Stuckeman School Symposium 2026

In the face of climatic threats (including heatwaves, droughts, fires, and flooding) and its impacts across spatial scales - from the body to the neighborhood - designers and residents alike spend mounting energy and resources to reshape their surrounding built environments and protect lives and livelihoods against such extremes. In response to this unprecedented challenge, scholarship in the social sciences and design fields advance methodological approaches to understand, on the one hand, how individuals and societies learn to coexist with climate amidst uneven risks, vulnerabilities, and capacities, and, on the other, how new techniques and technologies can inform building practices better attuned to changing weather conditions on the ground.

Yet, more work is needed to bridge these bodies of knowledge and examine how diverse methodologies can reveal situated lessons of being and becoming with climate to offer new insights for producing spaces able to cope with exacerbated yet uncertain climate futures.

This two-day symposium aims to address this gap by bringing together scholars working across the social sciences, humanities, and design to explore how diverse and creative methods can inform a more holistic understanding of preparing for and living with climate change. Specifically, and following disciplinary traditions in the fields of human geography, sociology, anthropology, architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and design, the symposium will bring together scholars working methodologically at one or more intersections between body – space – weather to explore linkages across the experiential, material, and environmental dimensions of developing and inhabiting changing climates. The goals of the symposium are two-fold. First, we aim to create a space for scholars interested in interdisciplinary and creative methods for studying climate change to learn from each other and advance their own work with the support of peers. Second, we aim to bring contributions from the symposium together in an edited volume and creative output to highlight the role of interdisciplinary and creative methods in advancing a more nuanced understanding of climate change and expand existing methodological tool-kits, with implications for design, community-based planning, and governance.

Workshop 1: Theorizing Social Value in the Built Environment

This workshop serves to develop multidisciplinary manuscripts for a Special Issue of Construction Management and Economics, allowing participants to share, review, and discuss manuscripts on “Theorizing Social Value in the Built Environment.”

Convenor: Alexandra Staub – Professor of Architecture, Penn State

Invited Guests: Mustafa Selçuk Çidik – Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction

Daniella Troje – Program Head and Senior Lecturer in Civil Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology

Workshop 2: Regenerative architecture through earth, body & climate: creative methodologies for climate-responsive design in Brazil

This workshop examines intersections and synergies across scales – body, space, weather – through the agency of soil in the context of a vulnerable community in the Global South.

Convenor: Clarissa Albrecht - Visiting Lecturer in Architecture, Penn State

Invited Guest: Jaqueline Leite Riberiro do Vale - Associate Professor, Department of Architecture and Urbanism, Federal University of Viçosa, Brazil

Workshop 3: Drawing the Unseen: Environmental Representation, Ethics, and Entanglement

This workshop investigates how drawing can function as a situated method for engaging environmental uncertainty across scales of body, site, and territory by treating air, light, water, sound, biological processes, and geological forces as active co-authors.

Convenors: José Ibarra – Assistant Professor of Architecture, Penn State

Delphine Lewandowski – Assistant Professor of Architecture, Penn State

Invited Guest: Lydia Kallipoliti – Associate Professor and MSAAD Director, Columbia University GSAPP

Workshop 4: Exploring the Use of Ethnography in the Design Research Lab

In this workshop, Penn State Graphic Design faculty member Brooke Hull (they/them) will be joined virtually by Omari Souza (he/him) and Shannon Doronio Chavez (she/them) to discuss uses of ethnography and storytelling as design research methods that expand our ability to design for and with communities and cultures we are not a part of.

Convenor: Brooke Hull – Assistant Professor of Graphic Design, Penn State

Invited Guests: Omari Souza –Assistant Professor, Communication Design, University of North Texas

Shannon Doronio Chavez – Associate Professor Graphic Multimedia Design, College of the Canyons

Workshop 5: Creative Methodologies for Studying Changing Climates: Future Actions

Join the symposium organizers to explore intersections of creative methods for studying changing climates and discuss future action including a follow-up symposium in Amsterdam and a nascent publication.

Convenors: Karen Paiva Henrique, Lisa D. Iulo, and Aparna Parikh – Penn State