052-0852-23L  Diasporic Modernities and Insurgent Domesticities

SemesterFrühjahrssemester 2023
DozierendeH. A. Kennedy, T. Avermaete
Periodizitätjährlich wiederkehrende Veranstaltung
LehrspracheEnglisch


KurzbeschreibungThis seminar begins with the premise that the modern built environment has been shaped in relation to migration, diaspora, and displacement. In this class, we will explore the ways in which settlement and migration are enacted in relation to one another, tracing the ways in which architectural knowledge is created alongside transience, marginalization, and domestic insurgency.
LernzielUnstitching the fabric of empire and capitalism’s violently guarded “worlding” capacities, we will think through the insurgent labor of inhabitance at the small-scale, in precarious everyday circumstances, militarized zones of occupation, across the contested commons of formerly colonized lands, in humanitarian camps and refugee cities. By and large, these spaces are contemporary embodiments of a transformation in relations between bodies, capital, and land that has its roots in the 16th century.

Thinking with Sara Ahmed, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, and others whose work provides a powerful framework for rethinking the relationship between belonging, dispossession, and the built, we will explore the effort that goes into “uprooting” and “regrounding” homes, challenging the naturalization of homes as origins: “Being grounded,” Ahmed writes, “is not necessarily about being fixed; being mobile is not necessarily about being detached.” The readings will engage recent scholarship in architectural historiography, including the on-going work of the research collective Insurgent Domesticities, which “draws on practices that emerge from and constitute interiority, which transform the figurations, materiality, and narrations of ‘home’ and ‘domesticity’ within the present worldwide protectionist climate, in which ‘home’ is still a fiercely pursued, maintained, and guarded space.”

This course has been planned in collaboration with the international symposium Concept Histories of Settlement, co-organized by Hollyamber Kennedy and Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, that will take place this semester. In this seminar, we will study the work of the contributors to this symposium—architectural and environmental historians, urban ethnographers, film makers, architects, and activists. Students in this class are warmly invited to participate in the symposium. Together, we will propose new methodologies for writing embodied histories of the built and imagined environment that “unsettle” our settled attitudes towards inhabitance, domesticity, and the global land politics that entangles them. We will build a platform for new architectural narratives concerned with diasporic and mobile practices of belonging.
InhaltWorking with images from their current home or family environments, students will explore experimental modes of writing, narrating their own architectural stories or experiences of diaspora, domesticity, and / or insurgency. Alternatively, students can explore experimental architectural narratives of a migration story from history, tracing the relation between movement and place at the large and small scale. It is an invitation to write dissident lives “on the move,” with care, into scholarship.

This is a reading and writing-based seminar. We will engage in close readings of select critical texts and will experiment with different forms of writing about diasporic and migration space, about belonging, inhabitation, domesticity, and its mirrors—unsettlement and displacement. Students will be asked to read 1 of the 2 required readings each week and to upload a short comment on the text, including key words, to the class Miro board. Using these key words, we will build a glossary of terms for this subject.

There will be 3 short-form writing exercises due in the class which we will workshop together. At the conclusion of the course, students will have a small dossier of their own critical texts.
Voraussetzungen / BesonderesThis course is designed for Master's student level, and also open for PhD candidates.
KompetenzenKompetenzen
Fachspezifische KompetenzenKonzepte und Theoriengeprüft
Methodenspezifische KompetenzenAnalytische Kompetenzengeprüft
Soziale KompetenzenKooperation und Teamarbeitgeprüft
Sensibilität für Vielfalt geprüft
Persönliche KompetenzenKreatives Denkengeprüft
Kritisches Denkengeprüft
Integrität und Arbeitsethikgeprüft
Selbstbewusstsein und Selbstreflexion geprüft