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, and material experimentation. It asks how land, bodies, materials, and communities shape the knowledges we produce and how we might resist inherited, Western-centric ways of seeing and describing the world.
The program invites participants to question conventional academic frameworks, attend to local forms of knowing and being, use "making" as a method of research, critique, and care.
Open ProspectusA 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 land 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
Fatima's work examines how geographies and power shape creative practice in postcolonial contexts.
Architect & Human Geographer
Zahra's research engages landscapes in transition, from rapid development to climate change.
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.
For artists, architects, anthropologists, agro-ecologists, geologists, historians, farmers, environmentalists, designers, textile engineers, and others who want to think and work across disciplines and beyond traditional academic or professional boundaries.