Jilly Traganou is Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at Parsons School of Design. Her work examines questions related to social movements, dissent, and prefigurative politics taking into account processes of material engagement and spatial agency.

As a 2020-21 GIDEST fellow Jilly will be working on a project tentatively titled Prefigurative Politics and Material Engagement. Prefigurative politics provide living examples of alternative social formations, and were recently enacted by movements such as Occupy and Standing Rock, and earlier by the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfasts and People’s Free Medical Clinics, and anti-nuclear feminist encampments, such as the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp. The notion of the prefigurative will be examined not only as a process that can help us better understand the role of material engagement in political action, but also as an opportunity to rethink design. The project’s goal is to expand the conception of the prefigurative to include art and design practice as key sites of the political. It will examine the relations between prefigurative, critical, and speculative modes of design, as well as draw comparisons between prefiguration and prototyping, and look at the tensions between innovation and maintenance, design and affective labor, object delegated morality and embodied infrastructures.