 Okay, welcome everyone to the Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration panel discussion. Thank you for joining us both in person and online. I'm Bryony Roberts. I teach here at Columbia GSTAP in the architecture program, and I'll be moderating this event. This event is co-presented by the Barnard Center for Research on Women, or BCRW, and Columbia GSTAP. And it's wonderful that these two institutions are coming together to support a conversation about experiences of gender and sexuality in the built environment. And hopefully there'll be many more such conversations to come. We're grateful to Dean Hawke of GSTAP for including this event as part of the Dean's lecture series and to the co-directors of the BCRW, Pramila Nathison, and Janet Jacobson for their support of this event. We'd also like to thank A.V. Cummings, Professors Beck, Jordan Young, and Karen Fairbanks at Barnard for their support, and Stefan Bodiker, Shannon Whirl, and Lucy Kressbach at GSTAP for the help in making this event possible. I'll shortly hand it over to Anuradha Ayrsadiki, who will be introducing our wonderful speakers and respondents. Anuradha organized this event and co-edited along with Rachel Lee, the series of scholarly essays on feminist architectural histories of migration that we'll be celebrating tonight. Anuradha is an assistant professor of architecture at Barnard and is also affiliated with the Barnard Department of Art History and several departments at Columbia University, the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society, the Institute of African Studies, South Asia Institute, and GSTAP. She's modestly asked me to keep her bio brief, but I will just say that through her work as a scholar and educator, Anuradha is profoundly expanding histories of the built environment. In addressing themes of migration, she destabilizes the subject matter of architectural history and transforms the process of writing history into a co-creative experience of care. This editorial project with Rachel Lee is a remarkable work of scholarship and of cross-border community building. Growing from the lineages of intersectional and decolonial feminisms, this project further challenges the fixity of ideas of subjecthood, statehood, authorship, and architecture, and in doing so builds radically collaborative methods of writing histories. Please join me in welcoming Anuradha Ayrsadiki. Thanks so much, Bryony. How is the sound? Is it okay? Talking into the microphone, great. So welcome to the launch of our collection, Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration. I, too, want to echo Bryony's thanks to the organizers, many organizers, and really I have the honor of serving on the BCRW advisory board, and I very much hope that this is the first of many collaborations with colleagues concerned with architecture, the built environment, spatial practices, and their histories. We're so very grateful. I'll speak for myself and my co-editor, Rachel Lee, and also our authors to our respondents and moderators, Bryony Roberts, Atia Korakivala, and the GSAP-X Plus students whose vision brought us here, Anais Halftmeyer, Rebecca Siqueiros, and Sofia Strabo. So my co-editor, Rachel Lee, is unable to join us, but she's here in spirit, so please imagine her hovering around and saying something hilarious and inappropriate, which is what she's best at. And it's really my pleasure to launch a series of essays and scholarly articles that concern migration as a method for understanding histories of the built environment. If we imagine architecture as something fixed, we do so because its histories are written in large part without questioning the fixity and landed wealth of archives. The articles and essays in this collection, instead, imagine the past and the future with the migrant, and construct narratives of people and things whose migrations form the basis of understanding environments or whose environments leave traces of migrations. Authors in this collection and their narratives are located all over the world, providing deeply situated histories, which, when read together, form connected global histories. The articles and the essays in this collection were published in installments over the past three years. There were three installments in three online platforms, and you see the front pages of each of those on the screen here. They also show a progression of theory on a theory of margins, a theory of diffractions, and a theory of collaborations. The feminist qualifier is an analytic that emerged in understanding the margins, diffractions, and collaborations of migrant histories. Rachel and I found ourselves understanding that by following migrants and migrations, we were necessarily coming into a kind of provincialization of those landed and fixed histories of architecture. And that provincialization of the normative archive is perhaps the first step in writing feminist histories. We found ourselves articulating histories of migration by following architectures and figures from the perspective of the margins through diffractions and in collaborations and important progression for feminist theorizations. We thought we would test ways of scaffolding this work that lacked its own edifices. Understanding the femorality of digital platforms for scholarship, we worked with the metaphor they offer to underscore the problem and themes at hand. So we're very grateful to the editors of three digital platforms. The scholarly peer-reviewed platform ABE, Architecture Beyond Europe. You see the page on the very right. That publication date is 2019, but it was launched in 2020. Thanks to editors Tanya Sengupta, Johann Lager and Ricardo Agares. Second, the visual and aural platform, the Canadian Center for Architecture, they released essays one by one in 2020 and 2021. Thanks to editors Alexandra Pereira Edwards and Albert Ferre. And finally, the scholarly and theoretically-minded platform, Aggregate, which launched the remainder of the collection in 2022. And we'd like to thank editors Meredith Tenhoor, Pamela Karimi, and Elliot Sturtevant. Thanks to all these editors, this is a collection of uniformly excellent research and writing magical narratives and entirely new approaches to seeing and storytelling. And you'll get to hear from some of those authors tonight. Releasing the collection over these three years, while in effect of the practical problem of editing and production, it allowed us to make time our accomplice to conscript into the process of publication forms of weighting and anticipation that are akin to the process of reading and allowed us to build the pathway from margins through diffractions into collaborations in solidarity with many authors. Rachel and I worked on migration long before the pandemic, but it's been meaningful to see these publications marking the first few years of the pandemic when the questions within them have been brought to the forefront. These questions of how to write anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, anti-castist, and anti-formalist architectural histories in historiographical solidarity with people in the past and present who've been de-territorialized and dispossessed of land and home. This has been a project of writing intersectional histories and we follow many thinkers such as Audre Lorde or Bell Hooks, who argue that there is no feminism without intersections. We find our feminist architectural histories of migration in the protests of Shaheen Bagh, the fishing villages of Nigeria, spaces of sex work at military bases in the Philippines, construction projects in Haiti and Brasilia, spaces of care in Cape Town's Somali malls, birthing clinics at the Mexico-U.S. border, a dining table in Ticino, Switzerland, the work of Silvia Federici, Simone de Beauvoir, and Gloria Anzaldua, pierambulations in Harlem and Delhi, Hong Kong's offices and classrooms, Barcelona's mansanas, apartments in Vienna and Istanbul, the rooftops of Tehran, and the nail houses of Shenzhen. We follow builders, refugees, dissidents, exiles, and even architects, thinking with and assessing the work and migrations of Cheng Yingsi, Sybil Molinage, Georgette Cotenuziol, Margrethe Schutely-Hotsky, Perin Mistry, Minnet de Silva, Susana Antonakakis, Lina Bobardi, Flora Ruchat-Romkati. And to better explain these stories and the collection as a whole, I'd like to present it through one of the edifices that we attempted to create, to house and grow the work. Rachel and I invited the readers listed here on the left side of the screen to select excerpts from articles that we assigned to them and film themselves reading them aloud in solidarity with this project. So