe it's easier to talk about the threats that it's under first before returning to the value. So I want to be also a stopped clock and be like, it's the economy, but if we're talking about economies in terms of attention, in terms of time, as well as money, the writer has a sort of strange position because who's reading, let alone who's writing?

21:01And so as you say, I teach history and theory at various schools.

21:09And like many tutors, I weep at the amount of AI that I'm reading now.

21:18While I feel increasingly sanguine about tutors who are now adopting AI as a means to give feedback, I understand the response. You know, if you're not reading real stuff, then I cannot describe to listeners who haven't been through this, the sort of pathos of writing thoughtful, humane feedback to what you know is a machine produced piece of text. The sort of futility of it is really existential. So I, I am, I am, I don't, I don't know if I can say troubled.

21:58Yeah, I am troubled, disquieted, unsure of the place of role in writing and text, certainly in architectural academia, because it doesn't seem to be something that's valued. And as we're talking about value, we're back to economy, the questions that I'm asked in the classes where I require writing to be of importance, whether that is students producing writing or reading writing, are increasingly kind of held up to expectations to do with employment.

22:35And how does this help me get a job? And although there are answers to that, that's not the, the sort of, that's not the bandwidth that I feel I signed up to. So again, we're back to a sort of existential problem. Yeah, I could say, look, you could go into architectural PR, you could go into script writing, you could go into, you know, going into computer game design, or increasingly producing virtual environments that need to be scripted, you could go into all sorts of these.

23:15Duration, as I am involved in involves a lot of writing.

23:20But that's not the point. The point isn't to be able to put a monetized value on reading and writing, or let's say how language can be useful or productive in that. It makes sense. So I think the metrics for how we determine what, how much writing is valued, or where indeed it's valued, are really hard to determine at the moment. On the other hand, you know, narrative, in terms of architectural narrative, whether that is something that is used to sell, as it often is, or used to evoke, as it always has been in fiction or in any kind of writing, really.

24:07I think there is more need for narrative, even commercially at the moment, people are seeking stories, explanations, propositions. And the ability to articulate yourself or articulate people on whose behalf you would like to work or whose struggle you would like to apply yourself to. It's important. Again, I find it hard to sort of put quantifiable measures on how and where this is sort of visible.

24:45Words are what we have in terms of, obviously, we're in the era of the image, perhaps. Perhaps we have been for a long time, and that sounds like some sort of just-come-out-of-the-ground Instagram is what has brought images to our mind. We've been in a sort of visual realm for quite a long time, through even preceding the 20th century, even.

25:15But clearly, the sort of speed of responding to and sharing images has become extremely dense, saturated.

Urbanization and the power of images

25:30Again, I'm sure I don't need to explain to listeners. I was thinking about Georg Simmel's The Metropolis Mental Life. Is that what it's called? Something like that, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. And I think perhaps it corresponds to urbanization, like urbanization being a very alienating experience in some specific way. You know, following his argument, you start having to mark your identity through signifiers so that you can find your tribe within the amorphous urban realm.

26:05And so all of a sudden, the image becomes extraordinarily potent. And it kind of goes back to what you were saying about, you know, thinking about how young people identify themselves or even, you know, like how you can read public space and people within public space. We've all essentially, like everybody in Britain is essentially urban. We all live an urban life. There's no difference between someone living in rural Scotland and someone living in central London. They all get Deliveroo. They all have Amazon Prime. They all, you know, have Ikea beds.

26:35They all paint their houses and magnolia paint from Dulux or Leyland or whatever. You know, like every aspect of our lives has become very urbanized. And so as a consequence, we have to find this, these devices for communicating within that homogeneity. Yeah, I think that's right. I think the atomization and individualization of culture and capital too, and the sort of creation of the self that has been so intense over the last century has also given rise to this.

27:09Because the thing about images is, the image is the image. It's only when you talk about it or try to sort of extrapolate from the image that something else happens. But I'm thinking of the way the word curate is used, moving into one of my other hats. One curates a number of images now to sort of speak of the self rather than words.

27:42I think if I asked my students, write me a paragraph about who you are or choose four pictures that tell me who you are, the communicative medium that many of them will choose will be images. Perhaps because they're more ambiguous, perhaps because more can be read, perhaps because people are more scared to articulate things. Certainly this is something I see as perhaps a result of other forms of communication and the consequences of communication. But yeah, it's another language.

