Beyond the Master’s Tools: In Conversation with Keller Easterling

Abstract

Keller Easterling is an unconventional thinker. Spanning writing, creative practice and teaching, her work draws on disparate sources and intellectual traditions: from media theory to the philosophy of ecology; economic geography to game theory; anarchisms to feminisms; and from decolonisation to political discourse analysis. Infrastructure, mutualism, reparations, freedom, fugitivity, indeterminacy, whiteness, failure and solidarity emerge as core concerns in her wider attempts to develop an artistic approach capable of contending with contemporary forms of violence and power. In late 2023, Architectural Theory Review (ATR), in conjunction with the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), invited Easterling to discuss her recent work on the civil rights movement in the US. Easterling sat down with Endriana Audisho (UTS) and Jasper Ludewig (ATR) to elaborate on the themes and questions that emerged from this work, discussing their relevance to her scholarship, pedagogy and broader spatial practice.