Life Beyond Emergency: Ecologies & Inhab

Life Beyond Emergency examines constructed environments and spatial practices in contexts of displacement, within the connected histories of colonialism and humanitarianism. People migrating under duress, seeking refuge, practicing mutual aid, and sheltering in governmental or nongovernmental settings invest in the built environment as a holder of knowledge, critical heritage, and imaginaries of life beyond emergency. The course considers a politics and poetics of architectures and infrastructures of partitions, borders, and camps: territories and domesticities of concern to authorities and inhabited by ordinary people forging solidarities and futures. We will investigate the connected histories and theories of humanitarianism and colonialism, which have not only shaped lives as people inhabit spaces of emergency, but produced rationales for the construction of landscapes and domesticities of refuge, enacted spatial violence and territorial contestations, and structured architectural knowledge. The course examines iconic forms such as refugee camps in relation to colonial institutions such as archives. From Somalia to Palestine to Bangladesh and beyond, our inquiry into contested territories where people have been forced to migrate invites students to interrogate the normalized discourses and spaces, for example, of ‘borderlands,’ or ‘refugees,’ in order to imagine and analyze emergency environments as constructions that people have resisted, endured, transcended, theorized, and inhabited.