How to Conduct a Didactic Dismantlement — Shannon Mattern
Media scholar Shannon Mattern explores what it means to dismantle systems as a form of teaching, cataloguing the pedagogic possibilities of undoing.
Why we picked this
Mattern is one of the sharpest thinkers on infrastructure and media alive. Her argument that taking things apart can be as instructive as building them is the kind of idea that rearranges how you see the world.
Shannon Mattern’s lecture asks whether dismantlement, the deliberate taking apart of systems, structures, and assumptions, can itself be a pedagogic act. The title’s nod to a catalogue suggests a taxonomy of methods: ways that undoing, unbuilding, and unlearning produce knowledge that construction alone cannot.
Mattern, whose work on infrastructure, media, and urban intelligence has made her one of the most widely read scholars working at the intersection of technology and the built environment, brings a materialist sensibility to a question that could easily stay abstract. Part of the Heyman Center’s Thursday Lecture Series on “Pedagogy of the Deed.”
Free and open to the public at the Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room.