Particular Questions in Architectural Theory: Pressure Points - The Subjects of Race and Feminism

Abstract

This course examines architecture through a set of lenses developed in Black studies, feminist technoscience theory, Black queer/trans studies. In asking questions around exclusion and belonging in the contemporary study of spaces, the course explores how constructs around race & gender have created interlocking forms of oppression that permeate the culture practice and discipline of architecture.

Objective

The seminar uses close readings of texts and weekly written reading responses as a means to develop intersectional reading and writing practices. In addition to weekly in class-discussions and reading responses, students will synthesize the cultural, architectural, spatial and design implications of the seminar’s topics by submitting a final research paper. These assignments will be the medium for students to test and share their ideas on the ever-changing mutations of racism. The course will provide space to: 1. Develop a critical vocabulary that draws on Black aesthetic theory, critical race theory, Black studies and Black feminist and eco-feminism 2. Critically assess built spaces with geographic and historical specificity that accounts for the uniqueness of racialized violence alongside attendant acts of refusal. 3. Hone a practice of citation by synthesizing your own ideas and arguments alongside themes presented in the assigned reading sets. 4. Identify categories of concepts that maintain white Western hegemony and develop a toolkit that begins to re-articulate architectural history and theory against the grain.

Content

The course will alert students to the problematics of white Western modernity’s use of race and gender to create certain categories of populations: the vulnerable, dispossessed, and disenfranchised as an entry point to discuss alternative narratives around difference. The course will question such frames as way to apply pressure points on the accepted histories of architecture and the built environment. Readings will include contemporary concepts of abolition, Black aesthetic theories of fabulation and futurism, Black feminist poetics, and critical race theory, among others. We will read Sabine Broek, Tavia Nyong’o, SA Smythe, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and Sylvia Wynter, to name a few. The full syllabus with weekly reading sets can be viewed on our course webpage.

Resources