A children’s book on agriculture in Le Cateau brings together drawings by students from three classes at three different schools in the region to partner with Musée Matisse Le Cateau-Cambrésis, located in rural northern France. At the invitation of Carrie Pilto, director of the museum, artist Harrell Fletcher joined by Nolan Calisch and Molly Sherman proposed instructions for children to illustrate a text on the agricultural history of the region. This book traces the first meeting between these artists and the inhabitants of Le Cateau and its environs, beginning a series of participatory projects initiated by Musée Matisse Le Cateau-Cambrésis. Made on ...

Anya Sirota is an architectural designer, researcher and educator. With her partner, Jean Louis Farges, Anya directs the Detroit based studio Akoaki. Through a distinct synthesis of aesthetics, social enterprise and cultural programming, the practice has established a reputation for innovation in the urban realm. The work, grounded in an affection for collective, unrestricted and inclusive experiences, has recently been featured in exhibitions at the Vitra Design Museum, the Saint Etienne International Design Biennial and the Detroit Institute of Art. Anya currently teaches at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, where she directs the Michigan ...

In summer 2018, Amsterdam appointed eight-year-old Lotta Crok to the position of the first ever Junior Bicycle Mayor. According to her senior colleague Katelijne Boerma, they work in synergy and “it’s important that adult professionals help children to implement ideas that would be good for the city and the whole country.” What are the main goals set by the duo? In this episode, Katelijne outlines the story behind famous image of Amsterdam, dives into the most common threats to the development of bicycle lanes, and shares tips on moving towards a cycling society.

Alexandra Lange has been writing about architecture and design for over two decades. Her articles span a wide range of subjects, from building reviews and calls for preservation to furniture, fashion, and women in architecture. After writing for such media outlets as Metropolis, Dezeen, The New York Times, Places Journal, Architect Magazine and The New Yorker, she published the book Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities in 2012. Currently working as the architecture critic at Curbed, her latest book The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids comes out this month. In this episode, ...

In this conversation, Miriam Ticktin and I talk about the problematic characteristics of discourses and legislation that particularize figures of innocence. Suffering and sick bodies are particularly subject to this process that distinguish innocent subjects from their necessary corollary, guilty ones. Miriam unfolds for us this aspect of her work regarding migrant’s claims for humanitarian exceptions and asylum in France. We talk of the role of the medical expertise in this context, as well as NGOs and other humanitarian institutions’ self-claim of “apolitical” function contrasting their particularism for suffering women or children for instance. We ends this conversation with the illustrative example of ...

Tools for playground is a toolkit to let people interact and modify space through “play” and on the creation of game dynamics. Playing is also a revolutionary act as in this dimension we can get rid of pre-constituted systems. With playful architectures we can relieve the constraints of form/function. Tools for Playground’s goal is to temporarily transform space into a playful dimension, favoring the interaction with the context and between people of any age, sex and nationality. These tools want to play with rules, leaving players free to arbitrarily invent their own. With few indications and simple tools, we can create objectives, parallel universes ...

An optimistic response to a terminal diagnosis finds its apotheosis as a lecture. The all-star news anchor, veteran of all three major television networks, Katie Couric is quoted as waxing, “most of us would slip into a deep depression, but Randy used the experience as teaching material.” Given on September 18th, 2007 at Carnegie-Mellon as a part of a cross-disciplinary lecture series, terminally-ill computer science professor Randy Pausch’s lecture “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” inaugurates an era of viral possibility for the lecture: weaving together self-help maxims, dad jokes and the ethos of computer science interdisciplinarity, this popular incarnation of ...

The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema illustrates how global horror film images of children reconceptualised childhood at the beginning of the twenty-first century, unravelling the child’s long entrenched binding to ideologies of growth, futurity, and progress. The book analyses an influential body of horror films featuring subversive depictions of children and proposes that complex cultural and industrial shifts at the turn of the millennium resulted in potent cinematic renegotiations of the concept of childhood. In these transnational films—largely stemming from Spain, Japan, and America—the child resists embodying growth and futurity: by demonstrating both the culturally specific and globally resonant properties ...