we're very grateful to Will Davis, one of the authors, who edited a video in a format that articulates the connections between authors, histories, readers, and wider audiences around the world. We're also very grateful to these careful, critical readers for producing a citational scaffold around this work. So I urge you to watch the full video to gain a sense of the collection, and I'm going to show you some excerpts tonight to explain the thrust of the three dossiers and give you a sense of some of the articles. Hello, everyone. My name is Esraakja, and I'm reading an excerpt from On Margins, Feminist Architecturalistries of Migration, written by Anu Siddiqui and Rachel Lee. Since 2015, there has been an upsurge in scholarly interventions that engage with migration and exile. The crisis perceived in Europe has impacted European traditions of architectural history, architecture culture, and discourse. Thus, the writing on architecture and the built environment resulting from this term has tended to focus on contemporary displacement related to cities, landscape, and social fabric in Europe. These have broadly drawn from a Eurocentric perspective of border transgression. Rather than taking migration as an ontological condition to be understood from the migrant's perspective. In contrast, the essays in this theme section and related contributions in this issue of architecture beyond Europe examine a longer time frame and wider geographical scope in order to consider architectural migration historically. While most recent spatial studies of migration and exile are rooted in the social sciences, the essays here suggest a humanities approach that can open up wider historical debates to encompass the territorial, economic, and geopolitical aspects of migration, as well as those of material culture, ecologies, and labour. Thank you, and congratulations to the editors. My name is Joanne Boyer, and I'll read an excerpt from the piece titled Convivium, Flora Rousharonkati's Practice, and it's by Irina Davidovich and Katrin Albrecht. Embedding her professional and teaching practices in the most productive social rituals led not only to a strengthening of her connections, but eventually her own professional empowerment. However, feeding people was not a strategic choice, nor a way of pursuing a hidden political agenda. Rather, this aspect of Rousharonkati's life may be placed under the sign of convivium, simply the gathering of work colleagues, teaching assistants, family, and friends around the dining table. As her daughter remarked, and I quote, nona separato le cose, end of quote, she didn't separate things. In keeping with both cultural custom and personal history, the social expectation of playing hostess was an integral and productive part of Rousharonkati's life. At the same time, this readiness to mix categories such as personal life, work relationships, teaching relationships, and so forth, can also be read as an unwillingness in ability even to separate them. The notion of convivium is the first step in understanding Rousharonkati's life and work. Hi, my name is Olga Tulumi and I'm reading an excerpt from If On A Winter's Night Azadi by Sarovar Zaldi and Samrati Pani. Are we to accept the barricades, the baseloads of gun-taughting police and the use of excessive force as the new ordinary? Does the folding in of the protest into the ordinary through repeated marches, banners, and sit-ins make the protest lose its impact as the analysts claim? Perhaps the protests have run their course in providing material for television debates, academic papers, artist projects, and hate speeches. Has difference finally set itself in a quiet repetition? Has the apparatus of the state figured out how to enumerate these differences? Are we fighting for elections for schools and not for the rights of the protesting students? Is protest the only apparatus left that can occupy the street, create the street, and hold together democracy? Do we exist because we're alive or because we hold a piece of paper or a flag in our hands? Is repeating the chant of freedom, our beauty, our bravery, or our naivete? My name is Nurah Akkawi. I'm reading an excerpt from On Diffractions, Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration by Anuradha Irsiddipi and Rachel Lee, where the authors introduce this wonderful and much-needed collection of essays. It starts with a quote from Diffracting Diffraction, Cutting Together Apart by Karen Barad. Diffractions are untimely. Time is out of joint. It is diffracted, broken apart in different directions, non-contemporaneous with itself. Each moment is an infinite multiplicity. These diffractions are more precisely these narratives of a moment of diffraction, churn and return, revisiting time and time frames. They loosen sediment and surface fresh entanglements, opening the past to arrays of new presence and futures. Situated but unfixed, the movement inherent to their making and remaking as they expand and contract interweaves chronologies and shapes dynamic grounds for fluid interpretation. The interactivity of connected time frames across territories through which architectures are negotiated is itself migrated. My name is Maria Novas and I'm reading an excerpt from Burden Borders and Bodies, American Crossings by Laurie Brown. Heberich's historical analysis describes how changes in economic systems disproportionately affect women. Globalization produces, according to Heberich's, the feminization of poverty. Although women are integrated into this economy, specifically given the search and manufacturing jobs of the North American free trade agreement produced, the current phase of globalization has resulted in the massive numbers of Central Americans and Mexicans fleeing their homelands in pursuit of employment and safety. Thousands hope to forge different futures crossing into the U.S. and overflowing the capacities of shelters and border processing stations. Religious non-profit and private organizations like the Burden centers I have described here have responded to building men's halls left by recruiting government policies. The creative flexibility and adaptability of those providing care demonstrate how buildings can be reimagined to perform in many unending ways and uses. I'm the artist. My name is Rachel Lee and I am reading from On Collaboration's feminist architectural histories of migration. Migration unsettles and resettles. It implies the spatial reconstruction of lives and domesticities at different locations across borders and within unfamiliar cultural contexts. Migration exposes vulnerabilities and uncertainties. It lays bare power on balances and social and spatial injustices. Examining architecture through the lens of migration clarifies the relations and interdependencies undergirding spatial production, built form, use and understandings of the constructed environment. This method illuminates the diffracting trajectories of people and things in migration revealing histories that may otherwise have remained inscrutable and illuminating the diversity of agencies, processes and practices that do not fit immediately into received categories of thought. Thinking with migration unravels neatly packaged narratives of individually authored buildings exposing more complex arcs of vibrant co-production. Perhaps most staunchly, migration as a concept draws a bold circle around masculinist forms and practices of history writing that do not depend upon love and camaraderie for their sheer existence. So I'll give Rachel the last word there and just want to thank these readers and also the authors of this wonderful collection. Rachel and I would really like to acknowledge their fine work and great patience as this project came together. So tonight we attempted to gather authors of some of the long format scholarly articles. In addition to those I'm honored to share the stage with, Allow Me to Acknowledge Zhuandu who hosted an in-person launch of this collection in November at the University of Toronto and is the author of The Nailhouse of the Sent Down Girl, Exile and Migration in China's Modern City, as well as Laurie A. Brown who was unable to join us this evening and is the author of Burthing, Borders and Bodies, American Crossings. So tonight we will hear from S. E. Eisterer, author of two of the articles, Dear Comrade or Exile in a Communist World, Resistance, Feminism and Urbanism in Margrethe Sztuglihodski's work in China, 1934-1956, and Spatial Practices of Dissidence, Identity, Fragmentary Archives and the Austrian Resistance in Exile, 1938-1945. She will be followed by Armagan Ziye, the author of On Contradictions, The Architecture of