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EPIC Seminar for Teaching Excellence

Instructors: Todd Presner and Dana Cuff

Assistant: Jacqueline Barrios 

During the spring of 2020, the EPIC Seminar In Teaching Excellence in Urban Humanities convened an interdisciplinary group of scholars at all stages of their careers to delve into a set of methods, practices, and pedagogies for investigating cities. At the nexus of humanities, architecture, and urban planning,”Urban Humanities” is a vibrant, new field which brings together design-thinking, speculative practices, and spatial justice to imagine and transform the city. 


As Fellows with UCLA’s Mellon-sponsored EPIC program (Excellence in Pedagogy and Innovative Classrooms),participants gained an understanding of the interdisciplinary field of Urban Humanities, including its lineages and practices; developed familiarity with and applied new methods (such as “thick mapping” and “spatial ethnography” )to investigate the complexity of the urban; applied the tools, concepts, and approaches of Urban Humanities to new pedagogical formats and sites (as determined by participants); and developed collaborative “project briefs” that deepened  engagement with and understanding of the city.


The best Urban Humanities project briefs are simple means to entice students to “make” sense of the world around them in surprising ways,  that reveal spatial (in)justice. This project page presents final projects by Fellows, “briefs” for a course of study the Fellow will or would like to teach, using more than one urban humanities method, and involving some form(s) of engaged pedagogy.  From charging students to decolonize the plan of the Great Exhibition to inviting students to reimagine Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange through new spatial imaginaries of the pandemic, these briefs propose experimental  forms of hybrid engagement: with highly specialized disciplinary content (from philosophy to ancient Persian poetry, for example) and the centralizing field of inquiry: urban space.


In judging the pedagogy evidenced by these briefs, the following considerations were prioritized: 

  • A provocative starting point (verbal/and/or visual)

  • A simple set of constraints

  • An opening of interpretive possibilities

  • An elegant brevity

  • A clarity about your expectations