Scholarship of Making
Where theory is tested in practice, and practice thinks back.
An 8-month interdisciplinary studio and research program that explores how knowledge is made and remade through studio work, fieldwork, and critical theory.
What is Scholarshipof Making?
Scholarship of Making is a multi-sited, practice-led scholars program that sits at the intersection of theory, fieldwork, material experimentation, and spatial investigation. It explores how land, bodies, materials, and communities shape the knowledges we produce, and how we might resist inherited, Western-centric ways of seeing and engaging with the world.
The program emerged from years of teaching and working within higher education and practicing within communities, where we encountered a persistent gap between theory and practice, between what is taught and how knowledge is lived through making. We questioned how conventional studio environments can separate practice from the social, ecological, and material conditions that give it meaning.
Scholarship of Making begins from the belief that making is not simply a technical skill or the production of an object. It is an inherent human act through which we understand our relationships with place, materials, communities, and ourselves. Through critical inquiry, fieldwork, studio experimentation, and collective learning, the program creates space for participants to examine the histories, conditions, and relationships that shape their practices.
The program invites participants to question conventional academic frameworks, attend to local forms of knowing and being, and use "making" as a method of research, critique, and care.
The program runs from April to December and is structured as an advanced studio practice:
A series of intensive courses on belonging and resistance, land, knowledge production, making, and archiving land as a living record.
Curated texts, discussions, and debates that unsettle familiar categories and open up new methods of inquiry.
A ten-day, on-ground engagement where scholars work alongside local communities and landscapes, treating field as both site and collaborator.
Guided time to develop your own research-through-making project, supported by tutorials and studio feedback.
The year culminates in a curated exhibition, a publication featuring scholars' research, and a public roundtable.
Scholarship of Making is designed and led by Laajverd Research and Design Unit, an independent initiative working at the intersection of art, architecture, geography, and environmental justice.
Artist-Curator & Academic Researcher
Architect & Human Geographer
Each year, they are joined by a changing faculty of practitioners such as farmers, policy-makers, designers, scholars, and activists, who teach from where they stand: in fields, courts, studios, archives, and communities.
Over eight months, you can expect to:
Expand your practice beyond its disciplinary comfort zone—whether you come from art, architecture, anthropology, environmental studies, or another field.
Learn to design and conduct fieldwork that is ethically grounded, collaboratively shaped, and attentive to local knowledges.
Leave with a clearly articulated research or practice-based project, documented through writing, visuals, and public presentation—useful for future PhD applications, grant proposals, or long-term artistic/research trajectories.
Become part of a growing cohort of practitioners who are rethinking how knowledge is made in and from the global South.
Scholarship of Making is for practitioners, researchers, and thinkers who are interested in exploring the relationships between knowledge, practice, place, and materiality. It is for those whose work does not fit neatly within a single discipline and who want to investigate how ideas emerge through engagement with landscapes, communities, materials, and lived experiences.
The program welcomes artists, architects, designers, writers, researchers, environmental practitioners, farmers, ecologists, geographers, geologists, historians and others working through creative, critical, or situated forms of inquiry. It is equally open to those whose knowledge emerges through community practice, craft, ecological work, or lived experience.
SOM is for those who seek to move between theory and practice, question inherited ways of seeing, and explore making as a method of research, reflection, and care. Participants are invited to bring a question, a place, a material, or a practice they wish to examine more deeply through collective learning, fieldwork, and experimentation.