The Society of Architectural Historians invites graduate students and emerging professionals to apply to participate in the virtual GAHTC Teacher-to-Teacher Workshop, “Speculative Spaces: (Re)presenting Global Architectural History”.
Thursday, May 22, 2025, 8:00am CDT to 12pm CDT
Friday, May 23, 2025, 8:00am CDT to 12pm CDT
In response to the limits and omissions of official archives, cultural historian Saidiya Hartman offers scholars the methodology of “critical fabulation” — the practice of speculative narration and imaginative storytelling to redress history’s failures, especially those in the lives of enslaved people — to unearth erased stories shrouded by the legacy of colonialisms and its continued hold in the present. Since the publication of Hartman’s seminal “Venus in Two Acts” in 2008, scholars of literature, cultural history, feminist studies, and architectural history have creatively adopted modes of critical fabulation in their scholarship, including Donna Haraway’s call for feminist speculative fabulation and Daniela Rosner’s Critical Fabulations: Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design (MIT Press, 2020). Likewise, artists and curators have taken up critical fabulations as a lens through which to imaginatively tell occluded histories: from multimedia artist Simone Leigh’s hybrid storytelling practice to MoMA’s 2023 exhibition, “Critical Fabulations.” Critical fabulation offers historians a means to engage with spatial politics, narratives of violence, erased histories, and other “impossible stories.”
This SAH GAHTC workshop explores speculative methodologies as a means of teaching global architectural history, especially stories of erasure. Moving from testimonial fabulation, 3D modeling, AI technologies, speculative mapping, and soundscape technologies, this workshop engages participants in how we (re)imagine erased spaces and narratives, develop shared pedagogical practices, and creatively and rigorously tell these stories. The two-day workshop will be divided into demonstrations, workshops, and keynotes. On the first day, participants will examine how we tell stories of spatial violence utilizing situated testimonies and speculative cartography and modeling. On the second day, participants will investigate how we tell occluded stories utilizing speculative technologies, including AI and soundscape mixing. Throughout the workshop, participants will have the opportunity to directly apply insights and new skills from the workshops into a collective syllabus.
Call for Participants
The demonstration and workshop sessions of “Speculative Spaces” will be limited to thirty graduate students and emerging scholars to ensure full participation by all attendees.
