Date:
Location: United States
Call for Papers: Materialities of Empire
Organizers: Irene Cheng, James Graham, Andrew Herscher, Diana Martinez
Attention to material has become almost ubiquitous in recent architectural history, both extending and revising a modernist tradition of interest in material innovation and expression. Whether through the lens of an ethics of representation, building technology, environmental concerns, supply-chain tracing, the expansion of historical agency to more-than-human beings, or developments within historical materialism, attention to materials has both reproduced received disciplinary formations and opened up new extra-disciplinary frames.
We shift our attention from the materialities of architecture to the materialities of empire in order to bring critical, theoretical, historical, and historiographic questions to the fore in explorations of architecture’s contingent and contested material dimensions. More specifically, we aim to assess how historiographic turns to materiality and to imperial and postcolonial formations can inform one another. Imperialism, after all, was a historical system constructed to exercise control not only over land and people, but also resources and materials. Might concerns with materiality, in both architectural practice and history, mediate architecture’s still underexplored and disavowed imperial lineaments? Might description and analysis of the materialities of empire expose historical materialism’s fault-lines and aporia around questions of imperialism? Might considering materiality with empire expand our capacity to consider the labor and agency of more-than-metropolitan humans—Indigenous place-keepers as well as miners, foresters, construction workers, stevedores, and other colonial laborers? The Materialities of Empire seeks to investigate these and other related questions that bear equally on architecture’s pasts and futures.
Among the questions that motivate this line of inquiry are whether and in what forms empire persists. A quarter of a century ago, Hardt and Negri’s Empire argued that the modern nation state, a geopolitical form institutionalized as a bulwark against imperial expansion, had been eclipsed by a new form of empire, one embedded within the unequal structure of internationalist systems. Grounded in the sociotechnical abstractions of globalization on the cusp of the twenty-first century, Empire focused on the seemingly dimensionless flows of data, images, and capital. Today, as the systems that subtend the speed and supposed frictionlessness of planetary circulations become increasingly visible in moments of breakdown and contestation, architecture’s relation to the still-imperial movement of resources (and the laboring populations that mine, move, and manage them) requires new forms of scrutiny. We invite contributions that consider how historiographies of older imperial forms have under-considered their material dimensions or that offer methodological or conceptual insight for scholarly engagement with the material weight of the present.
We seek contributors to participate in a collaborative workshop in spring 2026, leading to an edited publication.
Please submit a 300 word proposal and short (1 to 2-page) CV to materialitiesofempire@gmail.com by September 15, 2025. Selected authors will take part in a virtual workshop in spring 2026, which will include the submission and discussion of a draft of your chapter.
Questions? Email materialitiesofempire@gmail.com or the individual editors at:
