Practice
Educator programs
Workshops, multi-session courses, and seminars for teachers, school leaders, and museum educators, online and in person. Topics include how harm works, including structural harm and its afterlives; Holocaust and genocide education; and the social challenges of the 21st century, from the future of democracy to the ways digital technologies are reshaping belonging. On technology, we go beyond identifying harmful content: we explore how algorithms decide what becomes visible, how they shape attention and learning, and how old patterns of harm find new routes online.
Each course is shaped around the institution and the people in the room. Participants leave with a new lens for seeing how the past works in the present, along with frameworks, materials, and exercises they can bring into their own classrooms. Afterward, they become part of our intellectual piazza: an ongoing community with continued conversations, resources, and gatherings.
Research and evaluation
We listen before we design. As social scientists, we combine qualitative and quantitative methods, from interviews, focus groups, and listening sessions to surveys and data analysis. We help institutions understand what their educators, visitors, and communities are actually experiencing, and we evaluate whether a course, exhibition, or program is doing what it set out to do. We pay attention not only to what people say, but to the routines and assumptions that shape their work. Findings come in whatever form is most useful, always with practical recommendations.
Frameworks and curricula
We work with our own framework, Harm as Accumulation, which traces how violence leaves behind ideas, institutions, and conditions that travel, change form, and resurface over time. We also help schools, museums, and organizations develop frameworks of their own, along with lesson plans, units, discussion guides, and educator resources shaped to their context and created with the people who will use them.
Museums and public programs
With museums and cultural institutions, we develop exhibitions, interpretive approaches, and public programs that invite visitors to think, not only to remember. Bringing together research and design, we help conceptualize spaces in which the arrangement of objects, words, and movement shapes how visitors encounter the past and the questions they bring with them today. Programs carry this work further through guided experiences, discussion formats, and educator resources.
Strategy and advising
For schools, districts, museums, and organizations in a period of change, we offer strategic planning and advising grounded in research. We help institutions build professional learning and coaching systems, navigate contested topics and moments of community tension, design new programs and initiatives, and develop thoughtful approaches to artificial intelligence. Throughout, we pay attention to the people who will carry the work, because strategies succeed or fail in everyday practice.
How we work
Every project begins with listening: to the institution, and to the educators, visitors, and communities it serves. We design with them rather than for them, test ideas in practice, and refine them together. We approach contested subjects with care: not to tell people what to think, but to help them think things through. As a small studio, we work on every project ourselves, and draw on a network of scholars, artists, and designers when a project calls for it. Alongside our commissioned work, we develop our own frameworks to help educators and institutions see how social phenomena connect, and what we learn in each project flows back into them, so our work keeps growing with the people who use it.
Pro bono
We set aside part of our time for communities and grassroots initiatives that could not otherwise afford this kind of work. If you are a teacher, a community group, or a small organization working on these questions, reach out. Where we cannot help directly, we will try to connect you with people who can. This is part of what we mean by an intellectual piazza: a public space everyone can enter.