28:16One kind of has to acknowledge that, but it's different to the one of words. And I'm not really sure what I'm saying here, but just to say that it's harder to make arguments for insisting on language nowadays. That being said, okay, maybe time to introduce. Although I studied critical theory and all of the stuff that perhaps was more present in syllabi when I was a student.

28:48And I don't teach an awful lot of critical theory. I don't insist that my students read stuff that makes them feel stupid. At the same time, I'm not here to stop anybody from reading anything. It's just that theory and particularly the language of theory can be prohibitive. It can be extremely internally referential. It can be inaccessible.

29:21And so there are instances where language obviously can be a barrier, not only because of its quality, but because of its sort of, or because of its dialect, but because of its nature, or it's a particular kind of argo that is used in a field. So this is another area where language becomes very critical.

Oral history and accessible language

29:45And that's one of the reasons why a lot of my practice is conversational, acknowledging colloquial stuff. And a lot of history that I read and that I love to read is oral history or listened to, which is an area that I think is going to be and is now receiving more attention and acknowledgement. One thing that has gained in currency in the last couple of decades is a question of authenticity.

30:18And again, perhaps this goes back to distance.

30:22One wants to hear the voices of the people, a certain proximity to events does deny to kind of authenticity. And so oral history, as opposed to very schooled, let's say the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and the sort of Marxist psychoanalyst way of looking at history. While I wouldn't want to announce that a lot of fun and continue to have a lot of fun swimming in those waters, it is a language that many find prohibitive.

30:54Whereas asking your grandmother what it was like on the street that no longer exists, what she grew up on, is something that one can relate to and feel is not less valuable because of that authenticity.

31:09So I think my, let me give a shout out to Tony Parsons, maybe one of my favorite oral historians, but many, many others, particularly people who are writing in contexts that are not Western or not European. So oral histories from my part of the world, in the Eastern part of India and Bengal, oral histories from many other parts of the world, Brazil, American pioneer history,

31:44all of this stuff is told in language that is not schooled. Or maybe if it does suggest certain tribes or certain sort of enclosures, that's the point. The point is to get into those and they are somewhat more inviting, perhaps because of their authenticity, proximity to events and lack of posture in a way.

32:16So I'm keen to, I'm not against jargon per se. I think there is, there is joy to be had in, let's say, a certain grade of academic discourse. But to privilege that over accessible language is not something I've ever been able to do. I don't have a PhD. I could speak in that language for five years and get one.

32:49Perhaps I should, because my career is willfully stalled because of that. But it's more fun to have conversations with people. And I'm certainly, I'm more fascinated in oral history. That didn't really seem like an area for PhD work some time ago. It might be now, but I really do see it now as a sort of validating thing. One does a PhD to prove that what can operate in a certain stream, a certain language,

33:22a certain mode of talking or writing. And we can talk and write and think about all of those things, just not in that language and not get a PhD. Yeah. Again, it feels like I'm attacking the PhD system. I'm not. I am somewhat hurt by what's happened to academia and the educational institution in the UK, but across the board. But that doesn't mean it. I'm not trying to devalue what PhDs are.

33:53I should probably have pursued one at some point. But it's been more fun to talk to my students. It's been more fun to talk to people. It's been more fun to talk to exhibition visitors and not operate in that specific language that I would be required to. But it's really important thing to kind of, for academics and people within university, but also architects to kind of get their head around, is that the thing you're articulating, although within academia it's seen as being a marginal practice, oral history and non-traditional

34:25approaches to, say, for example, doctoral studies, actually it's the norm, just not for us. And I think that the interesting thing about the gatekeeping that academic language does is it keeps us in. And so it becomes more and more difficult for us to actually speak across the great divide. And this is very true of architectural writing, where we have actually manufactured the fence that holds us in, which is very frustrating. But I wanted to come to this idea, like, if we've managed, and if in your work you seek to some degree to kind of dethrone the written, the preferencing of the written word, or the

35:00privileging of the written word, how does the spoken word, the oral history, generate knowledge? How does this open conversation create knowledge? And maybe you can talk a little bit about Kuzark. Well, first thing to say is that I wouldn't want to dethrone the written language. That's not an agenda that I would hold. I think I've been trying to justify my own disenfranchisement with academia by sort of

35:33semi-consciously finding other ways. But one of the reasons why, for instance, I can't commission too much writing is because I don't have the funds to pay for it. And writing is hard work, as you know, and deserves remuneration, deserves support. I cannot and will not commission things that I can't pay for. And I can't really tell when my students do ask,

36:05can I make a living from this? I can't promise that. So that also feeds into why one needs to find other ways to, I'm not going to ask an architect or a PhD student to write me a 4,000 word essay if I can't remunerate them for their time. And in the editorial landscape that I operate in, I can't remunerate them for their time. So that's one reason why, at least in that role, conversations are preferred.

