Two UTSOA Faculty Receive Associate Professor Experimental Funding to Support Interdisciplinary Research

Two School of Architecture faculty members received nearly $200,000 in funding for their innovative projects from the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Provosts Office.

The projects were funded through the Associate Professor Experimental (APX), a design thinking and flash funding retreat that gives newly tenured associate professors dedicated funds and focused time to envision new research direction with colleagues in diverse academic disciplines. APX was created by the Office of the Vice President for Research together with the School for Design and Creative Technologies’ Dean Doreen Lorenzo and Julie Schell as well as UTSOA Associate Professor Tamie Glass to create a space where faculty members from different scholarly backgrounds could come together to solve interesting problems in new ways.

At the 2019 retreat, 24 participating faculty were given 24-hours to create a three-page, internal funding proposal to be reviewed and potentially accepted for funding. Of the twelve proposals submitted, only six were approved for funding, two of which involve faculty from the School of Architecture:

“Insuring Heritage: Earthquakes, Preservation, and the Valuations of Historic Buildings in Mexico”
Associate Professor Benjamin Ibarra-Sevilla partnered with Associate Professor Daniel Fridman in the Department of Sociology to examine the process that led Mexico to insure its historic buildings, giving insight to the socio-technical processes that determine the valuation of cultural heritage. Over the next year, their project will take them to Mexico for field work to uncover the processes that determine the valuation of historic buildings, the criteria for insurance valuation and, by extension, the implementation of building conservation practices and disaster recovery after the recent earthquakes of 2017.


“Sonic Spaces of Non-Hierarchy”
For their project, Associate Professor Clay Odom and African and African Diaspora Studies Associate Professor Xavier Livermon will explore liminal spaces within the built environment that are appropriated for use by African and African Diasporic communities, and cultures developing around electronic music. Combining ethnographic methods, mapping, and tools of computational design, they hope to reveal trends of appropriation and occupation by marginal communities, and to develop platforms for intervention that are both specific to cultural practices and capable of transfer between different urban conditions.


To learn more about the Associate Professor Experimental, visit: https://news.utexas.edu/2019/02/28/design-meet-research/