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Teaching Architectural History as the Academy is Being Silenced

Teaching Architectural History as the Academy is Being Silenced

This workshop sought to explore the challenges of teaching architectural history in a polarized world. It examined Palestine's rich spatial and environmental history across a long chronological sweep, hoping to contribute to the collective architectural consciousness of a place. By necessity, the workshop sought to consider a palimpsest of the material, the visual, the built, the imagined, and the affective as they contribute to common or contested historical narratives of a place by reflecting on a general atmosphere of silencing in the academy — as well as the demand placed by academic freedom and broader freedoms of speech, when enjoyed, not to be silent. The workshop encouraged participants to note how teaching architectural history — in settings around the world and perhaps developing shared practices — may promote diverse consciousnesses of place, enriching and expanding perspectives through the critical construction of knowledge of architectural and environmental pasts.

Particulars of the workshop:

Hosted by the Society of Architectural Historians over Zoom on June 4, 2024, this workshop was organized by Soumya Dasgupta (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Tania Gutiérrez-Monroy (University of British Columbia), Sben Korsh (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), and Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi (Barnard College, Columbia University), and made possible through a grant from the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative.

The Panel on the Spatial and Environmental Histories of Palestine includes four 20-minute presentations, which can be used in course instruction, by Heba Mostafa, Dotan Haley, Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat, and Nasser Abourahme. The panel was introduced by Sben Korsh and moderated by Soumya Dasgupta.

On Not Being Silent: A Keynote Conversation is a 1-hour dialogue between Angela Y. Davis and Neferti Xina. M. Tadiar, moderated by Tania Gutiérrez-Monroy and Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi.

Registration for the workshop was free and open to the public. Recordings of the panel and keynote were archived below for use in teaching. The workshop’s final portion, “Speak Out! A Collective Conversation,” was not recorded so as to provide an opportunity for open discussion.

The suggested readings, PDFs of which are available via this Google Drive folder, were distributed to participants ahead of time, and were suggestions for further inquiry and not mandatory. The readings are also linked below.

Panel on the Spatial and Environmental Histories of Palestine

About the panelists, in order of presentation, including suggested readings:

Heba Mostafa received her doctorate from Cambridge University’s Department of Architecture in 2012, where she also taught courses on Islamic art and architecture. She previously held positions at the American University in Cairo and the Arab Academy for Science and Technology. She holds a B.Sc. in Architectural Engineering from Cairo University (2001) and an MA in Islamic Art and Architecture (2006) from the American University in Cairo. Between 2012 and 2014 she was the Sultan Post Doctoral Teaching Fellow/ Visiting Assistant Professor at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Department of Art History at the University of California, Berkeley, in the areas of History of Islamic Art, Architecture, and Urbanism. Between 2015–16 she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institute in Florence. Between 2014–17 she was Assistant Professor of Islamic Art, Architecture and Urbanism at the Kress Foundation Department of Art History at the University of Kansas. Heba Mostafa is the author of Architecture of Anxiety: Body Politics and the Formation of Islamic Architecture (Brill) in 2024. She specializes in the history of sacred space, embodiment, and ritual practice in Medieval Islam with a particular interest in the cultural and intellectual history of the central Islamic lands during the first century of the Islamic empire.

Dotan Halevy is a social and environmental historian of the late Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. His research explores the transformations of environmental borderlands in the Middle East and how they shape political spaces and social identities. Halevy’s doctoral dissertation, Stripped: Ruination, Liminality, and the Making of the Gaza Strip 1840-1950, is the first work to analyze how a century-long process of economic impoverishment and political marginalization made the once-central Gaza borderland into the environmentally vulnerable periphery of Palestine by the mid-twentieth century. Relying on unstudied Ottoman, Arab, and European sources, Stripped departs from the common understanding of the “Gaza Strip” solely as a consequence of the 1948 war. Instead, it situates Gaza within the history of the Eastern Mediterranean’s integration into the global economy, the Ottoman-British quest for imperial sovereignty over the corridors between Egypt and Arabia, and the struggle of colonized people across the Middle East to overcome urban and ecological destruction. Halevy’s current research project, Settling Sands: Commodification, Displacement, and the Modern Coastline 1900-1970, furthers his interest in transregional environmental borderlands. It explores how the Levantine coastal plain, sparsely populated for centuries, emerged in the modern period as an aggressive frontier of economic and political expansion.

Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat is an Assistant Professor (Senior Lecturer) at the Azrieli School of Architecture, Tel-Aviv University, and head of the research lab, Spaces-in-Transition. She currently serves on the editorial team of the peer-reviewed International Journal of Islamic Architecture. Abreek-Zubiedat finished her postdoctoral studies at ETH Zurich. She earned a doctorate with outstanding distinction in 2018 from the Technion-IIT, Haifa. Her research focuses on architecture of transitions in the Global South as sites of modern formation, including cultural politics of development aid and humanitarianism, spatialities of forced migration and the insecurity of refugees, off-grid communities and food. Her studies have been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, Journal of Urban History, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Citizenship Studies, Rethinking History Journal and chapters in Making Home(s) in Displacement and Camps Revisited. Her work has been recognized through receipt of several prestigious awards and grants, including The Rothschild fellowship; The Neubauer fellowship; The ISF grant; VATAT fellowship for Arabs; and the Azrieli Award. Her book A Territory in Conflict: Eras of Development and Urban Architecture in Gaza will be published in winter 2024-2025 under the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Nasser Abourahme works between comparative colonial history, political geography, and political theory. His teaching and research interests include borders and migration; histories of encampment and carcerality; settler colonialism and race; revolution and revolt; Marxism and global Le thought; the anticolonial tradition; and the question of Palestine. He is also very interested in questions of critical pedagogy and the training of critical methods. Currently Abourahme is working on two broad but connecting tracks of research. The first thinks about how the global stakes of mass migration and mass encampment today might be read in the arc of colonial history. Against the reactionary presentism of mass migration as “crisis” but also beyond a simple reckoning with the coloniality of the border regime, he thinks about the concepts and political forms we can draw from movement and migrancy struggles in colonial history. He is particularly interested in how some of our most urgent concepts and practices in the politics of migration are prefigured in settler colonial history. The second track revolves around the concept of revolution and what can be thought of as its various temporalities. It takes the present as an age that seems defined by open-ended revolt or uprising—but decisively not revolution—to ask how the concept of revolution might be rethought from the archives of anticolonial thought and practice.

