We are delighted to be organizing a panel for the 41st SAHANZ Annual Conference, to be held in lutruwita/Tasmania, 3–5 December 2025 — and we warmly invite abstract submissions.
This call is for a panel session at the 41st SAHANZ Annual Conference, Extremities: South, East, North, West of Architectural History, to be held in lutruwita/Tasmania from 3–5 December 2025.
This panel explores how feminist spatial practices engage with the extremities of modernism—its disciplinary boundaries and spatial hierarchies. Extremities—whether understood as physical, disciplinary, or conceptual—can mark the points where dominant spatial narratives begin to hesitate. In the context of modernist design, these edges expose the contradictions behind its universalist ambitions, revealing how spatial regimes often reinforced gendered exclusions, and erased alternative voices. Feminist spatial practices engage with these conditions in diverse ways—not only by responding from the margins, but also by reworking, challenging, or offering alternatives to the spatial and ideological frameworks shaped by modernism.
By engaging with peripheral conditions—whether spatial, social, or conceptual—feminist thinkers and makers expose the exclusions embedded in modernist narratives and offer alternative frameworks grounded in care. Their multidisciplinary practices challenge who is enabled to build, be visible, and shape the memory of our built and imagined environments.
We welcome case studies, speculative histories, and critical practices that engage with:
- How have spatial extremities shaped gendered exclusions, and how do feminist practices resist or rework them?
- How do feminist approaches reimagine space where modernist narratives have broken down?
- How can interdisciplinary feminist strategies reclaim visibility, authorship, and agency?
Aligned with the SAHANZ conference’s broader theme, this panel welcomes proposals from across the Global South, the Asia-Pacific–Indian Ocean region, and beyond. We especially encourage submissions that foreground lesser-known spaces, practices, or individuals—particularly those from underrepresented or peripheral contexts.
*Submissions should include a title and abstract (max. 200 words), along with the author’s contact details and a brief CV (max. 50 words). References should follow the Chicago Manual of Style, 18th Edition. Please submit proposals to niloofar.amini@uca.ac.uk by 16 June 2025.
** This panel will run for 60–90 minutes and include 3–5 short-form paper presentations, each comprising 20 minutes of theoretical framing followed by 10 minutes for Q&A. Final papers should be 1500–2000 words in length, suitable for immediate conference publication and future development into journal articles. We also warmly welcome innovative presentation formats that combine a theoretical component (10 minutes) with an experimental or creative mode of delivery (10 minutes). These may include performances, readings of creative work, discussions of works-in-progress, or exploratory dialogues with practitioners, curators, or filmmakers, all aimed at fostering thought- provoking conversations beyond conventional academic formats.
