"Race &” Special Series: Building Solidarities

May 16, 2022 by SAH News

"Race &" is a podcast sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians that explores the influence of race and race thinking on the built environment. Co-hosts Charles Davis (SUNY Buffalo) and Maura Lucking (UCLA), co-chairs of the SAH Race + Architectural History Affiliate Group, conduct interviews, roundtable discussions, and conversations with the foremost academics of the arts and sciences to recover the untold stories of the people and forces that shape the world we live in.

The guest series "Building Solidarities," organized by Dr. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and students in the course "Colonial Practices," was originally staged as a series of discussions at Barnard College and Columbia University Institute of Comparative Literature and Society in the fall of 2020. The series was conceived as a form of mutual pedagogy between the campus and the public, through dialogues on urgent questions about constructed environments, urban life, and ecologies.  

Listen here: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/race/id1533595731

More info: sahraah.com/race-podcast

Participating Students: Kojo Abudu, Maya Bickel, Aishah Bostani, Gabriel Garon, Joseph Gedeon, Nur Jabarin, Mai Morsy, Samuel Needleman, Dora O’Neill, Amber Officer-Narvasa, Mahum Qazi, Javairia Shahid, Christopher Taktak, Noa Weiss, Athena Wyatt

1. Institutional InhabitationsThis episode of the Building Solidarities series discussed structuring cultural institutions and critical communities of black-brown solidarity in the African and South Asian diasporas of Nairobi and New York. Discussants from the GoDown Arts Centre and Navatman included Joy Mboya, Garnette Oluoch-Olunya, Sahasra Sambamoorthi, and Keisha Brown.
2. Building Historical Consciousness 
This episode of the Building Solidarities series discussed Indigenous thinking on infrastructure and architecture as sites for historical consciousness and contemporary creative practice in North America.
3. Monumental Landscapes
This episode of the Building Solidarities series considered landscapes of monumentality through iconoclasm, replacement, and renaming of built and natural structures in Nairobi and Minneapolis.
4. Environmental Reclamations
This episode of the Building Solidarities series discussed environmental diasporas and ecological reclamation in the "Somalias" of Dadaab, Minneapolis, and Mogadishu.