The History of Architecture and Urbanism Society invites graduate students to participate in its annual research symposium on March 22, 2024.
Please submit a 250–300 word abstract with your name and affiliated institution and a 1–2 page C.V. using the form below by January 5, 2024.
Authors of accepted papers will be notified on January 12, 2024.
The spring 2024 symposium "Writing Land into Architectural Histories," organized by the doctoral students in Cornell University's History of Architecture and Urbanism Society (HAUS), aims to explore the entangled histories of the built environment, land, and ecologies, examining intertwined methodologies that address questions of writing land into and out of histories of architecture.
The combinatory practices of both architectural and landscape architectural history have grappled with new ways to interrogate the instrumentality of land as a mechanism that perpetuates relationships of power. How do land policies integrate into the built environment to produce various forms of skill and expertise that challenge normative, often colonial and imperial, forms of knowledge production? How does the materiality of land shape architecture? How do technologies of land and state-making processes move bodies across land? How do various forms of colonialism imbue structural histories of violence on and to land?
Spanning a broad temporal range and extending to various geographies, we invite doctoral students working on the built environment in any discipline to rethink ways of utilizing land as a method in transnational and transimperial histories of architecture. Papers can include, but are not limited to: soils and their relationship to building practices and techniques; medicalization and health measurements; land and ecological governance; property rights and land-use schemes; cultivation and resource management through surveying technologies and agricultural infrastructures; representations of land; models of community and solidarity building through land traditions; labor; and methodologies of multispecies histories of architecture.
