Session #115

– Paper Presentations –

Are you passionate about the evolving field of architecture and its role in addressing contemporary challenges and forms of suffering? We invite you to submit your paper on the emerging situated ecologies of architectural care and reflexivity practices for our conference session.

The field of architecture is constantly evolving and adapting to the contemporary material conditions of the present. Recent anthropologically-informed architectural studies have uncovered emerging situated ecologies of architectural care and reflexivity practices in response to current crises and forms of suffering, such as COVID-19, ecological anxiety, social and climate injustice, and displacement. These conditions are co-constituted by new challenges and matters of care experienced by designers in their everyday lives and architectural practices. These new matters of care go hand in hand with new kinds of embodied performativity that take place in responsive ways to cope with current problems. This felt dimension of experience, almost unnoticeable but very real, has ignited new forms of political engagement which in turn are informing a fleshier orientation toward care as a cosmopolitical category, reconfiguring the field from within.

This paper panel seeks to gather paper presentations on the topic of situated ecologies of architectural care and reflexivity practices. We aim to make the implicit dynamics in practice explicit and to make sense of the subterranean changing forces in architectural making. We encourage papers that examine how designers and design communities are responding to the challenges posed by ecological anxiety, depression, isolation, fibromyalgia, somatophobia, social injustice, climate injustice, epistemic injustice, extinction, ecological collapse, climate emergency, unemployment, domestic violence, war, earthquakes, forced mobility, displacement, and other forms of suffering, injustice, and crisis.

We invite submissions that explore the following questions: What motivates new interests, concerns, and matters of care among designers? How do designers articulate what is going on in their practice when facing unexpected wicked problems? How do design communities find their ways to incorporate real-time recalibrations of social and material conditions of the present and unknown resources from the field and elsewhere in response to those problems?

This panel will provide an opportunity for researchers to share their findings and explore new avenues of research using a similar focus on embodied transdisciplinary inquiries on the topic. We seek original contributions that offer insights, challenges, and proposals for the future of architectural design in the face of emerging challenges. We want to raise questions about the present futures of the field of architectural design, not just in speculative and descriptive ways, but rather through the experimental implication of reflexive-embodied methods of care in design practice. We welcome papers that employ reflexive-embodied inquiries and expand the field of architectural design through transdisciplinary approaches that cross the boundaries between architecture, anthropology, somatics, sociology, and philosophy. We are interested in papers that draw on case studies or empirical research to demonstrate the relevance of situated ecologies of architectural care and reflexivity practices in addressing the challenges of the contemporary world.

We welcome submissions from scholars, researchers, architects, designers, and other interested parties in the field of architecture. Submissions will be evaluated based on their contribution to the overall theme, relevance, originality, and clarity of writing and particularly on the ways they raise questions, challenge assumptions, and experiment with reflexive-embodied methods of care in design with vulnerable communities and situations.

Join us in exploring the potential of situated ecologies of architectural care and reflexivity practices to address our current planetary challenges. Deadline for submissions is 17:00h UK time, Monday 12^th June, 2023. We look forward to hearing from you and exploring this topic together by becoming a part of this important conversation.