Shannon Mattern - multispecies worldbuilding lab

But also reminding people that disciplines are in a way, like a — they’re a fiction! If we look at the history of the academy, the way we have separated the epistemological world into disciplines has shifted dramatically over thousands of years. So the disciplines we have today are in part a historical accident. They are perpetuated through funding... See more

ON LIBRARIESI was visiting public libraries and ultimately writing my dissertation about them and realizing it’s not about people engaging with kind of romanticized documents. There is some of that in the library, but it’s also compromised bodies interacting with compromised bodies, often the most marginalized people in societies and also really be... See more

ON GENERALISM & INTER-DISCIPLINARY THINKING I would say I am anti-disciplinary just as much as I may be anti-academy or anti-institutional. 

They are spaces of intergenerational learning, they’re spaces of kind of civic engagement. And also where other social services fall short because of neglect and underfunding. Public libraries often have to pick up the slack there. That’s not something we’re typically going to ask an archive to do. So just the fact that there is so much that they’r... See more

ON REBUILDING & METAPHORS

I am very grateful that I had that scientific exposure initially because it helped me to appreciate the distinctiveness of the spaces I am in now, of the value of triangulating, of the value of bringing together people from very different knowledge spaces or terrains into the same room to just address these wicked problems we were talking about bef... See more

But then it’s not only about disseminating information. Over the years, we’ve also seen libraries take on the role of disseminating the networks necessary to receive information. So the pandemic also demonstrated how many people are on the wrong side of the digital divide, how many kids could not get online for school. How many people could not app... See more

I have been thinking primarily about how the pandemic has changed the way we think about cities and ecologies. What metaphors are actually useful in thinking about this moment, this era of rebuilding, of worldmaking to use a central theme for your project.

ON KNOWLEDGE & WORLDBUILDING In the last 20 years, dissemination of knowledge has changed so much. And I think this is actually a process of worldbuilding too, not only kind of building an epistemological world, but also in sharing knowledge, in generating knowledge together, you’re actually making a statement about what values matter... See more

And one additional thing, not only about disseminating information and building networks, but it’s also about creating knowledge as well. This is something that has happened increasingly or the realization increasingly over the past several years or a couple of decades, that libraries are not just about disseminating published material. It’s valida... See more