Lecture Series - University of Houston
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Adaption Lecture Series Poster

ADAPTATION

Adaptation implies a response to change. To adapt means to adjust, modify, and alter one’s response to changes in its various forms: slow, radical, planetary, and local. Adaptation suggests acknowledging new ways, ideas, technologies, and mindsets reacting and responding to possible futures, messy pasts, and complex contexts. Adaptation also refers to switching genres and media to serve better communication or to reach new audiences.

The processes of adaptation are often not as transparent as we would like them to be. They invite analyses, careful investigations, and debates on usefulness, functionality, reuse, ruin, and waste. Adaptation may sometimes mean finding ways to survive conditions that are not ideal and out of control, whereas to adapt may mean recalibrating one’s expectations to fit into new paradigms. As we confront inequities emerging from discrimination, gentrification, and climate change, among other global shifts, adaptation is everywhere.

Our lecture series cuts across geographies and disciplines to look at crises and inflection points, changing extraction and expert cultures, mutating legal, regulatory, and mapping systems, preservation and surgical interventions, and innovative and interdisciplinary construction practices.

 

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