Society of Architectural Historians
2027 Annual International Conference
April 14-18 in Chicago, Illinois (USA)
Session: Indigenous Knowledge, Architecture and Resistance in the Arctic
Processes of militarization, urbanization, and modernization accelerated exponentially in the Arctic in the twentieth century. Established literature on the history of Arctic architecture and urban design investigates examples of military and Cold War architecture in the Inuit and Iñupiaq Arctic of North America and examines modernist and regionalist architecture in Sápmi (arctic Europe and Kola Peninsula). Official accounts report on infrastructural development, resource extraction, and new towns in the Russian North, and analyze, among others, educational and healthcare modernizing plans in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland). More recently, scholarship on the Arctic has exposed longstanding patterns of hegemony and alarming interdependencies between modern design and national agendas for Indigenous assimilation. Other, even rarer studies have reported—often from Indigenous viewpoints—on Indigenous mobilization and acts of resistance to land separation. This scholarship investigates the role of architecture an urban design in Indigenous displacement while acknowledging loss of Indigenous lands, languages, and knowledge as interconnected problems in Arctic architecture and urban history (Nango et al. 2024; Bird 2021).
Building on this latter tradition, this session engages with the architectural and urban history of the region by introducing Indigenous discourses and perspectives on militarization, urbanization, and modernization. We invite papers which complicate established narratives of Arctic architecture and urban design. Presentations may investigate how Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural and building histories have been deeply intertwined in the Arctic or unpack the attempted erasure of Indigenous land-care and building practices in the region. Proposals might engage with notions of “indigeneity” and essentialized accounts on Indigenous “authenticity” or investigate how Indigenous groups have resisted centralized policies and design asserting control in the North. The session seeks to foster conversations on scholars’ positionality as well as methodological perspectives, including how to approach oral history, community history, and processes of co-creation.
The SAH Indigenous Architecture Affiliate Group endorses this proposal.
Session Chair: Elisa Dainese, Georgia Institute of Technology
Deadline to submit and abstract: no later than 11:59 p.m. CDT on June 8, 2026