36:37And I was speaking about this last night, actually, to New Architecture Writers, which is a program that supports writing in its many formats for writers of color. Yeah, we were talking about precisely this.

36:59Your question was, how does this produce knowledge? How does this form of, well, I think it invites knowledge from many other sources. I think that's, that's one thing to say, that if one is only drawing from the pool of what is considered archival material, for instance, or what is considered valid reference material, and there are all sorts of weights and loads in those words, archival and, you know,

37:35relevant, academically valid source material, those heavy words. One is obviously closed off to many other forms of knowledge, production, and many other actors. So, orality is one way that seeks to be more inclusive, I think, of the voices that are able to participate. And therefore, I suppose, it also allows for participation of other audiences, too.

38:11So, not only people who would be involved in a direct conversation intended to produce oral history, but those who are listening, perhaps if that language is, or if the speakers are from broader fields, perhaps that also generates a broader conversation with more people. Does that make sense? For instance, in the Space Between podcast, which is the Cousin's own podcast,

38:42what's fun is the matchmaking process between people who haven't met people, usually from quite distinct disciplines?

38:55Talking across those things is what generates different forms of, I hate to use this overly scholarly, like, juxtaposition. It generates different sort of images, it generates different audiences, people are listening to that thing from different reasons. And so, you know, you might bring a scientific community and a literary community together because you have an ecologist and a poet speaking about nature. And there's a joy to that, a real possibility for different ways of thinking about things,

39:33or synergies between people. I don't know that there's a deeper agenda than that, than being able to bring people together to share what they do and what they care about. That's a pretty deep agenda. I don't think there is a deeper agenda to human existence, is it? I mean, than connection and sharing? Well, quite. But again, one can't necessarily put a metric on it. I can't tell you which of our podcasts perform, like, and I'm glad that maybe there are analytics

40:08that could say, you know what, when it's this amount of diagonal, that's when it performs best or when it's this. The point is that, yes, it's for the joy of, I'm sorry to use this word, well, maybe I shouldn't be, I'm sorry to use this word three or four times in this podcast, but maybe it's a symptom of getting a bit older or being somewhat jaded, but the form of success or agenda that I have is not more than that. Yeah. Yeah. In the world of podcasting, you get used to that quite quickly,

40:41realising that producing a podcast that's not about sex or murder, probably, but you're not going to get a million listeners. I mean, what sort of knowledge is this producing? Who knows? I don't. Maybe it's just empathetic sort of knowledge, if that counts. What metric does that count on, where somebody listens and thinks, ah, yeah, I know what that feels like, but that is a form of something, no? Like, perhaps this is a moment of indulgence when there are millions of hours

41:12of people talking to each other. What forms of knowledge that will produce about our species and race in the future, whether it will all just be destroyed in a nanosecond? We don't know. But there is joy to be had in doing it, right? And I'm glad it can't be put on a metric. You mentioned Kuzak. You also have hold space as well. And these seem to be about cultivating a discourse outwith the academy. So we've talked about sort of critically engaging with the methods and their processes of academic

41:48discourse and positions of sort of formal historiography and theory and the possibilities of alternatives within that that not reveal because that's instrumentalizing and not permit, but give space to other impressions, other voices. I think it comes back to a kind of interesting discourse around the difference between history and memory and the way that memory and experience, lived experience, to use that, awful.

42:17I mean, what other kind of experience is that? Anyway, I mean, maybe in the afterlife there, you'll be like, I got it now. There's non-lived experience. I quite like this idea that you're setting up these spaces and frameworks for knowledge creation, discourse, sharing, fellowship, encounter, and various other words outside the academy. Is the idea here in some way to supplant the academy? Is the academy exhausted in its current form?

42:51Is that an inherent exhaustion? Is it just having a moment because it's been taken over by bad actors?

Creating spaces outside the academy

42:57Well, I'll say that I don't think the intention of either Hold Space or Kuzak is to supplant or replace the academy. First of all, I think maybe I should say Kuzak isn't my project alone. It was founded by my colleague Federica Zambaletti with her previous colleague George Kuh. And I believe it was set up as a platform primarily for student work and thinking because both the founders were students or recent graduates at the time.

