KRISTEN NEVILLE TAYLOR, 2021

Protean Pedagogy

Over the past year, from the early days of the pandemic until the advent of the vaccine, I researched the history of 7301 Milnor Street for the Superfund Dossier. This binder documents the Metal Bank Superfund Site’s development: its environmental degradation and other contextual histories, its immediate surroundings and the greater Philadelphia area. For my Site Response, I shift my focus from the Site’s legacy of harm to proposals and happenings I encountered in my research that might transform and re-envision the Site. I draw inspiration from several events, including a bid for a place-based school called the River Academy, imagined by the Stroud Center for Water Research at the University of Pennsylvania. I imagine this collection of stories and proposals as a kind of field guide — a protean pedagogy — for rethinking and reshaping the Site. In the frontispiece, I created a nonlinear organization for this collection of anecdotes, which centers archival information as well as ephemeral and multidirectional histories, from the highlighted stories shared here to lightning storms and sky patterns, seeds and specimens, and the tall grass deer have turned into bedding on the Site. Each shard of information supports a structure that allows for a spectrum of narratives and temporalities to coalesce like plate tectonics moving, colliding, and remaking the human/nature relationship.