EVENT: Into the Desert: Questions of Coloniality and Toxicity. Online lecture series

EVENT: Into the Desert: Questions of Coloniality and Toxicity. Online lecture series

2020 Preston H. Thomas Memorial Lectures

Deserts are not empty as they have long been seen and represented. Deserts —both hot and cold—have often served to search, extract, and transport various natural resources, such as oil and gas, as well as to design and build new cities, infrastructures, tourist complexes, farming systems, solar power plants, climate, and aerospace research centers, chemical weapons testing complexes, nuclear weapon research centers, and testing sites, and other settlements. How were these designs managed and implemented? What were their impacts on nomadic, semi-nomadic, and sedentary populations and their environments? To what extent did these deserts’ transformations influence the politico-economic assets of the governments in question? The Fall 2020 Preston H. Thomas Memorial Symposium will explore the ways in which politicians, scientists, and architects developed, exploited, colonized, transformed, urbanized, militarized, or polluted the underground or overground territories of a number of deserts in the aftermath of the Second World War.
The symposium will feature a series of virtual lectures convened by Assistant Professor of the History of Architecture and Urban Development Samia Henniwho is working on a book project on French nuclear testing sites and military bases in the Sahara Desert. Occurring weekly, scholars, curators, artists, and architects will each approach the topic from a different perspective and discuss one of their current research projects. The aim of the series is to offer a multiplicity of readings of the desert. Each speaker has thirty minutes to introduce the spatial possibilities or limitations of the desert she or he is studying. Taken all together, the lectures stage an intersectional understanding of the spaces and places of the desert.
The full list of speakers and the registration links are available at the series webpage.

Share this post

News from the field

Drawing Attention to the Periphery

October 25-27, 2023 Panel session for AHRA conference on Situated Ecologies of Care Portsmouth School of Architecture, UK. Submission deadline for abstracts: June 12, 2023 This paper session asks: How is the periphery reconfigured against collective life, culture,...

Research Assistant in the Field of Architecture and Landscape

Leibniz University Hanover The Faculty of Architecture and Landscape, Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, Department of Architectural Theory (Prof. Dr. Nathalie Bredella), invites applications for the position of a Research Assistant (m/f/d) in the...

Materia Arquitectura N°25: Out of Place Matter

MATERIA ARQUITECTURA is a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes original research, which can be exploratory and speculative. It is also open to visual and imaginative proposals. Its aim is to contribute to the development and questioning of the discipline and...

German Colonial Building Cultures in 100 Primary Sources

Exhibition at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte Munich, Germany, 20 April – 30 June 2023 From about 1880 to 1920, the German Empire was one of the European colonial powers. Its possessions included territories on three continents: in Africa (German South-West...