On Not Being Silent: A Keynote Conversation

About the keynote speakers, including suggested readings:

Neferti Xina M. Tadiar is Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College. She is the author of: Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (2009), and Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order(2004), which was awarded the Philippine National Book Award in Cultural Criticism for 2005. She is also co-editor of Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation (with Angela Y. Davis). Her most recent book Remaindered Life (Duke University Press, 2022), is a meditation on the disposability and surplus of life-making under contemporary conditions of the global empire of capital. Professor Tadiar joined the faculty of Barnard in 2006, after teaching in the Department of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz for ten years, and before that, at the University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines. Her academic interests include transnational and third world feminisms; postcolonial and Marxist theory; critical theories of race and subjectivity; literary and social theory; cultural studies of the Asia Pacific region; Southeast Asia and Philippine studies. Professor Tadiar's work examines the role of cultural practice and social imagination in the production of wealth, power, marginality, and liberatory movements in the context of global relations. Her research focuses on contemporary as well as historical Philippine and Filipino cultures and their relation to political and economic change, while addressing broader issues of gender, race, and sexuality in the discourses and material practices of colonialism, nationalism, transnationalism, and globalization.

Angela Y. Davis is known internationally for her ongoing work to combat all forms of oppression in the U.S. and abroad. Over the years she has been active as a student, teacher, writer, scholar, and activist/organizer. She is a living witness to the historical struggles of the contemporary era. Professor Davis's political activism began when she was a youngster in Birmingham, Alabama, and continued through her high school years in New York. But it was not until 1969 that she came to national attention after being removed from her teaching position in the Philosophy Department at UCLA as a result of her social activism and her membership in the Communist Party, USA. In 1970 she was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List on false charges, and was the subject of an intense police search that drove her underground and culminated in one of the most famous trials in recent U.S. history. During her sixteen-month incarceration, a massive international "Free Angela Davis" campaign was organized, leading to her acquittal in 1972. Professor Davis's long-standing commitment to prisoners' rights dates back to her involvement in the campaign to free the Soledad Brothers, which led to her own arrest and imprisonment. Today she remains an advocate of prison abolition and has developed a powerful critique of racism in the criminal justice system. She is a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex. Internationally, she is affiliated with Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organization based in Queensland, Australia that works in solidarity with women in prison.

About the workshop organizers:

Soumya Dasgupta (he/him) is a Ph.D. Candidate in Architecture (History and Theory) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. His scholarly interests include postcolonial urban geographies, neoliberal developmentalism, digital technocracy, Global South, and South Asia. He has assisted in teaching graduate-level history, theory, and design courses and served as an external reviewer at various undergraduate and graduate design studios. Dasgupta is an awardee of the Humanities Research Institute Graduate Fellowship for 2023-24 and is a former recipient of the Illinois Distinguished Fellowship for his Ph.D. studies. He holds a certificate in Criticism and Theory from Cornell University, a Master's in Urban Design from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, and a B.Arch. from the Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology Shibpur, Kolkata, India.

Tania Gutiérrez-Monroy (she/ella), assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, is an architectural historian who studies architecture as a material and signifying practice that spatializes colonial and patriarchal forces as well as resistance mechanisms. Her research focuses on the ways in which different categories of identity intersect, are negotiated in, and transform space. Thematically, her work spans historical examples of ephemeral and practiced architectures, race and gender in spaces of conflict, and landscapes of Indigenous resistance. Prior to joining UBC, Tania was an assistant professor at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She holds a PhD and an MSc in Architecture from McGill University, as well as a BArch from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of Architectural Education, Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, and Breaking the Bronze Ceiling: Women, Memory, and Public Space (eds. Valentina Rozas-Krause and Andrew Shanken, Fordham University Press).

Sben Korsh (he/him) is a PhD Candidate in Architecture at the University of Michigan, completing a dissertation on student debt and the neoliberalization of architecture education in the United States. Korsh has assisted in teaching courses to undergraduate and master’s students about architecture history, professional practice, and thesis seminars. He holds a BA from the City University of New York, an MS from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MPhil from the University of Hong Kong, all in the history and theory of architecture. He is a member of the Graduate Employees’ Organization, union Local 3550 within the American Federation of Teachers.

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi (she/her) is an architectural historian at Barnard College, Columbia University, and author of Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press, Theory of Forms series, 2024). The book conceptualizes architectures of migration and the problematics of settlement through the spatial politics, visual rhetoric, ecologies, and long colonial traditions of the UNHCR-administered camps at Dadaab, in Northeastern Kenya near the border with Somalia, which offer an epistemological vantage point within African and Muslim worlds. Siddiqi is writing a book titled Ecologies of the Past, which examines a history of the practices of architect Minnette de Silva and art historian Anil de Silva-Vigier. Their feminisms, environmentalisms, artistic and archival practices, and attention to craft and construction labor provide a singular reflection on twentieth-century histories and landscapes, against backdrops of empire, radical economic change, and militarization and armed conflict.

Resources on the built environment and ongoing genocide of people in Gaza and Palestine:

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