Dialectic VII: Architecture and Citizenship– Decolonizing Architectural Pedagogy

Call for Papers and Projects

DIALECTIC, a refereed journal of the School of Architecture, CA+P, University of Utah

Architecture and Citizenship– Decolonizing Architectural Pedagogy

Deadline: 1 June 2018

Requirements: Abstract (350 words) / Short CV

“Dialectic VII invites reflection on the challenges of training architects for global citizenship. In recent decades, design programs in affluent and globally dominant cultures, from Japan to United States, Belgium to Dubai have developed traveling studios that place students face to face with global others. Some of these efforts reproduce the priorities of professional practice for innovation, efficiency and market viability. Others, including design-build programs in poor communities, emphasize affective experience and tactical approaches. Still others are represented as simple cultural exposure by which design students collect experiences towards open-ended results. Some of these educational forays aim to educate future designers as global citizens rather than mere passive corporate cogs within the international marketplace. However, the idea of global citizenship is complicated

by the fact that the globe is a profoundly anti-democratic space, one in which international architects are some of the few granted mobility and voice. Is the very idea of “global citizenship” then an oxymoron? 

Just as thorny aspect of this pedagogic ambition is the need for decolonizing architectural pedagogy. Despite absorption of women, colored and queer voices, desire to reach out to the destitute, non-moderns, and difference, the studio culture still brings everything back to Western and capitalist modes of governance and being in the world. Decolonization of education is a wide ranging ethical project spanning numerous disciplines, with the goal of recovering power for different ways of knowing and being, discredited by the universalist truth claims of Western system of knowledge. In our discipline, history of world architecture is one domain that is attempting to relieve architectural pedagogy from Euro-US centric frameworks of imagining architecture. This highly myopic and narrow imagination is sustained by the myth of the neutral expert—that despite being thoroughly debunked by postcolonial critiques of development—persists in our field with a stubborn tenacity.

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Dialectic VII invites articles, field notes, reports, maps, and image essays on architectural citizenship and its entanglement with the decolonization of architectural pedagogy and practice. The editors value critical statements and model practices. We hope to include instructive case studies and exciting examples of professional practice. Possible contributions may also include mapping of ongoing debates across the world, and reviews of books, journals, exhibitions and new media. Please send abstracts of 350 words and short CVs to one of the editors.”

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