This talk connects Paulo Freire’s co-intentional pedagogy with Karimi's current book project, Survival by Design, which examines desert architecture as a critical archive for thinking and teaching in an era of accelerating environmental collapse. Drawing on research tracing how modernist visions circulated through (and often misread) Iran’s arid landscapes, this talk argues that the desert’s infrastructural traditions, from qanats to windcatchers, illuminate forms of ecological intelligence that modernism and geopolitics alike have failed to apprehend. This framework gains urgency in light of Iran’s recent heat disasters, water shortages, and infrastructural breakdowns, where the ecological crisis has become a terrain of political struggle. Alongside this intellectual trajectory, the speaker reflects on their own pedagogical and curatorial practices (including immersive fieldwork, studio-based inquiry, and VR environments) as methods for cultivating embodied, critical engagements with space. Together, these strands propose a pedagogy rooted in action, imagination, and the transformative possibilities emerging from sites of acute environmental precarity.

Speaker

Pamela Karimi is a historian of modern and contemporary architecture whose work examines how design mediates politics, environmental crisis, and cultural transformation in the Middle East and beyond. She is the author of Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iran, Women, Art, Freedom: Artists and Street Politics in Iran, and Alternative Iran: Contemporary Art and Critical Spatial Practice, and co-editor of several volumes, including (with Nasser Rabbat of MIT) The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in the Middle East. Her forthcoming book Survival by Design: Desert Architecture at the End of the World foregrounds desert infrastructures as models for ecological futures. Karimi’s curatorial and pedagogical projects (including immersive exhibitions) foreground architecture’s role in shaping shared futures.

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