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Dane Carlson

Assistant Professor Art/Art History

TEACHING AREA(S)

Art / Art History

EDUCATION

  • MLA II (Master of Landscape Architecture) Harvard University
  • BLA (Bachelor of Landscape Architecture) Ball State University

CONTACT

Dane Carlson is a landscape designer and researcher. His practice (REALMS) is formed by a series of ongoing collaborations with colleagues and communities in trans-Himalayan Nepal. This work uses design as advocacy for adaptive, just landscapes which center place-specific knowledge as radical change unfolds. He has been visiting design critic in Landscape Architecture at Harvard University and environmental design strategist at UNOPS Nepal (United Nations Office for Project Services). Dane is also a lecturer in the Master of Landscape Architecture program at Washington University in St. Louis.

“Land never settles. It is about relations between the material aspects some people might think of as landscapes--water, soil, air, plants, stars--and histories, spirits, events, kinships, accountabilities, and other people that aren’t human.”

Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism, p.43.

SCHOLARLY INTERESTS

  • Co-design and climate justice
  • Himalayan landscapes of change
  • Anticolonial methodologies
  • Landscape representation

CONTRIBUTIONS TO FIELD

Rather than seeking to claim ground in an individual field, I work across landscape studies, landscape architecture, anthropology, critical design studies, science and technology studies, and other fields. Ongoing work, most of which is collectively pursued with Nepali colleagues, draws from these fields to establish methods for the collective design of landscapes in response to climate crisis, infrastructural expansion, and demographic change. This includes projects supported by UNDP and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. This and other work has been featured in Landscape Research Journal, the Journal of Landscape Architecture, Thresholds Journal, and other publications.

MEMBERSHIP AND AFFILIATION

  • Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies
  • Landscape Research Group

AWARD

  • Fulbright Scholar, Nepal 2017-2018

PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS

  • “Terai trajectories: Layering design action in the plains of Nepal” in Journal of Landscape Architecture, issue 3, 2022.
  • “Tied Across Time: The Future of Making Landscape in the High Himalaya” presentation at Dumbarton Oaks Landscapes in the Making symposium, May 2022.
  • “A Landscape that has Never Existed: Temporalities of Control and Disaster-Making in the Terai” (with Tshewang Tamang) in Thresholds Journal, issue 50, 2022.
  • “Trajectories of Practice Across Time: Moving Beyond the Histories of Landscape Architecture” (with Mariel Collard) in Landscape Research Journal, 2021.
  • “Agencies of the Present: Landscape-Making and the Herders of Lower Mustang, Nepal” in Landscape Research Journal, 2021.
  • “Emerging Hybridity and the New Vernacular” in Landscape Architecture Frontiers, volume 6, issue 3.
  • “At the Meeting of Earth and Sky: A Sacred and Profane Landscape in Upper Mustang, Nepal” in Journal of Landscape Architecture, vol. 12 2017, issue 02.

Dane Carlson CV