Dr. Kush Patel (they/he) is a faculty member in the Postgraduate Arts Program in Technology and Change at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design, and Technology, Manipal Academy of Higher Education in Bengaluru, where they also lead and steward the Just Futures Co-lab. They are an editorial collective member of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (JITP); a social justice pedagogies topic editor for Reviews in DH; and a founding member of the Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed Collective. To get in touch, visit their academic profile and connect with them via email at kush.patel [at] manipal.edu or on social media @kshpatel

Dr. Patel’s writings have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Digital Studies / Le champ numérique; gta Verlag (Institute for History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zurich); Journal of Architectural Education (JAE); and Public: A Journal of Imagining America, as well as in edited collections such as Digital Humanities Workshops: Lessons Learned (Routledge UK, 2023); Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Science through Critical Race Theory (The MIT Press, 2021); and Gender and Academic Leadership in Architecture in India (Avani Institute of Design, 2021) among others.

Prior to joining the Srishti Manipal Institute, Dr. Patel held faculty positions as Academic Excellence Chair and Associate Professor of Architecture and Humanities at Avani Institute of Design in Calicut; and “alt-ac” positions as Associate Faculty Librarian of Digital Pedagogy at Hatcher Graduate Library, as LSA Adjunct Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Humanities, and as Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Director of Academic Programming at the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities and Humanities Collaboratory in Ann Arbor.

Dr. Patel completed their Ph.D. in Architecture from the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, where they researched issues of participatory politics, narrative building, and social production of space in the French radical architectural works of the “post-68” period. They have served as graduate student Public Humanities Fellow with Rackham’s Program in Public Scholarship, as Engaged Pedagogy Initiative Fellow with LSA’s Office of Community-Engaged Academic Learning, as Mellon Public Humanities Summer Fellow at the U-M Detroit Center, and as Project Assistant in the Art and Architecture Special Collections. Dr. Patel is a registered architect in India and they hold professional degrees with gold medal distinction in Architecture and Urban Design from South Gujarat University, Surat and CEPT University, Ahmedabad respectively, as well as a Master of Science in Architectural Design Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.