Women's Resistance and Emancipation in Early 20th Century Iran, then Eunice Seng, the author of Working Women and Architectural Work, Hong Kong 1945-1985, and finally Ross Exo Adams, the author of Enclosed Bodies, Locating Serdas Urbanizacion within Federici's History of Capitalism. Ross will join us on Zoom. Following that, we'll have responses first from Professor Atia Korakula, then the GSAP-X Plus students, and then Bryony Roberts, who will moderate the Q&A to follow. So, if I may, I would like to invite S. E. to the podium. Thank you, Anu. Thank you so much, Anu, for the invitation to present here tonight, and I'm just going to present a very short reflection on my second essay that Anu just mentioned for the Collection on Collaboration. Maybe we can go to the next slide. On the issue of on collaboration, I wanted to acknowledge the help of many, many people who were involved in shaping this essay, and because we're at Columbia, I particularly want to thank Elliot Stubisant, who worked tirelessly to make this collection possible in the context of aggregate, and I also want to note that, and Meredith knows this very well, it was very important for me that this essay be fragmentary, that two narratives can run in parallel to one another, and Elliot worked to kind of make that fragmentary nature of the essay possible. So, a guest house, an apartment, a safe house, an editorial office, a cultural institute, a farm, a cover, a font, a translation, a letter exchange, and a cryptic message, or a single word. Resistance and exile against the Nazi regime was formulated in ordinary spaces. It materialized in mundane rooms, buildings, and landscapes, in private domestic settings, and semi-public places. These spaces were clandestine, and often they were temporary, and they constituted the backdrop against which artifacts of dissidence, textual and visual, were created. In my essay for Feminist Architectural Histories and of Migration, with the title Special Practices of Dissidence, I sought to illuminate sites of dissidence in immigration, exile, and internment, and four twin fragments, and in two main storylines. These narratives constitute histories of both suffering and defiance, or what historian Ernst Lübe understood as the twin character of exile. In this brief reflection, it's important for me to point out two main things. First, how my essay took up the important interventions posited by the collection editors, and second, the arguments I sought to make within that context. In their earliest versions of the call, Britschelie and Anurada Isidiki made two critical arguments in framing the collection from a feminist perspective. That is, how to write both from a place of situatedness and a view from the body falling down a hair away, while taking in consideration the fundamental instability of historiographies, biographies, histories, and objects, as well as archives that are being made in conditions of exile, migration, and in the case I'm telling, internment. I took up these questions by writing a comparative history, if one will, of two groups of people who conduct the resistance work against the Nazi regime between 1938 and 1945. And one of these histories moves from Turkey to Austria, and the other history moves from Paris to New York. Histories of resistance have often been structured around nation states or political groups that organized said dissident activity. One of the histories in my essay follows this trajectory in part and is based on the labors of working class women. But the other narrative, and this is critical and does these structures and follows with literary scholars such as Dr. Bischoff, Esther Kirchman, and Christoph Gabriel have articulated as a main characteristic of artistic production and conditions of exile that is quote, to formulate a claim to cultural belonging beyond claims to state power and territorial demarcation. And this is a notion of culture resistance as it was first articulated in Jewish studies. In fact, scholars in Jewish studies, English, German, and literature have long argued that production of text and exile has rendered exilic conditions legible, and for me architecture too mediated these conditions. In the essay one of the major questions is why architectural history has so long confirmed narratives of oppression, especially if we think of the volumes of books on Nazi architecture rather than working actively against them. But this I mean to ask, what would it mean to trace histories, biographies, and spatial and artistic production from the perspective of the victims? One of the objects that is important here is a piece of weave works produced in internment, you see it here. These slippers were created through the embodied and clandestine labor of working class women who saved pieces of threads from rag rocks in their garments, and these remnants they kind of used as they were condemned to undertake forced labor in Gestapo prisons in Vienna. When these objects have been discussed at all, and they have not been discussed very often, because they allied both art histories and resistance studies conventional systems of classification, scholars have held on to political, sorry, categorizations of their makers that is working class solidarities of women in the framework of the Communist Party. But as I try to show, these objects were also imprints of spatial histories that defy these categories as each thread passed through many hands was made to pass through wall and especially as gifts of solidarity were transported in great, great danger. But in conclusion I also want to say, and this is essential, what these objects are not. Evoking Bishop it is noteworthy that their symbolism and the idea of the potential of one day walking into a future that might again be possible is tied to a notion of nationhood that the Communist Party underscored and where there was a belief in this possible return to everyday life. So formulating a claim to cultural belonging beyond claims to state power and territorial demarcation by contrast as Bishop would have it is what I try to foreground in the second essay. Here I ask, what would it mean if architectural considered, architectural history considered the spatial and visual production of refugee organizations such as Jewish journalists, authors and poets working together in the offices of Nobel nutrition Paris and we see here a cover. Forced to Fliviana, editors of the journal which existed for a little more than a year from 1938 to 1939, thought to provide life, cultural and especially legal advice through events, a permanent office and eventually the journal. Graphic work as well as the texts drew on multiple modes of knowing and speaking using dialects and puns geared towards people with a shared experience of displacement and persecution. These constructions of identity moved beyond binary notion of citizenships and against the politics of persecution which especially for Austrians of Jewish descent meant being able to affirm a right to country as well as to rejected and beyond that to articulate multiple modes of belonging and I think I will leave it to you. Thank you. Hello everyone, thanks for having me and thanks for this event organizing it. It's a pleasure to be here and sharing a space with you all especially right now which is the celebration of Noru's or the Iranian New Year and I hope this new year brings joy, health and prosperity to everyone especially women in Iran. So the article that I wrote on contradictions it was very dear to me because of multiple reasons. For sure one reason was that this was the history of women's right in Iran which I was also part of this history. I lived and grew up in Iran and it was also important for me to share it through a feminist and also architecture lens somehow bringing that interdisciplinary and intersectional notion to the conversation and of course it was also important for me because the history of women's rights and their freedom in Iran as we all see intersects with modernization of public and private spaces nationalism and fundamentalism and it's still going on and it's among one of the complex and contradictory histories as you all see right now and the news from Iran. As you all might know despite enormous contradictions and the challenges whether it's inside challenges or outside challenges Iranian women always showed their activism and resistance when it comes to you know different topics including nationalism and modernization in early 20th century Iran and you know showed their activism from the most marginalized spaces that were given to them and we should not forget the geopolitical location of Iran as an you know outside