Ten Special Interest Group (SIG) activities took place on the first day of the EAHN 2026 Aarhus Biennial Conference on Wednesday, 17 June, bringing together established and newly constituted groups around focused conversations on thematic and methodological questions.
The programme included Building Word Image, Children Matter, Women and Gender in Architecture, Landscape and Urban Design, Histories in Conflict, Migration and Architecture, on Housing, on Vanished Buildings, Postmodernism, The Connective Histories of the Eastern Mediterranean, and Urban Representations. Rather than functioning simply as thematic panels, the SIG gatherings were conceived mainly as workshops, roundtables, and working conversations in which members could test methods, exchange research in progress, and formulate future collaborations and publications.
Across their proposals, a particularly strong concern was how architectural history is produced, who and whose experiences become historically visible while others left out, and what kinds of sources and methods can broaden the discipline. Building Word Image, through “Experiencing the Domestic,” turned to the subjective experience of domestic environments those of dwellers, passers, migrants, labourers, and others who have imagined, encountered, or lived in such spaces, from shoppers to migrants, but also developers, labourers, tourists, artists, and writers and asked how spatial histories might be reconstructed from textual and oral traces beyond conventional evidence, and where the narrator’s experience and the author’s positionality diverge. Children Matter similarly addressed a historiographical absence, asking how children’s lived experiences could inform architectural history. The Women and Gender in Architecture, Landscape and Urban Design SIG examined methods for recovering collaboration and multiple agents from archival silences, challenging histories centred on the singular, canonical designer.
Other groups extended this methodological questioning towards contemporary political, social, and material conditions. Histories in Conflict, under the title Architecture in Extremis: The Return of the Dual State, asked how architectural history might respond when inherited analytical categories appear inadequate to contemporary transformations of political power. Migration and Architecture concentrated on Migration Pedagogies, discussing theories, readings, assignments, syllabi, collaborative grants, site visits, and public partnerships through which migration might enter architectural teaching. on Housing, meanwhile, asked how historians can study housing “in bulk,” considering oral history alongside digital methods such as machine learning and GIS as possible means of addressing dispersed archives and the enormous quantity of ordinary housing production.
Questions of absence, preservation, and contested historical evidence were equally prominent. on Vanished Buildings, meeting officially as an EAHN Interest Group for the first time, invited participants to work from objects, photographs, texts, and other fragments as witnesses to architectural absence and erasure, while collectively considering the methodological and ethical problems of writing histories from such traces. Postmodernism revisited the intersection between postmodern architecture and the preservation movement, examining how neo-historical design approaches became entangled with the conservation and planning politics surrounding historic European cities.
Two further groups foregrounded transnational connections and representation. The Connective Histories of the Eastern Mediterranean, also holding its first meeting, proposed the Eastern Mediterranean as both a geographical and conceptual field through which to investigate intercultural mobility and exchange among Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East; its programme introduced members’ current research and opened the group to the wider EAHN community. Urban Representations, in contrast, used its fifteen-year history within EAHN as an occasion for self-reflection, asking where the field is heading through collective discussion of sources, interpretive lenses, technologies, positionality, visual media, current research, and emerging publications.
As the EAHN 2026 Aarhus SIG programme shows, the SIGs operate as working infrastructures within EAHN rather than merely subdivisions by research topic: spaces in which members could bring unfinished research and primary material into collective discussion, interrogate historiographical methods, identify disciplinary blind spots, develop pedagogical approaches, and establish future research, publication, and collaborative agendas. The emphasis across the proposals was therefore placed on roundtables, workshops, informal exchange, networking, and the planning of next steps.
To take part in the next SIGs activities, please take a look at the Special Interest Groups and their respective pages, and feel free to get in touch with the coordinators of any groups that align with your own research interests.