Thing Tank returns in the 2025-2026 academic year! This year’s topic is an investigation of making, led by Thing Tank Faculty Director Jennifer Van Horn. What does it mean to make? How do we understand this materially transformative practice? How have politicized definitions of personhood, subjecthood, and objecthood, obscured the mysteries and possibilities of making? What do we learn from participating in making ourselves? Bringing together participants from a variety of disciplines, perspectives, and situated knowledges, including artisanal, craft-based, activist, technical, scientific, “amateur,” ritual, and spiritual, we will come together to create new anti-hierarchical and anti-colonialist modes of analyzing making. For this academic year, eight faculty and graduate fellows from Art & Design, Art History, Art Conservation, Geography, the Hagley Program in the History of Capitalism, Technology, and Culture, and the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation will meet to address these topics. The Thing Tank seminar will include fascinating public lectures by prominent scholars and activists.
We welcome all our new Thing Tankers.
Kayle Avery, The Hagley Program
Megan Baker, Art History
Rebecca Stasiunas, Art History
Kaanan Thakkar, Geography & Spatial Science
Camille Williams, WPAMC