The College of Arts and Architecture's Stuckeman School at Penn State will host the hybrid research symposium "Creative Methodologies for Studying Changing Climates: Body, Space and Weather" on March 4-5. All in-person events will take place on the first floor of the Stuckeman Family Building at University Park.
The symposium - a two-day event featuring two keynote speakers, poster and paper sessions, workshops and panel discussions - brings together international scholars to explore diverse methods and knowledge frameworks about preparing for and living with extreme weather conditions and uncertain climate futures.
The topic of the symposium comes from bringing different disciplines, including design, together to address climate research. Despite the inevitability of the climate crisis, this research looks at how cities and rural areas are addressing the issue.
"The topic of climate change is a very important theme in a lot of the research that's happening in the Stuckeman School, especially with the graduate students in architecture and landscape architecture," said co-organizer Lisa D. Iulo, the director of the Hamer Center for Community Design. "The symposium is something that is timely because it engages academic communities as well as Commonwealth communities."
Interdisciplinarity is an important aspect of the 2025-2026 Stuckeman Research Symposium - the crossovers between architecture, landscape architecture, graphic design, geography and more all play roles in developing methods for addressing climate change.
Co-organizer Karen Paiva Henrique, an assistant professor of human geography, planning and international development studies at the University of Amsterdam, said what she realized from working between disciplines -geography and architecture - is that both can look at the same problems but in different ways.
"For me it's a really important question of how we can bridge disciplines so that we can engage with the complexity of climate questions," Henrique said. "Bridging disciplinary boundaries between design, architecture and graphic design with human geography and the broader social sciences would create a much richer understanding of how we can live with climate change."
The symposium will not only explore methodologies for climate change but also look at it from an ethical standpoint.
Aparna Parikh, an associate teaching professor of women's, gender and sexuality studies and of Asian studies at Penn State, mentioned these ideas are important for research development.
"Questions surrounding knowledge production and ethics are central to how we are approaching this topic and drive how we understand the promise and pitfalls of different methods and approaches" Parikh said.
On March 4 and the morning of March 5, there will be five paper sessions where participants will present their research papers for discussion led by a session moderator - all experts in their respective fields.
There will also be a "poster session" of lightning talks and a hands-on workshop led by Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture Leann Andrews on the first day of the symposium. This workshop will introduce amphibious architecture and community design around the world. It will challenge participants to develop design solutions for everyday life scenarios using ancestral and vernacular knowledge for a changing climate.
"The idea of the fourth [March] is to bring people in from within and outside Penn State together to share groundbreaking climate research across scales," Iulo said.
The second day of the symposium will feature "working groups," hosted by Stuckeman School faculty members, to discuss new ideas or projects that could later branch outward from Penn State as a University.
"Our hope for the two-day symposium is that it will foster long-lived collaborations," Iulo said.
The first keynote speaker is Hannah Knox, who is honorary professor of anthropology at University College London. With her recent work focused on governing cities amid environmental uncertainty, her overall research explores the relationships between people, knowledge, infrastructure and technology in shaping social and political changes.
Knox has conducted research in several places as well as written several books. She is currently working on a new project called "ReGeneration: Energy, Data and Social Change in Net Zero Britain."
Her virtual lecture on March 4 at 9 a.m. will examine the relational commitments of creative climate intervention.
The second keynote speaker is Catherine Seavitt, who is chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design and the Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. Seavitt is also the faculty co-director of The Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology and creative director of LA+ Journal. Her design work examines the entanglement of public space and health through the lens of ecology, policy and novel plant science.
Seavitt's lecture on March 5 at 9 a.m. is called "Plants as Inventors."
The research symposium aims not only to advance scholarly conversations but also to expand methodological toolkits for addressing climate change in ethical and practical ways.
