Cohabitations: A Social, Environmental and Climate Justice Research Seminar

Please join The Bartlett School of Architecture for an interdisciplinary architectural research seminar on new social, environmental, and climate justice practice research. Three panels of research by academics and students will present research which: 

• examines gender/decolonial, conflict-sensitive, environmental and decarbonisation issues of inhabitation; 
• promotes plural modes of inhabitation, from human to nonhuman settlements; 
• prioritises indigenous communities, regions and modes of living; 
• models experimental methods of writing about social, environmental and climate justice.

Speaker biographies

Namita Vijay Dharia is a socio-cultural anthropologist and architect who researches urban South Asia, bridging design, planning and social science methodologies and theories. She is Associate Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design and the author of The Industrial Ephemeral: Labor and Love in Indian Real Estate and Construction.

Ikem Stanley Okoye is an art and architecture historian who is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware. His work focuses on African and African Diaspora landscapes, architecture(s) and art, often via critical interrogations of the historical Africanist scholarship. He is author of the forthcoming books, Where was Modernism? - An African View of the Elusive Idea and Hideous Architecture: Feint, Invention and the Occultation of an African Modern Practice.

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is an art and architectural historian at Barnard College, Columbia University, whose work centres migration, heritage politics, and feminist and colonial practices in Africa and South Asia. She is the author of Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement and Ecologies of the Past: The Inhabitations and Designs of Anil and Minnette de Silva (forthcoming), and co-editor of Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration and Spatial Violence.

Daniel A. Barber is a historian and theorist focused on interconnections between architecture and the environment. He is Professor and Chair of Architecture History and Theory at the Eindhoven University of Technology, and author of Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning. He co-edits the “Accumulation” and “After Comfort: A User’s Guide” series on the e-flux Architecture online platform.

Professor Nishat Awan (UCL Urban Laboratory) Nishat's research and teaching examine the intersection of geopolitics and space, including questions related to diasporas, migration and border regimes. Her ECR project, Topological Atlas, produced visual counter-geographies of the fragile movements of migrants as they encounter the security apparatus of the border. She is the author of Diasporic Agencies (Routledge, 2016), co-author of Spatial Agency (Routledge, 2011), and co-editor of Trans-Local-Act (aaa-peprav, 2011).

Dr Alistair Cartwright (Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, Liverpool University)Alistair's research into architectural and social histories draw on visual culture, oral history and archival analysis to track the contested occupation, adaptation and re-use of built spaces over time. His current research explores the architecture and politics of post-disaster reconstruction in Mauritius during the transition from British colony to independence.

Student presenters:

Sarina Patel, MArch Architecture (ARB/RIBA Part 2). Sarina is an architect, passionate about socially driven, environmentally conscious architecture that empowers communities and promotes ecologically and socially sustainable design.

Vaishnavi Gondane, PhD Architectural and Urban History and Theory. Vaishnavi is an architect, alumni of MA Architectural History, and incoming PhD researcher exploring colonial maritime architectures, labour histories, and decolonial methodologies.

Yichuan Chen, PhD Architectural and Urban History and Theory. Yichuan's research focuses on the history of concrete in modern China.

Divya Shah, PhD Architectural Design. Divya's research/practice focuses on gathering local stories, knowings, and situated practices of monsoon places, through immersive field methods.