A+I Working Paper Series, Issue #03 | Guest Editor: Jingliang Du
Abstract Deadline (300 words): 8 June 2026
This issue invites contributions that examine how architectural labour organised, mediated, and contested colonial and imperial power, with a focus on East Asian contexts, preferably within and/or before the twentieth century. Wage records, apprenticeship documents, accident reports, and subcontracting arrangements open new lines of inquiry and prompt different questions about familiar structures, figures, and histories. What changes when a building is read through the conditions of its construction alongside its design? How did colonial power work itself out in the everyday routines of a building site?
East Asia provides a rich but open-ended regional frame. This issue welcomes contributions along two overlapping directions: the first concerns sites of colonial and imperial encounter within the region, for instance, treaty ports, concessions, occupied territories, and colonial cities such as Shanghai, Macau, Incheon, and Hanoi, where labour organisation, skill transfer, and building authority played out under conditions of contested sovereignty; the second follows East Asian labourers into broader global built environments, tracing the material and social traces they left in construction sites, infrastructure projects, and urban landscapes worldwide. Cross-regional perspectives are especially encouraged.
Please send your 300-word abstracts to dujl22@connect.hku.hk by 8 June 2026. All accepted authors will be asked to submit a 6,000-word article (including notes) that will be subject to a double-blind peer review. Final publication is expected by November 2026.
More information about the call and the journal: https://archlabour.iscte-iul.pt/working-papers-series-call-for-papers/
The Architecture + Infrastructures Working Papers Series (A+I WPS) is an academic journal in the field of architecture. The journal is supported by Dinâmia’CET-Iscte and the research project ArchLabour, coordinated by Ana Vaz Milheiro (ArchLabour, ERC 101096606).