Session #140

– Round Table / Discussion –

In recent years significant efforts have been made to expand architectural historiography beyond its traditional focus on architects and their achievements. In documenting contributions by clients, residents, builders, caretakers, as well as others, the stories and perspectives of people who traditionally have held less official power (including women, minorities, and racialised or marginalised individuals and groups) are increasingly entering history books. However, building more inclusive and diverse historiographies is not an easy task. Faced with archival silences, many architectural historians have turned to ‘alternative’ research methods such as oral history, interviews, situated fieldwork, and witness seminars. The growing use of such expanded methodological toolboxes coincides with important changes in our institutional bureaucracy. Notably, universities are expanding their regulations regarding privacy, ethics, and data management. While these institutional frameworks can support and strengthen the researchers’ ethical practice, not just in history but in the architectural humanities more broadly speaking, they can also form obstacles. Important ethical reflections that are needed, especially when making visible overlooked voices, risk to be overpowered by ethics legal frameworks. Moreover, project information sheets and consent forms drafted to protect people whom data stewards and ethics advisors deem ‘vulnerable’ are often lengthy and complex. Presented with such paperwork, people may decline to be involved in the research. The bureaucracy that has been set in place to protect the privacy and rights of ‘vulnerable’ subjects can thus mean that their stories remain forever untold.

This roundtable discussion invites humanities scholars to reflect on shared concerns connected to ethics, bureaucracy, and historiography, drawing from historical research but also theory and design research that allows us to thematically reflect on such questions. We will invite in-depth discussions of encounters with ethics (both positive and negative) in their own research practice and of the epistemological implications of institutional bureaucracy. We envision this panel as hybrid in-person and virtual which may also include requirements for some pre-recorded elements.