43:34And they found that there was no platform that would accommodate the level of sheer mental activity and production that student work entails, which is a lot. And so that's where it was initially set up. And indeed, I joined after various incidences of having fingers burnt in other editorial enterprises. So I was a co-founder of RealReview, but then was not a part of it after it began operations.

44:12And one of the reasons I took on Kuzak is because perhaps like the intentions with RealReview, it doesn't have a commercial agenda in that we don't really carry advertisements. That's not how it operates and it's not, of course, one does want to be able to pay employees, but it's not entirely profit motivated. We don't need to get clicks. We can take time and we can think about who we give space to.

44:47And so that freedom of agenda is something that is possible in Kuzak, which perhaps isn't in other B2B journals that I've worked for. And I've worked for a lot in the Architectural Review, the Architect's Newspaper in New York, the AJ Blueprint. I have kind of done the rounds. And also more art journals I used to work after all, which is supported by various educational contexts. And that's a peer-reviewed journal. It's a whole different process.

45:19And so Kuzak is not meant to supplant the academy. It is the space that Kuzak takes up is perhaps framed by the fact that commercial architectural publishing sits over here and academic publishing sits over there. And there are some spaces, there's some gaps to operate in outside of those enclosures rather than to replace or even cause fractures.

45:51And then that's not necessarily the point. Whole space, on the other hand, was much more of a survival instinct for me. That one is something that I founded. And one of the reasons, I guess, that it's so sporadic and mostly underground is that it is just me. And I find it difficult to inhabit a sort of main character energy.

46:22So there's a lot of stuff that happens that I don't put out, especially if it's mostly me. But it came from a combination of having worked in academia and publishing for a long time. And it was in 2020. It was late summer 2020. So we'd been through the largest academic strikes that this country's seen in the last 75 years, where a number of university lecturers and teaching staff were on strike for months due to labour conditions, due to things that we've alluded to in terms of what's happening to education, racial pay gaps, all sorts of reasons why those strikes were happening.

47:11And that was a really big moment for me because it helped me to realise that a lot of the problems that I had in academia were structural and not because I'm crap. Always nice to work that out. It takes years and it's a persistent malaise.

47:32I can't say that I'm killed. Nor do I know anybody who is, at least not people who are doing what I do. I don't know about people who are in management.

47:46But so that was a very, it was a very important moment, joining the union, being part of those strikes, realising that the problem was not mine, but structural. And thereby also realising that the problem isn't academia. It's not like education isn't bad. No, the chance to talk about architectural history or theory or whatever, the chance even to teach someone rhino isn't inherently bad, just like capitalism inherently bad.

48:21But it's when, it's when there are certain structures around things that are so, I can't even get into it in the minutes that we have, but the educational system. Let's talk about it the way that I do with my first years. You're here so you can earn more money than the person who isn't here, right? Let's just get that clear.

48:46And so there is a sort of violence inherent in that act, in that statement. And increasingly, the educational institution has leaned more and more towards that violence of saying that this is a machine to put you in a better financial position. And anything that isn't in the service of that can fuck off, really.

49:14But teaching itself, the act of knowledge transfer, isn't the bad thing. So I sound conflicted. I don't think I feel that conflicted about it. There's certain institutional structures that make university education or the academy, as we call it, its enclosed and problematic itself. But the act of teaching, the act of knowledge transfer, it's inherently bad. And I love teaching. I wouldn't want to kill the academy because it gets me in a room with people who want to talk about the things that I love.

49:49And I do think, I think I can speak to my students when I say that they are transformed by the experience of thinking and talking about things together. So one has to be careful when there's pointing fingers at the academy. I don't want to take the whole fucking thing down. There are some things that I do. On the other hand, to your point, there are other spaces where teaching can happen, where conversations can happen, where seminars can happen, and that lectures can happen, where any of these formats that are said to be academic, where not only they can happen, but they should happen on a civic level, on a social level, on an intergenerational level.

50:29So finding opportunities outside of the academy became, again, existentially important in 2020. Not only, of course, in the face of the academic strikes of 2019, but also the murder of George Floyd, also the technocratic term that education took under COVID-19. All sorts of reasons made it so unbearable, but I initially was trying to grab a website and Instagram, so pathetic, no, as just as somewhere to say something.

