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Building Solidarities: Racial Justice in the Built Environment
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The following is republished from https://architecture.barnard.edu/building-solidarities-0.
About Building Solidarities
Building Solidarities is a form of mutual pedagogy between the Barnard / Columbia campus and the public, through student-led dialogues on urgent questions about constructed environments, urban life, and ecologies. Students interested in leading a dialogue series are encouraged to develop collaborative proposals. For more information, please contact architecture@barnard.edu.
Fall 2020: Building Solidarities: Racial Justice in the Built Environment
In Fall 2020, four Building Solidarities dialogues were organized and facilitated by Professor Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and students in the Barnard and Columbia Architecture Department / Columbia University Institute of Comparative Literature and Society course, “Colonial Practices.” Building on material studied in the seminar, guests were invited into the virtual classroom in small groups to meet each other and talk with students. Students’ research questions drove these discussions, and members of the public were invited into the virtual classroom to attend and participate. Below please find the research guides that underpinned these explorations, along with the resulting web/podcasts, archived digitally by community partners who also participated in the dialogues.
Building Solidarities: Racial Justice in the Built Environment foregrounds the communities of Minneapolis, Nairobi, and New York in dialogues between students, activists, artists, and academics, in order to process the conditions around the murder of George Floyd and its aftermath in cities whose racial histories have long impacted the built environment and provoked sympathy protest. Our aim in hosting these dialogues is to build mutual solidarities between our campus and our partners, seeing us all together as experts and as students, and to use our institutional platform to be as hospitable as possible and extend the political imaginaries, community futures, and solidarities that our partners may build with each other. As we study racial and environmental complexities and injustices, we remain vigilantly reflexive about the relationship between our campus and our neighbors, in Harlem and elsewhere.
We would like to acknowledge the communities, lives, and futures affected as we study. The essential workers who make it possible for us to conduct work. The Lenape elders, relatives, and children whose land our campus occupies, and who have been stewards of this land, and the displaced peoples and citizens of many Indigenous nations for whom New York has been home. All Black people, especially those whose enslavement is written into the wealth of our institution, and the past and present Harlem neighbors to whose labor and disenfranchisement our campus owes a debt. Migrants from all over the world whose dispossession and sacrifices have ensured the prosperity of our institution, especially those impacted by United States imperial interests, who arrive here to participate in its economy or flee homes targeted by its military. Those we have lost in a pandemic due to colonial practices that we have allowed to persist, and those who remain at risk due to inhumane economies, carceral and security states, and racist, casteist, and misogynistic policies that we must actively refuse. As members of a university community, we heed Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s warning that “belief in the ideal that benefiting mankind is indeed a primary outcome of scientific research is as much a reflection of ideology as it is of academic training. It becomes so taken for granted that many researchers simply assume that they as individuals embody this ideal and are natural representatives of it when they work with other communities.” (Decolonizing Methodologies, 1999) In working with our partners, we take up her challenge to “question the assumed nature of those ideals and the practices that they generate.” In doing so, we make a wish for peace.
Professor Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, B+C Architecture / ICLS affiliated faculty
Kojo Abudu, CU Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Modern Art, Critical and Curatorial Studies
Maya Bickel, CC Middle Eastern, South Asian, & African Studies
Aishah Bostani, CC Architecture
Gabriel Garon, CC Comparative Literature and Society / Medicine, Literature and SocietyJ
oseph Gedeon, CU Journalism, Master of Arts
Nur Jabarin, CU GSAPP, Critical, Curatorial, & Conceptual Practices in ArchitectureMai Morsy, CC Architecture / Visual Arts
Samuel Needleman, CC History / Pre-Law / Hispanic Studies
Dora O’Neill, CC Comparative Literature and Society
Amber Officer-Narvasa, CU GSAPP, Critical, Curatorial, & Conceptual Practices in Architecture
Mahum Qazi, CU MESAAS, Master of Arts
Javairia Shahid, CU GSAPP and ICLS, Ph.D.Christopher Taktak, CU Urban Studies
Noa Weiss, BC History and Theory of Architecture / Dance
Athena Wyatt, CU Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, American Studies
The Fall 2020 series was sponsored by The Office of the Provost at Barnard College, The Institute of Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, and The Barnard and Columbia Colleges Department of Architecture.
Institutional Inhabitations
Guests: Joy Mboya, Garnette Oluoch-Olunya, Sahasra Sambamoorthi, and Keisha Brown
Description: On structuring cultural institutions and critical communities of black-brown solidarity in the African and South Asian diasporas of Nairobi and New York.
The research guide for this dialogue is available here.
A recording of this dialogue is available on the following platforms:
The GoDown Arts Centre webcast
Building Historical Consciousness
Guests: Chris Cornelius, Elsa Hoover, and Nick Estes
Description: Indigenous thinking on infrastructure and architecture as sites for historical consciousness and contemporary creative practice in North America.
The research guide for this dialogue is available here.
A recording of this dialogue is available on the following platform:
Monumental Landscapes
Guests: Kate Beane, Lydia Muthuma, and Bhakti Shringarpure
Description: A consideration of landscapes of monumentality through iconoclasm, replacement, and renaming of built and natural structures in Nairobi and Minneapolis.
The research guide for this dialogue is available here.
A recording of this dialogue is available on the following platform:
Environmental Reclamations
Guests: Alishine Osman, Anisa Salat, and Huma Gupta
Description: Environmental diasporas and ecological reclamation in the ‘Somalias’ of Dadaab, Minneapolis, and Mogadishu.The research guide for this dialogue is available here.
A recording of this dialogue is available on the following platform:
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