How are settlement and migration enacted in relation to one another? What fictions of land and architecture live inside ‘settled’ histories of the colonized world? Through towns and camps, enclaves and ghettos, partitions and borderlands, this symposium studies the conversion of oceans, deserts, and forests into architectures, infrastructures, and territories. These sessions seek to ask how the homes of people and animals, now borderlands, frontiers, and wastelands, have been remembered and narrated. Within these forms and narratives live concept histories of settlement.

This symposium is presented in conjunction with the Insurgent Domesticities Roundtable on March 27, 2025.
(Separate event: more info here)

Presentations

Nasser Abourahme is an Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Bowdoin College, and the author of The Time beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony (Duke University Press).

Nitin Bathla is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geography at the University of Zurich and a lecturer in the Department of Architecture at ETH Zürich. He is the author of the award-winning book Researching Otherwise: Pluriversal Methodologies in Landscape and Urban Studies and the incoming Debates and Interventions editor at the journal Urban Geography. His teaching and research focus on urban studies and political ecology, with particular attention to commoning, landscape restoration, labour, and infrastructure geography.

Hollyamber Kennedy is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Northwestern University. She researches and teaches modern architectural and landscape history, with an emphasis on heritage politics and the material and environmental legacies of colonial building cultures and land practices. Focusing on transregional links between sub-Saharan Africa and Central and Eastern Europe, her work investigates the ways in which architecture and infrastructure facilitated imperial governance and reshaped agrarian modernities through rural modernization projects across the 19th and 20th centuries.

Rafico Ruiz is the Associate Director of Research at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. He holds an ad personam PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture and Communication Studies from McGill University. His research examines the relationships between architecture, infrastructure, and the environment across the circumpolar world. He was recently a SSHRC Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta. He is the author of Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier and the co-editor with Melody Jue of Saturation: An Elemental Politics (both with Duke University Press).

Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of California, San Diego—on unceded Kumeyaay land—where he is also co-director of the Just Transitions Initiative, member of the Indigenous Futures Institute, and faculty in the Design Lab. Shvartzberg Carrió researches the architectural and urban history of modernism in the Americas with a focus on technology, law, geopolitics, labor, Indigeneity, and racial capitalism across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is an architectural historian and Assistant Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, and author of Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press), on the spatial politics, ecologies, iconography, visual rhetoric, and long colonial traditions of the UNHCR-administered camps at Dadaab, Kenya. She is the author of Minnette De Silva: Intersections (Mack Books), and her book manuscript Ecologies of the Past: The Inhabitations and Designs of Anil and Minnette de Silva analyzes the politics of heritage environments through the work of Sri Lankan architect Minnette de Silva and art historian Anil de Silva-Vigier.

Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar is Associate Professor of History at Brown University. She works on decolonization, displacement, war, non-violence, anticolonial practice, and the visual archive. Her book, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (Columbia University Press, 2007; Penguin India 2008; Mashal Books, Urdu edition, 2014) combined oral histories with archival research to examine the signficance of refugees in nation-state formation in the devastating aftermath of 1947. Stories from the book have been performed by the Delhi-based Dastangoi.

Responses

Esra Akcan is a Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Architecture at Cornell University and a board member at the Institute for Comparative Modernities. Akcan's research on modern and contemporary architecture and urbanism foregrounds the intertwined histories of Europe, West Asia, and Northeast Africa and offers new ways to understand architecture's role in global, social, and environmental justice. She has written extensively on critical and postcolonial theory, racism, immigration, reparations and transitional justice, architectural photography, translation, neoliberalism, and global history.

Brian Larkin is the Director of Graduate Studies and a Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University. His research focuses on the ethnography and history of media in Nigeria. Most broadly he examines the introduction of media technologies into Nigeria—cinema, radio, digital media—and the religious, political, and cultural changes they bring about. He explores how media technologies comprise broader networked infrastructures that shape a whole range of actions from forms of political rule, to new urban spaces, to religious and cultural life.

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).

Keynote

Ananya Roy is a Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography and The Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the founding Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA, which advances research and scholarship concerned with displacement and dispossession in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the world. Working in alliance with social movements and community organizations, the Institute seeks to build power and abolish structures of inequality.

Please email [email protected] to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. This event will be recorded. By being present, you consent to the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.

Image: Kuruvungna Village Springs and Cultural Center in Los Angeles
Photo: Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi