Interview with Marina Rustow

Art Inquiries, 2019

2019

Professor Gillian Metzger: Katherine, thank you for that wonderful overview of all that the Justice has achieved and the history of Columbia Law School. And I want to apologize for those to whom I am showing my back, but this will allow us to have more of a conversation with the Justice. Justice, thank you so much for being with us today. It is a real privilege for us to get to talk to you this way, and we know for the entire audience. You have had-as you have now heard (LAUGHS)-an amazing and just tremendously varied career, spanning so many different roles of academic, public interest advocate, judge, now Justice. We can't possibly cover all of this in the time we have this morning, but what we are hoping to do is talk a little bit about each of these roles, how each step you took influenced the rest, and then we will be throwing it open after our conversation for questions from the audience.

Risco Revista de Pesquisa em Arquitetura e Urbanismo (Online), 2018

A: We want to talk with you about curating architecture. Could you talk about how you became a curator for architecture? Was there a starting point? MMF: I did my undergraduate studies and first Masters degree in Glasgow. I chose to go to Glasgow because it had amazing music culture at the time around 2000. And it also had (and still has) this wonderful, vibrant, urban cultural variety. My mum, and her parents before her, and theirs before them all grew up there and so that's where my heart was (and still is). It is a place where the urban fabric really spoke the situation of its inhabitants, it was really dirty, a very post-industrial city at that point as it had the shipyards for the longest time. And yet it had been in 1999 the city of architecture and culture in Europe. So it had this kind of renaissance in terms of seeing itself again in this renewed way. It is the home of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Alexander Greek Thomson, so it has this wonderful late 19th century/early 20th century reputation for architecture and the Glasgow School of Art. I like architecture and design for reasons most of us do because there is something immediate about it, it touches peoples' everyday lives, people can immediately understand it in many ways, even if they are not going off into the theoretical. I really loved Juliet classes (A/N: Juliet Kinchin as MMFs professor in art history at the University of Glasgow), she was a great mentor, and then she told me that graduate school existed, and I applied for it. I got a scholarship, then came over here (A/N: NYC, USA) for a three month internship (A/N: at the Guggenheim) and then got a job. And so stayed and I also got a husband! (laughs)

Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, 2020

In this interview, Jayne Osgood discussed with us the impact of certain theories not only on her thinking and approaches to research, but also how they have transformed the way she lives her life. This observation really resonated with us. The more we engage with posthuman and new materialisms literature, the better attuned we have become to the "everyday" and the things we encounter. These things are often small, like the glitter that Jayne investigates in her research. Such matter is not diminished by its size-in fact, as Jayne shows in this interview, small things come to matter in significant ways-politically, environmentally, etc.-and need to be taken seriously because they have ethical implications for human and more-than-human others. We also really appreciated Jayne's discussion of writing within posthuman and new materialist approaches, and how, despite calls for experimentation, we must keep in mind what experimentation does in our work, and for those we do research with. We discuss some of her recent writing in Feminists researching gendered childhoods: Generative entanglements (Osgood and Robinson 2019) in which she experiments with different forms of writing, and the opportunities this has opened up for her. As Jayne suggests, research and writing is not about having answers, but is rather about becoming open to questioning and making connections that we may not have considered or noticed before.