David Gissen works at the intersection of architecture, history, and experimental design. He is Professor of Architecture and Urban History at the Parsons School of Design. He was Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor of Architecture at Yale University (2019 – 2020); University Professor (2019-20) at the Institute for Art and Architecture, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria; and former Professor at the California College of the Arts (CCA) where he was based for twelve years. David is the author of five books and over seventy published essays. His books include a materialist study of architecture and the modern urban environment, Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments (Princeton Architecture Press, 2009) and a history of New York City told through the design of the city’s air, Manhattan Atmospheres (University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

David will explore a methodological question, raised in a recent book and exhibition project: How can those of us with significant impairments produce knowledge through our disabilities rather than despite them? More specifically, he wants to ask what types of values around knowledge would immobility, blindness, deafness, and cognitive incapacities create and that is not about impairment itself? Such a methodology challenges the athleticism of much humanities and social science-based intellectual and academic exploration. To explore this, David will engage in dialogs with colleagues in allied fields and whose work also emerges from and integrates their incapacities. His goal is not simply to make research practices more accessible for disabled people. His goal is two-fold: To question the imagined, ideal physicality of people who create empirical knowledge and to open research to another under-represented physicality. Ultimately, his aims are critical and applied as well as conceptual, theoretical and related to larger problems around methodology and epistemology. The images shown with this statement are from a forthcoming exhibition – “An Archaeology of Disability” – and that were developed with Jennifer Stager and Mantha Zarmakoupi.