maybe factor that affects all their activism and you know existence in public and private spaces and I also wanted to highlight that another important point in the article that I wanted to highlight was how modern architecture and modernization of public and private spaces and of course urban modern practices in Iran created this element of you know biopolitics and macro politics for women in Iran in which their bodies have been subjugated disciplined and controlled by the state and through a state surveillance so whether it was modernization or nationalism or right now we see how their bodies being centered to be surveilled by the state and their bodies became this liminal space of you know acceptance and resistance and it was very important then to highlight this history of their presence and how by their presence in public and private spaces they challenged you know the hegemonic views on gender ethnicity class and you know religion in Iran and I see writing histories through a feminist lens and one goal of me by writing this history was showing how we can put activism into practice of writing and you know my goal was not only to publish a piece as an intellectual piece but bringing that active activism notion showing that as feminist architecture historians one of our goal needs to be how we historicize and shed light on important histories and also I think it's important for us to realize our standpoint and how we need to center the knowledge that needs to be centered in architecture discipline so methodology and methodologically speaking seeing like oral history as a valid methodology can serve as a kind of like contribution in this piece as well also how you know when we talk about consumption of spaces or occupation of spaces how we imagine social justice I think that was one of the points that I wanted to highlight in the article and how again it's our responsibility to you know share the histories of those particularly women and minorities who shape the discipline outside the boundaries of discipline just by by producing this space and reproducing the space that were given to them and I want to end and highlight this important point of the work that Anu and Rachel you know did by bringing all these voices together because I think one whether we call ourselves you know are an ally an advocate or you know in solidarity with women's right or feminism or a minorities right is showing how we put it into practice and I think this collaboration by itself shows how we can be an ally and advocate and care about everyone when I say everyone I mean everyone in this world and I would greatly appreciate Anu and Rachel for doing that because they really at least for me being in diaspora they really helped me to be the voice of or echo the voice of women in Iran by writing this history and bring their you know existence into publication and I would say that the production of this piece is not only the physical again production of knowledge and it goes beyond that it's about care it's about ethics and it's also about the emotional labor that Rachel and all authors and editors put into this work so we need we cannot measure that what we need to think about that and how that means or what that means to us in terms of feminist collaboration or feminist architectural histories of collaboration so I'm gonna end here thank you good evening so about two months ago I received an email from a woman by the name of Maureen Fun and the email was simple it says I believe you want to talk to my mother so obviously I wrote her and said who is your mother and she said my mother is Doreen Fun so who is Doreen Fun I've been searching for Doreen for five years since 2018 so and did not manage to so if you had actually read my footnotes I had made a disclaimer that I did not find her in my paper that's titled working women and architectural work Hong Kong 1945 and 1985 so let me go backwards about why Doreen is really important in the project that I'm working on Doreen is one of four women that was the first batch of graduates from the University of Hong Kong in 1955 the architecture school was founded in 1950 so I I had encountered Doreen's name in another project a book manuscript that I'm working on on precarious buildings in Hong Kong looking at mid-century buildings that were built by very renowned architects that have since fallen into somewhat kind of mismanagement and I'm in the process of writing that manuscript and in so doing discovered that one of the largest project which housed 10 000 inhabitants in one single housing estate had someone by the name of Doreen Fun in it and the reason why this stood out is because of the entire team that was listed Doreen was the only one that had her credentials which says Doreen Fun Harvard GSD so for to cut the story short I started an investigation that led to my paper with the question where are the women architects in Hong Kong and and where are women in Hong Kong's architectural history asking this question reveals two issues first in the early 20th century women rarely stepped out of familiar and Chinese state parakeets and hierarchies to enter the workforce let alone practice architecture second those who did not have been hidden in the records behind collaborations in the system that privileges monographic authorship of buildings this is of course not unique to Hong Kong so when I was invited to participate in this collaborative I was elated because for the first time I started to understand there's such a thing called the feminist analytic and I was being very opportunistic on jumping onto that so-called bandwagon so the question then is where do I find the women and how do we even begin so I started with two periods one is to look into the archives of the university to identify and to locate where are the women this sounds easy but it was a very arduous task because there's a serious privacy involved in the releasing of even the names let alone contact and the second is within the context of colonial Hong Kong women as soon as their merit will be initialized as well as they will take on their husband's name so there's no way I could locate them when there are students versus when they're practicing architects so this is among some of the challenges that face in the construction of these archives however I do want to share the last few years of building up this archive and what it means by way of just concluding my very quick statement which is to say that in order to situate women architects within the history of women who work I looked at four perspectives one is from the geopolitical situation that saw the labor emancipation of women on mass in mid 20th century Hong Kong the other is to look through the lens of the education and professional professionalization of the architect thirdly is to examine from the perspective of the colonial and Chinese shaping of gender roles and the and the family and how it evolved in the last half century and finally in the representation of women in the public sphere so this is a an archive and construction which involves many people whom I have named in the article and it's an ongoing project to and the project has been of also into requests from other places in Asia specifically at the moment Singapore to conduct a similar project so something I'm going to start on soon and I'm going to leave you with my archive thank you I just wanted to pick up on something that Armagan mentioned which is how to put into practice feminist histories of architecture and expressing a sense of gratitude and joy in working in the Rachel and Anu and you know the amount of emotional labor and care and really generosity in bringing what I feel like is in my work I sort of see this somehow strangely I don't know fitting into various forms of history in sort of weird ways so just to really express that gratitude and patience that was given to me so in my piece as opposed to thinking about migration as a condition of and or for research mine approaches it through the conditions of its possibility through the ways in which mobility and immobility have imprinted themselves onto the spaces and ways of inhabiting modern world and this is something that's been central to my work with circulation so when I first read Federici's Caliban on the Witch years ago I'm assuming it's a familiar text with most people it occurred to me that there's really a history of architecture to be written that can complement her history of the body a history that covers roughly the same period and takes a similar and a political and epistemological view the construction of gender that my own work has done with the emergence of the urban so this essay