Esra Akcan

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, lectured globally, and received multiple fellowships on critical and postcolonial theory, racism, immigration, climate change, reparations and transitional justice, architectural photography, translation, neoliberalism, and global history. She has advised more than 40 doctoral students (16 as primary advisor), and served as reviewer in multidisciplinary academic publications.

Akcan’s book Architecture in Translation offers a new way to understand the global movement of architecture and advocates a commitment to a new culture of translatability from below and in multiple directions for cosmopolitan ethics and global justice. Open Architecture defines open architecture as the welcoming of migration into design, and exemplifies formal, programmatic and procedural steps towards open architecture during the urban renewal of Berlin’s immigrant neighborhood, by giving voice not only to established and understudied architects who were invited to build public housing here, but also to noncitizen residents. Abolish Human Bans builds on her theory of architectural translation to construct an activist gesture against the racist anti-immigration policies of ruling powers. Architecture and the Right-to-Heal: Resettler Nationalism in the Aftermath of Conflict and Disaster explores architecture’s role in individual, social and planetary healing after conflicts and disasters by discussing buildings and spaces in relation to transitional justice and energy transition. She co-authored Turkey as part of a series that aims at an inclusive survey of modern world architecture; and co-edited Art and Architecture of Migration and Discrimination to show the scope of diverse artistic media that respond to the compulsory partitions and diasporas.