Call for papers for the spring 2023 annual PhD symposium at Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning

The History of Architecture and Urbanism Society at Cornell University is hosting a symposium this year to explore architectural histories that grapple with the scarring and marring of lands, buildings, and bodies caused by forced occupation, violent displacement, and extractive practices associated with modernity under totalitarian, colonial, or neo-colonial regimes in any part of the world during the twentieth century.

Architectural history, like other fields in the humanities, has been struggling with new approaches to awaken critical consciousness of the ongoing unjust systems of power-knowledge and address the coloniality of modernity in architecture around the world. We wonder how our architectural history can destabilize the coloniality of race, violence, and place. How can we shake the imperial ideas that constitute modernity in and of itself? Finally, might our work ignite transformative resistance and reinscription practices in both historical and architectural thinking?

This symposium will address these disciplinary difficulties by presenting research that reconsiders and expands our understanding of the role of architecture in the construction of power structures that supported fascism, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism during the 1900s. Papers should investigate specific architectural, spatial, and material practices and demonstrate how they aided in the occupation, taming, disciplining, and control of places and people—as well as the nonhuman, natural, and material. We particularly welcome work that sheds light on the histories of contested spaces and architectures, as well as voices of anticolonial agency, heterogeneity, and intersectional diversity, in our search for histories and discourses that are neither exclusionary nor limited to established colonial and imperial realities.

Submission details
Submit your paper title and abstract (250–300 words) with your name and affiliation through the Cornell AAP website form by February 17, 2023. Authors of accepted papers will be notified by February 24, 2023, via email and will be asked to submit a full draft (3,000–3,200 words) by April 14, 2023. More details can be found on the event webpage.