51:10Being alone in 2020 and weeping through meetings about racial prejudice and police violence and what was happening to college. Just like the whole time. I think I was trying to buy a domain and call it like holding page. I think I was trying to get a holding page or a holding name on it because I just, I was so emotional after a particular meeting to do with labor and race.

51:41I threw my laptop across the room. It survived. I later picked it up and tried to set up an Instagram account that would be a place for my personal survival where I could talk about things that were not part of the agenda of the academy and that were not even part of any kind of anything. It was just a survival space. I later ended up finding out that holding space is a thing, a sort of counseling term and one like hold space for people in conversations.

52:18I swear I was not aiming for that. I just, for obvious reasons, couldn't find a web domain that was a holding page. But I just, I really just wanted a space to contain my anger and my upset. And then, you know, so the public tagline was stuff that doesn't fit in academia. I felt that in many ways I couldn't fit in academia.

52:50The private tagline for me was work that doesn't piss me off. And so a lot of stuff that happened in 2020 was reaching out to students, asking them what they want to do. Some students simply wanted to read a chapter of a book they couldn't afford with me. And through my work as a curator and an editor, there are lots of people that I know, people my age, people are also sitting around. So oftentimes we're able to do things like, oh, well, let's read this chapter of this book and I'll just call, for example, Sekou Cook, who's just published the book Black Architecture with, Black Architect, I'm sorry, with Park Books.

53:31His first book, Hip Hop Architecture, was something that not all my students couldn't necessarily find or afford. I didn't want them to do that. So we read a chapter of it together because I have the book and I told Sekou about it and he joined us. And because it was so intimate, that's not something I've put out as a video. It's not to sell or anything. And I don't take any kind of Marxist, martyrish pleasure in saying that.

54:03It's just not how it happened. But it was nice to have a place to be able to respond quite intimately with and kind of have a space to do that. I know that if I had proposed to any of the institutions that I work for, can we bring Sekou over? I'm sure there would have been, especially at that moment in 2020, there would have been, you know, some. Oh, yes, we should do that. But it would have taken six months and people making a lot of noise about where we find that budget from, what gets cut.

54:37And it just would have been a drag. Whereas this was just an ability to put some students in a room where not only I could give them time, which I'm structurally not allowed to do at college. I structurally have to teach a group of 110 students. I can't sit with 10. Yeah. And talk about stuff. So it was really just a conduit to be able to do work that was fulfilling, but didn't necessarily, that I can't make space for in my institutional or any professional roles.

55:11Not to supplant, but as a sort of oxygenation, if that makes sense. That's a nice way of putting it. I want to finish on one last question.

Activism and principle in the classroom

55:21We talked before we started about your work with Architects for Gaza. And your work crosses over both, I think, your scholarship, your teaching, clearly, your curation, your general practice. With protest, broadly speaking, but activism, I guess, protest probably is quite, actually not broadly speaking, is narrowly speaking, activism more generally. Can you speak to that role that you have and the way, I guess, your written word, your language performs in that space?

55:52What is it doing? And I guess, clear enough, why you feel there is need for it? Because, as you say, the structural forms and the violence that exists within our implicitly and actively within the system is worthy of challenging. But like, how does it operate? And this is a rather instrumentalizing question again. Is it effective? Okay, yeah, tough questions. I don't think I've, it's a question I've asked before.

56:24It's not a question I've been asked, so that's always fun. I don't think I've ever categorized myself as an activist. I don't know why. I think perhaps the posture or the claim to putting my energies to that in any kind of dedicated way would feel like an overreach. But there's a, I suppose, intentionality ought to be acknowledged. And certainly, look, my intention is to feel all right in the years that I have on the planet.

57:00That's, again, a hard one. Taken many years to understand that my intention is to feel okay as long as I'm alive. And that involves other kinds of intentions, right, in terms of where you are positioned and who you stand with and who stands with you and so on. I don't think I've thought more consciously about activism. I was thinking about this the other day.

57:30I don't remember the context in a conversation about labor, obviously. But I did see my teachers go on strike when I was about 13 or 14. And I didn't think about that for years. But it was, it probably had some effect because at that moment of time in life, you start to understand. And, of course, I grew up in West Bengal, which was very historically, in a way, up until a few months ago, was always a very red area in terms of its politics. And you'd often see the working class protesting their rights.

