United States
The Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research (CAD+SR) is an international nonprofit based in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 2017, on the principle of supporting and centering multiple and heterogeneous ways of knowing in contemporary research, the Center was conceptualized as a project outside of and in between existing educational institutions. It is an archipelagic (Édouard Glissant) research program distributed across different places and forms to host people from diverse global locations, creating transitory spaces to gather, share, and learn. Now after more than forty research fellowships granted and twenty research residencies and convenings, held in collaboration with cultural organizations, artists’ collectives, and educational institutions in Brazil, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Kenya, Mexico, South Africa, Turkey, and the United States, the Center serves as a meeting ground for a trans-local community of artists, researchers, and activists. The Center is both theoretical and practical, a place of thought and action. This is expressed as a rigorous and creative transdisciplinarity in the architecture of pedagogical experiences, and an emphasis on pluriversal epistemologies and diversities of experience through sustained engagement with indigenous, diasporic, queer, trans, post/de-colonial thought, and emerging forms of digital knowledges, to name only a few.