Imagination, Impact, and Epistemic Justice: Marisa Morán Jahn’s ISLS 2026 Keynote on Play, Care, and Storytelling

[Elissa Alves]

TIPSY by Marisa Morán Jahn. San Antonio Museum of Art, Nov 2025-Nov 2027. Photo by Anselm Seale. Image courtesy of Sapar Contemporary. This year’s ISLS Annual Meeting at UC Irvine, co-hosted by the Connected Learning Lab, was themed around “Partnering with Purpose”: building effective research-practice partnerships through cross-sector collaboration and uniting technical and socio-cultural expertise to create richer learning experiences. Embodying that theme, Tuesday’s opening keynote session featured artist and creative director Marisa Morán Jahn, whose work “exemplifies the possibilities of art as social practice” (ArtForum) and explores “civic spaces and the radical art of play” (Chicago Tribune). Jahn’s work blurs the boundaries between art, social activism, and community-driven learning. Rather than treating art as a creation to be observed, she treats it as a collaborative process where everyday people become co-creators. Jahn’s keynote talk, “Imagination, Impact, and Epistemic Justice”, drew on two decades of teaching, collaborative art, and civic media work to demonstrate that a joyful, play-centered approach can be a route to social change. She structured the talk around three long-running projects: HOOPcycle, CareForce/Carehaus, and Bibliobandido. Seeking the “Otherwise” Recreation by Marisa Morán Jahn, 2025. Permanent installation at The National Public Housing Museum, Chicago. Colin Boyle/Chicago Block Club, 2025, courtesy of Sapar Contemporary. To ground the audience, Jahn began with a quick overview of recent work, starting with ReCreation – a series of wallpapers for Chicago’s National Public Housing Museum drawing on a 1964-1972 photo archive of low-income Black mothers in Baltimore who worked to secure community health clinics, free lunches, and after-school programs for their children. What stood out to Jahn were the images of joy and solidarity, notably documented at the same moment the press was covering inner cities almost exclusively as sites of violence. “I love research,” Jahn said, “and I love looking for little pockets of moments where we can see the otherwise.” This search for the “otherwise” – reimagining existing narratives to reveal hidden potential – is central to Jahn’s methodology. Her diverse body of work ranges from TIPSY, an installation at the San Antonio Museum of Art that spills wine-colored paints down the museum’s foyer, to Art-Tek Tulltorja, a plan to convert a former brick factory in Prishtina, Kosovo into an art and technology hub. HOOPcycle: How Can Play “Bleed Into” Real Life? HOOPcycle by Marisa Morán Jahn and Rafi Segal. Permanent public artwork at The National Public Housing Museum, Chicago. 2025. Photo by the artist. HOOPcycle, a Mesoamerican and contemporary basketball court on wheels, is a mobile sculpture Jahn co-created with architect and MIT professor Rafi Segal. It has toured through the streets of Chicago and Milan, tracing a lineage that runs through ancient Mesoamerican ballcourts and the first known women’s basketball team in the US, founded at Jane Addams’ Hull House in 1893. Jahn framed the piece against Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, which argues that play is voluntary, self-contained, and separate from ordinary life – then posed her own question: how can play bleed into, and transform, real life? Her answer was to leave the rules undefined. The rim is vertical and nearly impossible to shoot into head-on, so players negotiate their own version of the game. This “invites a really broad group of people to play,” Jahn has said of the piece, many of whom wouldn’t otherwise step onto a court. With no fixed way to score, there is no wrong way to play, and no expertise required to start. CareForce and Carehaus: Finding the Right Language The NannyVan (2013-2016) is a mobile studio that accelerates the movement for domestic workers’ rights. Photo by Marisa Morán Jahn. As a pop-up, place-making project, the NannyVan unfolds in parks, transit stops, schools, and public spaces where domestic workers (nannies, housekeepers, caregivers) convene to exchange stories and resources. Marisa Morán Jahn (Studio REV-) with members of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. A humorous and touching road tale, CareForce One Travelogues (2018) features Jahn, her son Choco (aka Luca), and their buddy Anjum Asharia as they travel from their homes in NYC to Miami in a fifty-year old station wagon, the CareForce One. Meeting up with nannies, housekeepers, caregivers, and allies along the way, this series explores how care intersects with some of today’s most pressing issues — immigration, the legacies of slavery, racial discrimination, and more. The 24-minute documentary is accessible for free: http://careforce.co. Graphics by Marisa Morán Jahn. Marisa Morán Jahn (Studio REV-) with members of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Caring Across Generations CareForce, ongoing since 2010, began with Jahn’s collaboration with the National Domestic Workers Alliance and grew into two mobile studios – the NannyVan and the CareForce One – plus CareForce One Travelogues, a 2018 PBS/ITVS film following Jahn, her son Choco, and their friend Anjum Asharia driving a fifty-year-old station wagon from New York to Miami to learn how families navigate the caregiving crunch. Throughout the project, Jahn let the workers’ own words drive the narrative. “I’ve been working as a nanny for over 10 years,” one passerby told her, “but until I saw the NannyVan, I hadn’t identified as a domestic worker or someone entitled to rights.” Another worker, Ana Cipoletta, said: “On the day that I saw the CareForce One, I decided I was ready to become a leader.” Jahn connected these moments to philosopher Miranda Fricker’s concept of hermeneutical injustice – the harm that occurs when someone lacks the language for their own experience, described by Fricker as “blanks where there should be a name.” Not seeing and not recognizing, Jahn argued, is not neutral; it actively perpetuates injustice. This ethos directly informed Carehaus, the country’s first intergenerational, care-based co-housing project, which Jahn co-founded with Segal and developer Ernst Valery and has presented to members of Congress to help shape housing policy. By 2030, the US population over 80 will grow by 79 percent, while the prime caregiving-age population grows by just 1 percent, against a national shortage of 12 million homes for low-income families. Carehaus clusters independent apartments for older adults... Read more »

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