is in part a kind of prelude to such a history it's kind of an attempt to and correlate the enclosure of women's bodies and gendered social relations of capital the caliban traces with the rise of a new understanding space that's increasingly defined by mobility and immobility across this kind of division so the piece does this in two kind of moves if you will the first is a kind of provocation to read caliban and the witch architecturally because Federici's claim is an epistemological one it seems to me that we should be able to read the sort of dialectical imprint of the new this new human body that she describes across archives of architecture spatial planning spatial planning infrastructure and beyond and indeed Federici suggests as much the enclosure of lands as colonial acquisitions or under the new regime of private property the body she argues is simultaneously enclosed in new social relations further in the discourses and experiences of 16th and 17th century european colonialism of empirical scientific method of new understanding of nature of material wars and conquests and so on this new human is one which appears to be imminently divisible along endothemical lines that sort of naturally or so-called naturally offer itself to emergent social orders hierarchies and labor regimes of a nascent capitalism so reading caliban and the witch architecturally i believe allows us to understand the role that architecture and space have played as social technology that's ever to think of them that sort of somehow undergird the gendering of the body if the human of an emergent capitalism is seen to be made divisible according to anatomical markers and race and gender then we can start to see how certain corresponding divisions appear as functional partitions in domestic architecture at the same period separating productive and reproductive labor forms of labor so the second move that i tried to make in the piece then is to follow these socio-spatial divisions outside of and beyond the house while the violent processes of disciplining gender onto women's bodies across 16th century europe is evident in the periods architectural history i argue that it's not really until the middle of the 19th century that both this conception of the body and a politics attuned to managing it found their correlates in a kind of certain spatial imaginary a theoretical model in which space and governance could be co-organized to maintain and reproduce this divided body and divided in laboring body this model for me is the funso serdas concept of urbanization urbanization it's a term he actually coined serdas prolific writings reveal a spatial imaginary built however inadvertently on the governing of gender through immobility and mobility across this divide keeping with federicis caliban in which it's hard to read serdas urbe as anything but a multi scalars that have gendered technologies of enclosure that reduces space to a binary of two elements infrastructures of total literally total mobility built for the mobile settling man and domestic spaces of total immobility designed for the settled and nearly invisible woman the lens of immobility and mobility cuts not only down because not only the urbe down the middle but it also produces a human split in two so reading serdas theory of urbanization from the imagined bodies for which he theorized it reveals the contours of a subtle network of gendered spaces and technologies that govern them in a sense the second move then mirrors the first to read serdas corporeally according to federicis history the body is to begin to understand our gender capitalism and space continue to be articulated across the planetary urbe that we've learned today good evening thank you anu and rachel for putting together this fascinating collection um i thought one way to respond to this intellectual call to think and write feminist architectural histories of migration was to consider the purpose of a call for papers and the work of bringing into being juxtaposing organizing and arranging a collection of research so a key aspect of an edited collection is that it helps shape a field in the sense that authors respond to a call and shape their work towards that call and it is clear that your call has provoked new research that wouldn't have found a way into the world um without your provocation to both produce it and your labor to house it uh reading the essays i was thinking about the work of the psychoanalytical theorist jackall and rose who writes in her book mothers an essay on love and cruelty that the anger and hatred unleashed on migrant mothers entering the united kingdom settles not just on women but specifically on migrant mothers migrant mothers she says says rose are being asked to carry and be accountable for the failures and injustices of the modern world she underscores the double bind that migrant mothers face that by fleeing war zones and violence they are vilified for both hoping for better lives for their children and also for exposing their children to the perils of migration they will always be bad mothers no matter what they do what rose argues is that in the act of migration mothers are asked to do two things shield their children from the violence of history uh the words that they are fleeing and in the united kingdom maintain the fiction of a just world a world without violence and this double bind seems to be at the heart of this collaborative project uh where migration creates a set of contradictions that can sometimes be possibility and at other times be binds but the key here is that this double bind settles itself on the bodies of women in its feminist interrogation anu and rachel ask the authors to think migration in all the multitudinal ways that bodies and women's bodies move through space and move across peripheries borders fringes exteriors interiors buffers surpluses edges and more in this way marginality itself creates a migratory condition another way to put this is that migration itself involves an amount and is an account of violence if migration as method allows us to interrogate the violent histories of architecture and space making then collaboration the editor's offer is a structural antidote to the violence enacted by migration in the modern world this collaboration brings together multiple different forms of this condition of mobility and it focuses on the different ways in which women carve out pathways to move through the world collaborations are central of course to this body of work theoretically and logistically and i was struck by unice's essay where the form of collaboration also hid the labor of women when it functioned within the bounds of the myth of individual authorship as a result to make an archive of women in architecture unice argues that first you need to do the intellectual labor of understanding what constitutes labor and what are the structural constraints on participatory collaborative a collaboration what structural shifts make collaborative labor into valued work Armagan's paper which shows how the modernization and masculinization of space went hand in hand argues that this gendering of women and space was enacted through laws mandating unveiling this gendering occurred in relation to the emergence of a seemingly egalitarian public sphere so Armagan's essay captures that fraught double bind that women are caught in when they become symbolic subjects of modernization and national nation state making enforcing and unveiling women were denied a normative right to public space and in turn produced counter spaces of habitation and access Ross's essay also tackles the violence structurally embedded in migration where economic forces render one set of bodies mobile and another immobile creating the conditions of unfettered access to laboring bodies if mobility is one form of migratory violence then another explicit form of it is exile. Essie's body of work around the life and work of Margaret Schuter-Lehotsky centers the question of how to be in exile. All forms of migration involve a component of exile a forced separation from a condition of belonging and indeed Essie speaks to this isolation that Schuter-Lehotsky experienced even inside Austria. Schuter-Lehotsky Elizabeth Freundlich and their collaborator and with other collaborators argues Essie used this condition of exile to interrogate political and intellectual forms of Nazism and fascism and from Essie's article the aggregate essay the aggregate essay not the other one we know that not only is migration a method but so too is exile a kind of subjectivity that needs one that needs ordinary spaces in which the exiled perform the subjectivity of their exile