The Larger Landscape Conversation: Whose Land?

Ghazal Jafari is a territorial scholar and design educator in exile. She is an Assistant Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia where her research focuses on environmental justice, racialized geographies, and narratives of displacement.

Ghazal Jafari, Photo Courtesy of the Artist.

Elizabeth Solomon, Photo Courtesy of the Artist.

Elizabeth Solomon is an enrolled member of the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag and a longterm partner with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Elizabeth speaks frequently about local Indigenous issues and has a long-standing commitment to human rights, diversity, inclusion, and community building that she brings to both her paid and volunteer work. Elizabeth serves on multiple advisory and management boards. Elizabeth holds a master’s degree in museum studies and she has a commitment to work with native communities and others that are currently underrepresented in museum exhibits and public history programs to assist them with bringing their voices and stories to the forefront.

Charles Waldheim is an American Canadian architect and urbanist based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Waldheim’s research examines the relationships between landscape, ecology, and contemporary urbanism. Waldheim is author, editor, or co-editor of numerous publications on these topics, including Landscape as Urbanism: A General Theory and The Landscape Urbanism Reader. Waldheim developed the theory of landscape urbanism in response to the industrial economies and emergent ecologies of the American city. On this topic, he curates Harvard GSD’s Future of the American City platform.

Waldheim is John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design where he directs the school’s Office for Urbanization. He also serves as Ruettgers Curator of Landscape at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston where he convenes The Larger (Landscape) Conversation. Waldheim is recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, the Visiting Scholar Research Fellowship at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Sanders Fellowship at the University of Michigan, and the Cullinan Chair at Rice University. He has been visiting scholar at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau, Germany.

Charles Waldheim, Photo Courtesy of the Artist.

Activist Amber Starks, a.k.a. Melanin Mvskoke is an Afro-Indigenous activist, organizer, cultural critic, decolonial theorist, and budding abolitionist. She is an enrolled citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and is of Shawnee, Yuchi, and Quapaw descent. Her passion is the intersection of Black and Native American identity. Starks’s activism seeks to normalize, affirm, and uplift the multidimensional identities of Black and Native peoples through discourse and advocacy around Black liberation, Indigenous sovereignty, anti-Blackness, and abolishing blood quantum. She hopes to encourage Black and Indigenous peoples to prioritize one another and divest from compartmentalizing struggles.