Call for Proposals

BUILDING GROUND FOR CLIMATE COLLECTIVISM

The Architectural Humanities Research Association invites you to submit proposals for its November 2022 conference. The theme of this year’s conference is Building Ground for Climate Collectivism: Architecture after the Anthropocene. The conference will convene between November 17-19, 2022

COLLECTIVE CLIMATE WORK: GROUND, FOOD, VOICE

The 2022 AHRA Convening invites practitioners, scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and community leaders to work, learn, and move collectively towards challenging conventional academia conference formats. Can a conference open up an authentic space of discussion - a space for humility and collaboration– as we address climate urgency and collective action? Can architecture become a thought structure rather than an outcome? Can we scaffold participation among audiences which extend far beyond the campus? We envision a conference where participants share skills and research, and where there are opportunities to participate in direct actions, or co-create research agendas which critically address how climate justice is social justice, and how sustainability necessarily involves redistributions of wealth, land, and power.

We welcome contributions that explore these contemporary concerns, and which interrogate formats for dialogue, on three broad themes: Ground, Food, and Voice. Our call for conference content and programming is intentionally broad: we encourage creative activities, such as design actions and performances, artistic exhibitions or installations, interactive workshops, critical conversations, skillshares, as well as traditional research papers.

Ground

Ground is shared; upholding relationships that oblige a negotiation first with the seen, felt, tangible world. Yet, ground is largely concealed underfoot, in the contours of racist policy, legal title and extractive land-use. Through the lens of reconciliation, we seek expressions of interest for those working to expand the meaning of ground - whether urban, rural or transitional; including but not limited to place names, preservation values, botanical vocabulary, ancestral knowledge, invisible narratives and archaeological surveys. The most pressing question for us is: Where do we stand?

Food

Does the post Anthropocene acknowledge food waste and food scarcity as an area for architectural intervention? How do we go beyond the urban farm to more equitably distributed networks ? How can more potent alliances between architecture and landscape among other disciplines begin to develop design logics that incorporate food landscapes, both as food producers (pollination, urban farming) and food decomposition (composting, brewing, decomposition beetle farms)?

Voice

While the climate crisis creates new populations of refugees, an ongoing sixth mass extinction manifests the widespread habitat loss for non-humans. Yet our miniaturized sensors, AI systems for citizen science and cloud computing platforms create the substrate for new levels of engagement in species monitoring and understanding. How can we apply science, computation and design among other disciplines in the production of artificial habitats that promote biodiversity?

ALTERNATIVE FORMATS

Our 2022 AHRA Convening encourages us to question traditional formats for contributions. We anticipate that our conversations with our partner, The World Around, will be recorded, and that our collective output will result in jointly-edited transcriptions, co-edited conversations, and non-domiciled texts and transcripts.

We encourage creative activities, such as design actions and performances, artistic exhibitions or installations, as well as interactive workshops, critical conversations, skill shares, and traditional research papers.

CONVERSATIONS

Propose an issue for discussion, debate, and/or consideration, as well as potential interested and key stakeholders addressing questions of ground, voice and sustenance. Invited stakeholders should be diverse, representing different disciplines, and roles such as activists, on-the-ground knowledge producers, etc. Propose a community partner who might host the discussion. Suggestions of participants for your proposed conversation are welcome.

Consider submitting proposals for live streaming or pre-recorded sessions, which may include skillshares (on research methodologies, developing research proposals, fieldwork techniques, ethical research/community engagement, archiving techniques, modeling skills, drawing skills, etc…), which allow for informal conversation and quiet thinking 24/7 throughout the timeframe of the conference.

DESIGN ACTIONS

Propose a project, site, or transformative action across existing projects, or future sites of interrogation in the New York State area, that could form the basis for sites of engagement, performance, or workshop. This segment can also include reflections on previous work presented as film, installation, mixed media, or previous pedagogical work, i.e. workshops or studios related to the topic. Please note that this work will be documented for public use through publication and digital media.

PAPERS

Propose a 15-minute presentation for a paper that addresses the conference themes. Proposals may include "Coauthoring Workshops" for unfinished research facilitated by the researcher with support from conference volunteers. They might provide a space for participants to work together and contribute to ongoing research. All participants will be credited, challenging the existing academic/architecture model of single "genius" authorship.

A selection of authors will be invited to contribute their full papers to either an edited volume in the Routledge Press Critiques series, or to a special conference issue of the Journal Architecture and Culture. Contributors who are selected for these publications will be notified by mid-July, and their full manuscripts will be due in early October 2022.

Please note that full papers from all participants will be required prior to the conference, so that chairs and moderators can prepare for their sessions.