bodies. So final words congratulations on this wonderful volume on this wonderful body of work congratulations on this generous act of collaboration. I have very much enjoyed dipping into it and immersing myself in this collection of stories and the force of their intellectual framework and with that I will turn the mic over to the GSAP X students. Thank you again for the great presentations. It is very powerful to hear and see the breadth of feminist strategies of countering power through the undertaking of history writing especially through the lens of constructed environments. We would also like to thank Anais who cannot be here today but who did work in conjunction with us to formulate this response. Through the discussion on histories of migration and feminist practice it is evident and imperative that the future of architecture should lie within the power of collaboration building on the foundation of a pedagogy of the of the oppressed via architecture and the unwritten forms of power in the built environment. These unwritten forms of power lend themselves to what architects should be thinking of the dimensions of people culture and the importance of not generalizing individuals. Through this lens we see that the intention of architecture is not its totality. Architects then cannot claim to control what happens in a space or even the individuals who will use the space but rather work towards unveiling an alternate urban plan or a counter hegemonic plan created by the people and subverting spatial codes. As architectural students it's imperative not just to look at the future but also to look at the past and the ways in which people react and create their own resistance to architecture in the built environment which surrounds them. Migration unravels narratives of individuals and buildings yet it was discussed that migration as a concept draws a bold circle around masculine forms and practices of history writing that do not depend upon love and camaraderie for their sheer existence. This begs the question why must love and camaraderie be strictly feminist? By placing these terms in the sphere of feminist practices we must be critical in framing them so they're not just seen as just feminist approaches but rather introduce them as a new architectural ethos in which all can contribute. The ideals of collaboration and migration should not be thought of as simply as feminist practice. In doing so this narrows the potential of these topics that can be seen in a strictly feminist light. We ask ourselves as future architects what kind of work can we do to incorporate the approaches and critical understandings discussed today. What is the practice of radical reimagination of both our buildings and the roles we ascribe to it? Hello again. I'm going to keep this brief since as moderator I'm also in charge of keeping time. So I just want to celebrate this wonderful format that you've created much like the sort of polyphonic narrative that you described in the video project and the anthology. I think it's wonderful. And so I'm going to pose a response that's also a question so we can kind of transition into the Q&A phase of the event. I'm interested in the attention to embodiment in all of your essays and how that's prompted different methodologies in writing history for all of you. And speaking here as a sort of bridge to architectural practice I'm also wondering what the implications of that attention might be for material design practices. So Anurada in the introductory essay to the collections you point to different lineages of feminist epistemologies that have called for greater attention to embodied experience. And there've been many different perspectives on this over time. Calls to embodiment have been ways of foregrounding the experiences of marginalized people and also challenges to the conceptual binaries of mind and body and productive and reproductive labor. And you write the feminist architectural histories of migration demand sensibility as much as theory. These essays may be understood as much through affect and emotions as through formal concepts or ideologies. And it's a theme that reappears in many of the essays. So Ross writes about this as well talking about shifting the historical analysis to the body and unsettling the presiding scholarly logic of architectural history that starts with buildings. And I think it's amazing how all of you are turning to sort of source material that can speak directly to embodied experience. So Armagan, Eunice and S.E. you're drawing from sources that might be outside of a typical sort of architectural archive looking at diaries, memoirs, letters, personal photographs. And S.E. even kind of deconstructing the format of the essay itself through these fragments which I think really evoke in their structure a sense of loss, disjunction and trauma. So I'm curious to hear from you all about this sort of feminist methodology of writing history that you're exploring, how it's connected to feminist epistemologies about embodied knowledge and specifically why embodiment might be particularly important to pay attention to in the context of migration. And I have some speculations about is it perhaps that in migration the body is the sort of moving subject where the geography is located now since there's a disconnection between the body and a kind of situated context that's stable. But I'm really curious to hear your thoughts. And then as we maybe transition to questions from the audience, thinking about that transition also to design practice, how do you see that intention to embodiment play out in the practices that you looked at? Was there a greater awareness of embodied experience through the programs that people were working on, through their work with materials? Are there sort of lessons there as well that we can draw from in thinking about contemporary practice? Thank you. I think we should jump in. Thank you so much, both Atia and Bryony and Sofia and Rebecca. You've all been so generous. We really appreciate it. Does someone want to take up Bryony's questions? Even the disembodied Ross? I think I'm just going to say something quickly. I like the provocation by Sofia and Rebecca why must these histories of care and camaraderie, why must it be feminist? And maybe I just want to make two very quick remarks. So I think one of the issues, of course, that hovers over our conversation is the question of gender, obviously, and gender performativity that everybody has a gender, that it's socially constructed. And so I think you bringing us back to this question, I guess what you're asking, or I'm not sure if I heard that right, is why are women at the center of this? And I honestly believe they don't have to be. I mean, love and care and camaraderie exists between all kinds of agents we research. But I do think that like a close attention to gender and how it is constructed is really important and kind of what modes of operating derive from that. In addition to that, and maybe also wanted to say that intersectionality, for me, of course, was important for both essays as a concept, but also that those constructions in specific conditions that certain categories can be more important. So in the end of Kimberly Crenshaw's famous essay, I think there's kind of an opening that nobody really ever discusses, where one category in intersectionality can actually be more important than other categories. And that needs to kind of be the center of forming certain types of alliances. And so maybe this is kind of too porous of an answer. But I do think that our histories need to be written in a type of awareness of historiography and like what kind of categories at the intersection of gender, race, age, you know, shape those histories. And I think we need to attend to those. Yeah. Yeah, maybe I'll peek from where you actually ended by saying that, first of all, I personally believe why not all of us should be feminists, right? So when we think about social justice and the ways in which, as you mentioned, we need to have an intersectional lens, thinking about gender, class, race, ethnicity, religion and the list can goes on and on. We really all need to think about how the life is different for each one of us because of, you know, our position within this world, whether it's about, you know, about any of these categories of identity. But also be mindful of Kimberley-Krincha's theory in which she doesn't mention the Olympics of oppression. We're not talking about who the most oppressed person in the room is so that we go and say, okay, let's talk about them, but about how these identities intersect. And that intersection, I think, is very important for any kind of social justice practices. Architecture should be the main one, maybe, when we think about how we all occupy a space, right? And how a space can be inclusive and exclusive to different bodies only because of their identities. So even if you think about migration and travel ban and, you know, anything that relates to physical and abstract borders, I also wanted to think about how, you know, this piece serves as all of these, you know, writings in relation to your question, you know, serves as a way for us to reimagine what we are doing in the practice of architecture and the future of the practice of architecture in terms of how we can bring new methodologies and new histories into place. So we know what we are really doing in our practice of architecture. So whether it's about teaching or practice or, you know, new methodologies, it's about people. So centering people, their stories and their intersectional background I think is very important for any kind of like social justice topic, which I think is very important for the histories of, you know, the world and also migration. So, yeah, just adding a little bit to what Estie mentioned. Maybe I'll pick up on the point of methodology. In the context of my research project, I discovered, really it started very simply as trying to figure out other ways to rethink the monographic method as a way to evaluate the profession or the professional history. And so that's how I would be quite honest to confess I stumbled onto this project in the process of trying to figure out what are the various other ways in which we can write about the, you know, the disciplinary history. And so on that note, it opened up other questions that I didn't learn before as an architecture student. Like how do you deal with gender plus class issue or gender plus race or with age? And these are what I discovered in the last few years of trying to build up an archive. And it has led to essentially a reflection of what I'm doing as a method into a question that is bigger than gender already. So, and also in the context of Asia, which is where I'm building up this archive, a feminist lens is a very different conversation as it is in here. So I'll need to situate that as well. Because if there's such a thing as feminism, it's discussed very differently as it is here. Just as race discussions is very different also. So it's not very binary these questions. For example, racial discussion is not binary. So actually, I'm answering two questions. We've regard to embodiment. Every woman architect in Hong Kong is a migrant. At least all the ones I've interviewed. Because it's impossible in the first few generations to be able to afford architecture school if you're not coming from a place of relative wealth. And they tend to be not if you just a quick history of Hong Kong. The majority really working class migrants. So the only way you can enter architecture school is if you're coming from a very different kind of status from South China and so on. So inherently, it is bigger than a feminist project already. It's trying to understand the evolving geopolitical situation. So and that really helps. Well, at least it helps me a lot in trying to understand how the shaping of a practice. Ross, do you have any thoughts you want to share? I do. Thank you. I'll be just coming back to the question about, you know, an awareness of historiography that Armageddon brought up. And how this somehow brings into question something that, of course, is central to a lot of this all this work, which is identity. And it's sort of I'm reminded that identity is never a kind of standalone category. And it needs institutions and networks of power to constantly reproduce itself. And this sort of rings up Otemi Taiwu's work on identity politics and his shifting from kind of identity to the sort of room as he talks about spaces in which identity is again reproduced and or terminated or whatever. And I think all of this comes back to, for me at least, to thinking about how various methods that we are all trying to embrace, run up against or perhaps within, in some cases, institutional structures, you know, we're all academics. We all, you know, have to receive some kind of validation from an institution. And in a way, I think that puts the added pressure in a good sense on nurses of collaboration, embodying practices of love and camaraderie and comradeship and so on. That puts in a way that puts us in the position to maybe claim ourselves as activists, in a sense, or as people who are actively working to push against certain institutional norms, certain hegemonic structures that goes everywhere from like tenure to the ways in which history is written, the sort of norms that we assume as history writers. And that we start to really unsettle these kinds of things and push back against these structures. So I guess just, you know, an attention to the institutional forms in which, you know, all of our work I think is playing out is important to keep in mind. Thank you. So we have some time for questions from the audience. I think we have a couple microphones going around. So if anyone has questions, can you raise your hand? Would that microphone come to you? Well, thank you firstly for these presentations. This is a question about what it means to do feminist history more broadly and maybe particularly feminist architectural history. Several, maybe most of your accounts seem in locating disappeared histories, forgotten accounts, attempted to sublimate the work of women in particular in these particular situations to forms of resistance or community that represents a sort of possibility of an otherwise of moving beyond the conditions to which they're subject. I'm thinking of affiliations with other modes of historiography like, for instance, Sedgwick's notion of reparative reading, which attempts to resuscitate from what are typically narratives of oppression, modes of beaking out resistance and community and solidarity and joy. I'm also thinking of Robin D. G. Kelly's notion of freedom dreaming, right, the way that notions of liberation can be conjured amidst desperation. So the question is whether something like a reparative mode, something of trying to read into these histories, vitality, resistance, the possibility of doing something else is necessary to feminist history or feminist architectural history, or if this is the mode of feminist architectural history that you are practicing. I can kind of clarify that if it's not so. I can take this question even un-clarified. I think that one of the reasons that we even structured this event this evening and the way that we did was that for us the answer is yes, there can be that mode of resistance or as we've thought of it a provincialization of normative histories. But we also feel like there can be many answers to that question and it was very important to make a platform where there could be many different dissenting arguments around that very question or even around this very question of what does feminism have to be or does something have to be feminist to be X, Y, Z. We ourselves had many different answers over the course of these many years. The first publication was in 2020 but we had been working on the collection for some years before that. I think that part of why we thought it would be helpful to even just hear from the four authors that we brought together today and also these wonderful respondents is by way of saying there are many ways that this can shape. However, there is something to be said for gathering forces around something rather than knowing that you're in it, having a lens onto something rather than assuming that what you are doing is normative. I mean I think that one can look at this collection and also see it as quite normative in certain ways and there will be others. I mean I think this is a maybe a kind of rolling critical process but that's what I take from your question actually is a call to a kind of pluralism. So thank you. So I would also add to what Anu mentioned in regards to your question that by nature this collaboration and different pieces in this collaboration I think is a form of resistance to the grand narrative that we see and read in architecture histories. And also without even mentioning the resistance that actually people did in case of my writing women's resistance in Iran, the format that I wrote my article was a form of resistance that why we talk about I don't know XYZ European male architects work in Iran but we never talked about how women resisted their spaces that they designed for them. And also in your in regards to your question about feminism and freedom dreaming I think