My current research is going in a few directions.

• I am working again with Suzanne Lacy, this time in Bristol, England, on a collaborative piece she is organizing with the Knowle West Media Centre (KWMC), the Arnolfini Art Gallery, and other institutions. It's called "The University of Local Knowledge," and it launched in late June 2010. The middle and right images show Knowle West and the opening day launch event. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting Carolyn Hassan and Penny Ames of the KWMC, and Tom Trevor of the Arnolfini. During 2010 and 2011, there was an ongoing collection of video vignettes and website development to organize these contributions to local knowledge. A related project about Socially Engaged Art Practices has a newly-launched website called Demanding Conversations. I contributed a commentary via Skype, here. 
  

• While I was in England during June 2010, I met with artist Stephen Willats again. I was able to get further information from him--and see some old movies--so that I could present a paper on his MetaFilter project of 1973-75 at the Special Interest Group Computers Information and Society (SIGCIS) of the Society for the History of Technology in October 2010. I worked in London and Edinburgh again in June of 2011 and presented a paper on the Edinburgh Social Model Construction Project in Liverpool in September of 2011.
  

• In a very vague stage at this point is another book project, on critical spatial practices.  I’d like it to be collaborative, and perhaps an edited volume, but we’ll see. As a beginning, I coordinated a roundtable discussion at the Society of Architectural Historians meeting in 2010 in Chicago, called "In Between: Histories Informed by Contemporary Art and Architecture." Here are some questions that I invited discussants to address. Joseph Heathcott and Aaron Levy and about 15 of us had a lively conversation.


• With Sarah Ross and Ryan Griffis, I am excited to be involved in the Regional Inquiry Studio. This effort is spearheaded by Sarah. Her first topic is the Global Rural. We traveled in late June 2009 to Beardstown, Illinois, for an initial view of the multi-lingual, multi-cultural area of rural Cass and Schuyler Counties, with scholar Faranak Miraftab. There's also a prison at Mount Sterling, as well as a prison at Jacksonville, both nearby. Beardstown has some documentation as a sundown town. The image above left is a storefront in Beardstown.
  


• I am thinking quite a lot about "imperfect" communities. How we work with what is given, as difficult and slow as it may be. I'm reading Henri Nouwen, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben for starters.
  

• With urban historian Wendy Plotkin, I did an interview in July of 2008 about the history of H-Urban, and other online humanities efforts, for the Digital Humanities Quarterly. It is now online.

• Josue Pellot, a Chicago-based artist who has done some interventions in public spaces that are both powerful and funny commentaries on identity, was kind enough to talk with me in July of 2008. Reading about the Puerto Rican community in Chicago, and Paseo Boricua in particular, has informed an article on Pellot’s work.  The Journal of Arts and Communities published it.