To inaugurate Albert Hirschman Chair for Identity Passions between Europe and the Mediterranean at the Institute for Advanced Study (IMéRA), the first appointed Chair, Samia Henni, is hosting a series of monthly online conversations, named Hirschman Forum 2022. The Forum aims at addressing critical interpretations and interdisciplinary expansions of instigating and disputed themes borrowed from Hirschman, including Democracy, Self-subversion, Passions, Reaction, Interests, and Loyalty. The Forum reflects on "the possibility of an otherwise" in the context of the politics, policies, temporalities, spaces, and economies of societies. Every invited speaker will offer a 25-minute interpretation of a potential "otherwise," which will be discussed with the audience.All events will be held both online and at IMéRA, at 6-8 pm CET. Online registration is required.
12 January 2022
Stefano Harney, Professor of Transversal Aesthetics, Academy of Media Arts, Cologne
Shalini Randeria, President/Rector, Central European University, Vienna; Senior Visiting Fellow, Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva
9 February 2022
Jeremy Adelman, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, Princeton University, Princeton
Ayça Çubukçu, Associate Professor in Human Rights, Co-Director of LSE Human Rights, Department of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science, London
9 March 2022
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Contemporary Art Curator, Critic, Writer, Biotechnologist, Founder and Artistic Director of SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin
Alya Sebti, Contemporary Art Curator, Director of the ifa-Galerie Berlin - Institut fuer Auslandsbeziehungen, Berlin
13 April 2022
Ariella Aisha Azoulay, Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Department of Comparative Literature, Brown University, Providence
Adrian Lahoud, Professor of Architecture and Dean of the School of Architecture, Royal College of Art, London
Questions of Coloniality and Toxicity
Department of Architecture, AAP, Cornell Universoty
Convened by Samia Henni
October 5 - November 30, 2020
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 2020 Preston H. Thomas Memorial Symposium explored 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 featured a series of virtual lectures convened by Samia Henni, who 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 was to offer a multiplicity of readings of the desert. Each speaker introduced the spatial possibilities or limitations of the desert under study. Taken all together, the lectures staged an intersectional understanding of the spaces and places of the desert. Speakers included:
-Ariella Aisha Azoulay: "Palestine is There, Where it Has Always Been," 10/5
-Dalal Musaed Alsayer: "The U.S. Suburb in the Desert: Aramco, Dharhan, Saudi Arabia," 10/19
-Paulo Tavares: "Plantation Deserts," 10/26
-Asaiel Al Saeed, Aseel AlYaqoub, Saphiya Abu Al-Maati, and Yousef Awaad: "Space Wars: An Investigation into Kuwait's Hinterland," 11/5.
-Nadim Samman: "The Antarctic Imaginary," 11/6
-Menna Agha: "Architecture as Governance: Displacement, Resettlement, and Power Tensions in Nubian Resettlement Villages," 11/9
-Alessandra Ponte: "Matters of Extraction: The Lithium Triangle (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile)," 11/16
-Solveig Suess: "Overland, There's Shorter Time to Dream," 11/23
-Zoe Samudzi: "Fraught Desert Memorials," 11/30
The Preston H. Thomas series is funded through a gift to Cornell's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning from Ruth and Leonard B. Thomas of Auburn, New York, in memory of their son, Preston. The symposium lectures are free and open to the public.
Preview
December 9, 2020
A workshop organized by Urban Humanities Working Group:Peter Christensen, Lawrence Chua, Samia Henni, and Lisa Trivedi
Supported by Central New York Humanities Corridor
The events that occurred during Ariella Aisha Azoulay's lecture, "Palestine is There Where it has Always Been," convened by Samia Henni on October 5, 2020, as part of the Preston H. Thomas Memorial Lectures, "Into the Desert: Questions of Coloniality and Toxicity," at the Department of Architecture, Cornell University, call for a reconsideration of the roles of institutions, pedagogies, and sources in academic practice.
Borrowing the term unlearning from the titles of several publications, including Swati Chattopadhyay's Unlearning the City (2012), Azoulay's Potential History, Unlearning Imperialism (2019), and the Black Faculty of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation's statement, Unlearning Whiteness (2020), this workshop seeks to engage in a collective and scholarly exchange about normative roles and our agency as historians of architecture and the built environment in the processes and mechanisms of acting conscientiously and correctively as researchers, teachers, and members of academic communities.
The Central New York Humanities Corridor's Working Group: Urban Humanities, which includes Peter Christensen (University of Rochester), Lawrence Chua (Syracuse University), Samia Henni (Cornell University), and Lisa Trivedi (Hamilton College), is pleased to host this workshop. We have invited Swati Chattopadhyay (University of California, Santa Barbara), Charles Davis II (University of Buffalo), Ana Maria Leon (University of Michigan), Lesley Lokko (City College of New York), Victoria Young (University of St. Thomas), and Mabel O. Wilson (Columbia University) to share their experiences, concerns, and hopes in an era of institutional change that promises the prioritization of diversity, equity, inclusion, in pursuit of justice.
Schedule
Forms of Construction and Destruction in War Zones
Convened by Samia Henni
June 2-3, 2017
gta Institute, ETH Zurich
supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Chair for the History of Art and Architecture Prof. Dr. Philip Ursprung, the Chair for the Theory of Architecture Prof. Dr. Laurent Stalder, and the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zurich.
In everyday parlance, a war zone suggests a region
in which a war is being waged. In the context of
international law, a war zone refers to a demarcated
area, on land or at sea, within which the right of neutrality
is not respected by belligerent nations. After
the end of the Second World War and the beginning
of the Cold War, theaters of war became gradually
blurred and often undeclared, and the very form of
warfare changed significantly. Wars implied not only
conventional symmetric models – armed conflicts
between two or more military authorities in a defined
battlefield – but also asymmetric conflicts and in
some cases total wars. Whereas an asymmetric war is
an armed struggle among state or non-state powers
whose respective military resources are unequal, a
total war mobilizes all civilian-associated means and
ends. However, symmetric, asymmetric, and total
wars do not exclude one another; they frequently
interact or coexist.
In recent decades, critics and historians of the
built environment have paid particular attention to
the implications of the Second World War and the
declared and undeclared war zones of the post-Second
World War era in the design of infrastructures
and buildings; in the execution of extrajudicial territorial
occupations; in the urbanization of warfare;
in the mechanisms of destruction, surveillance, and
security; in the “Global War on Terror”; and in the
mapping of discontinuities and differences among
various military schools. The conference aimed at
highlighting the legacies connecting nineteenth- and
twentieth-century colonial wars and twenty-first-century
counterinsurgency and disclosing the intersections
between the history of the built environment,
colonial practices, and military operations.
Schedule