what any form of feminist writing does is first it addresses the structural inequalities that we have in societies and communities and by that then they propose this imagined future in which all of us are free. So yeah this is something that I wanted to add. I just have two points. One is actually this has become a platform to pursue other issues of equity at least for me that is beyond just the feminist project. So for example I'm actually embarking on a project that wouldn't have been possible if I didn't work on this building of the so-called feminist archive which is on custodians of architecture. So that's really the process that's what it led to. The other one is a more pragmatic point. I had applied for a grant for the project and was not successful but as soon as I demonstrate the collaborative that I'm a part of and applied again I got the grant and the comment from it was very very case in point. Essentially I built a for lack of better word I took advantage of the collaboration in order to justify the significance of the work. I'll just say two sentences very quickly to the question. I think for my own work I sit a lot with silences as well and I think the work of Ruha Benjamin for me for example comes to mind that you know is often speculative but actually like build silences in the razor into those speculations. So I think like that's maybe like kind of the position where I would come down to. I did want to take up this question of embodiment that Briani asked about to maybe so to say two things one about collaboration and one about embodiment. I think for me historically it's really important to say that not every collaboration is fruitful and you know built solidarities. In fact I think one of the things that I really wanted to show in this essay is while working class women solidarity has been written out of the historiography of architecture and the Holocaust. There are other issues concerning this group where they actually did real violence and kind of the politics of memory and so I think like I wouldn't overemphasize you know that the just the sheer power of positive like I mean there there are also a lot of collaborations that become quite violent I guess and so on the question of embodiment I did want to kind of maybe clarify one point about the essay that I didn't get to talk about that concerns kind of archives and memorials. So at the at the end of the essay there are two kind of figurations that appear one is Szytlichocki's inability to actually build memorials in public space and so she begins to write a book that is this type of like taking stock of her memory and the appendix she has this long list of women that she met who were all resistance fighters and I've kind of argued that that is a type of politics of memorialization and the book is a type of textual memorial that really notes each of these persons and kind of tracks them down. So but on the other hand Elizabeth Freundlich the other person who's at the center of the story she starts to write for theater and there is a person that emerges really prominently in a lot of the plays and this person has traces of the biographies of multiple people. So if you read her memoir this is not actually one person it's a composite of multiple people and what's important to me to kind of like answer your question about embodiment is that I felt there were two different types of treatments of archives and bodies one that tries to note bodies which is a really really important that they were there which is a really important political move and decision especially in lieu of memorials but the other approach is a composite of a generation of people and I just I think it was really important to put these two types of approaches into conversation and also what kind of different politics vis-a-vis the Holocaust they they mean I guess that's a really great point yeah um I want to be mindful of time should we do one more question or just do you think I'm unmuting um no I mean well again I'm gonna I keep picking up where you leave off I think very generative what you're saying but like I think that in a way again thinking through the ways in which histories of architecture are always kind of written within institutional frameworks you know our our profession if you want to call it it has been very you know kind of well let's say it's a professionalized form of history writing and I think one of the sort of bits of common sense or the kind of hegemonic structures that underlines that is the way in which the present or conditions of the present are somehow not meant to intrude into the practice of history writing and I think that's a it's a shame really so you know I think what a lot of us are doing is really writing histories that unapologetically not only engage with questions or or issues of the present or structural questions that continue to inform the world present but that that carry a certain core or seed or I don't know what metaphor to use that that looks towards a different kind of future looks towards a world building let's say imaginary and I think that's something that that for me would be really a part of this new kind of or this different kind of history writing that we might call feminist or otherwise whatever it is thank you for that yeah we have time for one more question do we have another one from the audience if not I would like to add something to what Ross said I think that I keep going back to Saloni Mathur's book The Migrant's Time that this book that she edited and one of the things she talks about in the introduction is the migrants time in thinking about how time is experienced by the migrant what it means to have to wait what it means to have to arrive but also the migrants time as in the time that we are in being the time of the migrant that I think you know Ross in a way you're gesturing to just that we are in a moment of you know there are of course many analytics that one couldn't use to think about histories histories of the built environment histories of things that we that we think of as fixed and but for for me and Rachel I think that this problematic of the archive was really so fundamental and migration gave really unlocked for us a way to start naming something that doesn't get named that is truly normalized in not just in architectural history but I would say really across the board in the academy all these institutions that are really built on stolen land and landed wealth and in many ways are only just learning to name these things but I think that because we had been living in the migrants time to think with Saloni for a minute we really had been thinking about these things as fundamental to the ways we write histories now whether that is thinking about history within the contemporary I think that can also be debated but I think it has been enormously generative for us and I mean I have to say I was so moved at the idea by your point about how these are things that fall on the backs of migrant mothers I mean of there are many things that you can you can say but I think that that really rang true for me that we find these hidden figures in all these histories and I think every history we've heard about tonight tells this story in different ways and I think that maybe to not normalize those things is a way that we wanted to begin calling out in the way we started naming archives we you know I work very closely with I think I've learned so much from SES process because I work very closely with a book written by Minette De Silva that she calls my archives and I spent many years wondering why is this architect publishing something that she has to call my archives what is it that she's so self-consciously constructing there and I think this also was this this problematic that we found that if we could just unlock this way of understanding that the things we think are fixed are actually very mobile and that the things that we assume are landed are actually made by migrants those were things that we felt could give us some purchase on just ways to see differently and ways to really imagine differently so we owe a great debt to all these authors who were willing to collaborate with us on what didn't sound like it made very much sense back when we were saying it some years ago but has seemed to have gained steam over time and um and these editors too who took who really took it seriously so maybe I'm trying to I don't need to have the last word but maybe I want to just sneak that in that's a beautiful when you wrap up yeah thank you thank you all for your incredible presentations and insights it's just been really meaningful and thank you all for coming and happy new year