Design Symposium Undercommoning The Urban Campus
The Undercommoning the Urban Campus Symposium brings together scholars from art, architecture, public history, and urbanism to examine the histories, reckonings, and futures of the modern urban university. Exploring themes such as campus as “UniverCity,” monumentality, and town–gown relations, the symposium creates a forum for dialogue across disciplines. Open to all, it will be of special interest to students and faculty in design, social sciences, and cultural studies.
Since the sixteenth century, the typology of the university campus has served as a nation-building instrument of modernity—from a settler colonial architecture that literally and figuratively concealed enslaved labor in the conception of the colonial college, to fictions of terra nullius that predicated on indigenous dispossession in the making of the land-grant university, to the unmaking of Black, Latino, and immigrant neighborhoods in the postwar and ongoing expansion of the modern urban university. Since the decolonial turn, the typologies of the colonial college and the land-grant university have been increasingly scrutinized to reveal institutional spatial practices that appeared removed from racial thinking, all the while reinforcing the absence of Black and Indigenous bodies and material culture. In contrast, the more recent emergence of the modern urban university in the twentieth century—and its ongoing hand in displacing communities in service of institutional expansion—continues to be either overlooked or justified under the guise of progress.
In the case of the modern urban university, scholars in the humanities and social sciences have been centering the experiences of displaced communities as they excavate the racial underside of urban campus expansions and advocate for reparative futures; in contrast, scholars and practitioners of the built environment have yet to critically re-examine their role historically and to productively re-imagine their agency moving forward, as more architects and University Architects continue engaging with extractive campus expansion projects. To that end, the symposium invites a much-needed discussion: as beneficiaries of higher education—scholars, faculty, students, staff, admin—how do we confront past and ongoing urban institutional expansions when they come at the expense of displaced communities whose suppressed histories have often been justified under the rhetoric of public good? What theoretical underpinnings can shape how we unravel this pattern in higher education’s built environment?
This symposium is generously supported by a UK Conference & Workshop Grant, UK UNITE small-scale grant, Gaines Center for the Humanities Mini-Grant Program, and UK CURATE Research Support Program. Research presented at the symposium is supported by a 2025 Graham Foundation Grant.
Symposium Schedule
2:00 - 2:15: Introduction
2:15 - 2:35: Davarian Baldwin | Distinguished Professor of American Studies & Founding Director of the Smart Cities Research Lab at Trinity College
2:35 – 2:55: Rachel Gross | Associate Professor, Co-Director of Public History Program at University of Colorado Denver
2:55 – 3:20: Panel Discussion
3:20 – 3:30: Break
3:30 – 3:50: Faheem Majeed | Co-Director of Floating Museum, Assistant Professor of Art, Director of Undergraduate Studies at University of Illinois Chicago
3:50 – 4:10: Leen Katrib | Assistant Professor of Architecture, University of Kentucky
4:10 – 4:35: Roundtable Panel Discussion, Audience Q&A
4:35 – 4:45: Closing Remarks
Speaker Bios
Davarian Baldwin
Davarian L. Baldwin is the Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies and the founding director of the Smart Cities Research Lab at Trinity College. His teaching, research, and advocacy explore the politics of global cities, with a focus on the diverse and marginalized communities striving to build sustainable lives in urban environments—from the United States to London, Rotterdam, and Bangkok. Baldwin is the award-winning author of several books, including In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities. He also served as consultant and text author for The World of the Harlem Renaissance: A Jigsaw Puzzle (2022). His commentary has appeared in major outlets such as NBC News, BBC, HULU, USA Today, The Washington Post, and TIME magazine. Baldwin was named a 2022 Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation in recognition of his scholarship and public engagement on issues of racial and economic justice.
Rachel Gross
Rachel S. Gross is a historian of the modern United States. She is the author of Shopping All the Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America (Yale University Press, 2024) and co-editor of Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America’s Biggest Retail Stores (University of Wyoming Press, 2024). She is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado Denver where she teaches U.S. gender, business, and public history. The NEH and the Mellon Foundation have supported her projects on the history of displacement and community resistance on the Auraria campus in Denver. Her collaborative work includes walking tours, digital history projects, and museum exhibits.
Faheem Majeed
Faheem Majeed is an artist, curator, educator, and non-profit administrator whose work focuses on institutional critique and centers collaboration as a tool to engage communities in meaningful dialogue. He received his BFA from Howard University and an MFA from the University of Illinois Chicago, where he is currently an Assistant Professor of Art. He is the recipient of the Field and MacArthur Foundation’s Leaders for a New Chicago Award, the Joyce Foundation Award, and the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant, and has been recognized as a Harpo Foundation Awardee. Majeed served as the Executive Director of the South Side Community Art Center from 2005 to 2011 and currently serves as the Co-Director and Founder of the Floating Museum, an arts collective and non-profit that creates new models to explore relationships between art, community, architecture, and public institutions. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Centre Pompidou, Highline, and the Hyde Park Art Center. Majeed’s sculpture highlights marginalized objects, histories, people, and places into powerful narratives that challenge and recontextualize their value, fostering dialogue and broader social change.
Leen Katrib
Leen Katrib is an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Kentucky. Her work investigates architecture’s materiality and historiography and designs new frameworks for marginalized histories and material culture. Her work has been supported by the Graham Foundation, The OpEd Project, Art Omi, MacDowell / NEA Fellowship, Harry der Boghosian Fellowship, PD Soros Fellowship, Howard Crosby Butler Travel Grant, William & Neoma Timme Travel Grant, and George H. Mayr Travel Grant. Her work and writing have been published in The Architect's Newspaper, Dezeen, Deem, Future Anterior, Pidgin, Room One Thousand, and various proceedings, and has been exhibited at Lexington Art League, Syracuse University, Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism in South Korea, Van Der Plas Gallery in New York, and the A+D Museum in Los Angeles. Leen holds a MArch from Princeton University and a BArch from the University of Southern California and has practiced architecture in New York City.