Events

On March 30, 2026, Fred Moten and Brandon López brought  “Surfacing: Let’s Go Over,” a performance and activation, to Boston’s JazzUrbane Cafe. Moten and López’s explicitly political sonic performance practice opened channels through which we imagine beyond and above what confronts us. Moten’s poetics, intoned through a deep consideration of Black vocal performance and musicianship, alongside Lopez’s rooting instrumentation, called the audience into a collective space of inquiry, feeling, and transformation.

This performance-lecture, hosted by Nia K. Evans and Kris Manjapra, marked the launch of a new Scholars for Social Justice series—Boston Open University: What Belongs to Community and What Universities Owe Us.

Throughout history, it has been the trickster figures who messed with the line dividing this from that, who troubled the certainty of categories. Since 2005, The Design Studio for Social Intervention (ds4si) has worked to build tools and a community of practice around exactly such work.

We now find ourselves being told that there are two choices: to fight to defend the neo-liberal state or succumb to fascism. In this ds4si/Social Action Lab collaborative event, Dr. Joy James, Ebenezer Fitch Professor of Humanities at Williams College, drew on a long line of thinking and third ways in an invitation to expand our range of motion.

Kenneth Bailey and Judith Leemann of The Design Studio for Social Intervention (ds4si)–the renowned Dorchester-based artist research and community development group–were Visiting Fellows at Northeastern University’s Social Action Lab, in collaboration with Kris Manjapra (Stearns Professor of History and Global Studies, Northeastern University).

Coming together around the provocation, “For the Vibrancy of Needs,” the residency encompassed StudyLabs and public events for faculty, students, community, and staff, in a cross- and anti-disciplinary inquiry into theories and embodiments of justice rooted in experiences of common need. Drawing diversely on aesthetics, somatics, design methodologies, art-making, close reading, counter-archiving, and activism, the inquiry sites itself precisely at the border of the university and the community in which it is embedded, with an aim to transforming and re-imagining the relations this border tries to fix.

“For the Vibrancy of Needs” included the following events:

• Conversation at the Center for Design with Kenny Bailey, Judith Leemann, Sara Hendren, and Kris Manjapra on September 19
• StudyLab I at the Center for Design from October 2-4
• StudyLab II at the ds4si storefront space, 545 Columbia Road, Dorchester, October 24-26
• Conversation with Joy James, Kenny Bailey and Judith Leemann at the Center for Design, October 30
• Closing Event at ds4si storefront space, 545 Columbia Road, Dorchester, November 7