58:07And given the context that I grew up in, the political context and culture that I grew up in, that was something to appreciate. So those people who are waving flags and stopping buses, I didn't really associate myself with that. But I think probably even as late as 2020, I did have to gradually acknowledge that optics are a thing. I don't think I realized that.

58:38Sorry, I'm trying to think the best way to describe this. Somebody told me, a colleague told me that they had overheard a student saying it's cool that we have a brown female teacher. And it was the first time I had realized that I was actually visible to students. I know that sounds stupid, but when you're not thinking about it, you're not thinking about it. And at least, again, for a formative part of my childhood, I grew up in my majority. So I wasn't really thinking about being seen in that way.

59:09Then moving to Derbyshire, there weren't, and there still aren't, very many brown people. So not seeing any diversity, I would forget that I looked different until somebody pointed it out.

59:22So that was a weird experience at that time. But in 2020, it becomes instrumentalized in a different way, right? That optics speak to something that needs to be spoken to. And sort of unwittingly, I realized that people were seeing something in just the fact that I was being a brown person. And I think you realize that it does matter what you do and say and think, especially in the role of a teacher or an editor, to be given that role, to be given that privilege.

59:57However, however uncomfortable it might be, that I get to stand at this end of the room and you get to sit there and listen to me talking, it does matter. On the other hand, going back to this idea about wanting to live. So I think on the October 7th was a Saturday. I think October 10th or 11th is when I saw my students in 2023. And I went to college wearing my Gaza T-shirt.

1:00:31I couldn't think of being in anything else.

1:00:34And stood in front of my class and said, listen, guys, I don't get paid enough to lie to you. And we had a conversation about how much we'd have to get paid to betray our principles and how much we'd have to get paid to stand up in front of a group of people and perhaps, yeah, own a perspective that is not ours. And that became the conversation that day. So it then led on to other things, obviously, or maybe not obviously, but many schools and mine included, were very cautious about how people would be able to speak about Gaza, about genocide in the classroom in ways that we didn't experience in other conflicts.

1:01:26But I think that level of, as I said to my students, and I can't say it better, I don't get paid enough to perform some bullshit. So it was important to let my students know that I'm not an automaton and that there are some beliefs. And yes, it is a risk and a position to wear them on your sleeve as such, but that's a choice, I suppose.

1:02:02I think acknowledging that was important to my students, it might have been a violent thing to do. There might have been people who might have been hurt to see that position, but I think acknowledging it and acknowledging that one has the agency to take position is the point. So in terms of what effect it might have, I don't know, I hope it has the effect of watching a rehearsal of someone operate under certain conditions. What else?

1:02:33And then college is that, right? Education is that. It's a rehearsal for life, and one obviously wants to model a way of living that is acceptable. So for me, putting myself behind certain causes, making space to have conversations about race and labour and other inequalities, agreeing to put certain amounts of, how can I say, behind the discussion of the genocide in Gaza.

1:03:17All of this is, it would, I don't know how much you'd have to pay me to not do that. Because I couldn't countenance lying to all these kids who are paying tuition or to all these people who happen to be reading where I work, reading the things that I publish where I work. I don't know. It's a profound discomfort that I'm not able to inhabit at the moment anyway.

1:03:48And the effect or the impact that that might have is simply a demonstration of that.

1:04:01Yeah, as a sort of rehearsal for anybody that might be looking, I don't know what else.

1:04:08I can't, I guess, yeah, it's hard to know what else the impact. The impact on me is that I don't earn very much money. The choice is to perhaps, you know, not engage in certain normative forms of practice or certain normative career pursuits. The decision to spend energies on certain things that are, let's say, not oriented towards visibility or remuneration.

1:04:39But it's a negotiation to do with my own comfort. The impact that it has on me, I hope, is at least some degree of comfort aside of the financial part. But that's just who's, that's, come on, who's, who's, who's listening? Who's feeling like they've got that part figured out? It is, and it's very suitable that as a teacher of history and theory, you are confronted by the same question that's presented to Socrates.

1:05:10Do you, do you drink the hemlock or do you offer a pinch of incense to the gods of the state? Do you take the hemlock for corrupting the minds of the youth? It's the perennial question, isn't it? Yeah, and it's, I guess it's always going to be, but it allows me to have, it's moments like this and moments that I have with my students that allow me to determine what's, what's my own metric are. And again, if the impact of that is that people are able to see that other metrics exist, great.

1:05:42Great point to finish on. Fantastic, Shumi. Thank you so very much. Thank you. And thanks for listening.

1:06:16Thank you.