The forthcoming edition of CRIPITIC's Agora symposium series, Mediating Matter(s): Architecture and Bodily Affects, is welcoming abstracts for paper presentations to be given at the event in Ottawa, Canada, in Fall 2025.
Mediating Matter(s) seeks to unpack, contest, and subvert normative relationships between matter and bodies as they take place within architecture practice and discourse. This call asks: How does the mediation of matter(s) through architecture and by architects (broadly understood) normalize certain modes of being while undermining others? Expanding contemporary discussions on how the scales, movements, animacy, and vibrancy of matter unevenly affect and act on, through, and between diverse bodies as well as how such bodies are objectified, thingified, reduced, and transformed into a labour force, our goal is to engage in a conversation that probes architecture’s complicity in rendering “some beings as more human than others,” and marking all of us who “cohabit in the space of the undercommons,” as ontologically empty.
The aims of Mediating Matter(s) are twofold: to explore how architecture’s “orderly arranging of materials and bodies”[6] affirm the discipline’s violent legacies of exclusion and how bodies that fall beyond dominant norms of the human disrupt these configurations through non-normative entanglements with matter. This call hopes to bring together work from a broad range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to explore the intersections of architecture and urbanism with critical new materialism and colonial, subaltern, disability, queer, gender, sexuality, Black, and Indigenous studies.
Abstract proposals are due by August 15, 2024
Abstract proposals for papers must be approximately 350 words and submitted in a .docx format and a maximum of 2 images. Please include your name, institution affiliation, and a brief bio (100 words) in the email body. All submissions will be kept anonymous and will be blind peer-reviewed. Applicants will be contacted in September 2024 with a decision.
