Profs and Pints DC presents: “Designing Belonging,” on the messages sent by various institutional environments and how they can be made more welcoming, with Martha Kakooza, research associate in the department of higher education and student affairs at Morgan State University, where she teaches courses on gender, sexuality, and narrative and qualitative research.
Why do some rooms make people relax while others make them stiffen? Why do certain workplaces, schools, restaurants, churches, airports, and waiting rooms seem to say, “you are welcome here,” while others quietly signal “this was not built with you in mind”?
Explore how ordinary spaces shape belonging at a talk that will offer guidance to those seeking to create inclusive environments for students, clients, and customers. Being on hand will help anyone out there sort out why some environments have felt so welcoming while others left them focused on exits.
You’ll learn how a room's layout, lighting, seating, signage, sound, artwork, security presence, and history all affect whether people feel at ease or on edge, powerful or invisible, cared for or merely processed. People read these cues almost instantly, usually before they can explain why a place feels welcoming or alienating.
Dr. Martha Kakooza, a scholar whose research has focused space, identity, and institutional environments, will discuss why the same environment can feel like home to one person and like a closed door to another. She’ll describe how experiences of race, culture, class, gender, age, disability, and migration all shape how we read a space. We’ll look at how no space is truly neutral, because each one carries social messages and histories.
Drawing on research on students navigating higher-education institutions built without them in mind, Dr. Kakooza will discuss three distinct things spaces do to us: Some leave us drifting and unanchored. Some put us on display and grant only a conditional, watched kind of welcome. And some we manage to come to see as genuinely ours. She calls these different effects, respectively, “Drift,” “Quota,” or “Turn.”
Among the questions Dr. Kakooza will answer: What makes a place feel welcoming? How do buildings and rooms communicate power? What would it take to design schools, workplaces, and public spaces with belonging built in? (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image by Canva.