SAHGB Annual Conference 2023: "Constructing Coloniality: British Imperialism and the Built Environment".

As previously announced, we are delighted be hosting the upcoming three-day conference on Constructing Coloniality: British Imperialism and the Built Environment. The event will take place at the Bartlett School of Architecture in central London, run by The Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (SAHGB) in collaboration with UCL and the London School of Architecture.

We will kick off on Thursday May 11th 2023 at 18.00 with a drinks reception in the foyer of the Bartlett School of Architecture followed by Professor Nnamdi Elleh’s pre-conference keynote lecture titled Decolonizing Decolonisation: Ideological Continuity and Discontinuity in Colonial and Postcolonial Imaginations of Modernity.

This will be followed on Friday and Saturday, May 12th and May 13th 2023, by two full days of conference papers focusing on the coloniality of architecture and built heritage in relation to the British Empire. They will cover the period from the early years of colonial expansion and the escalation of the slave trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through to the physical and political force wielded in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the development of racial capitalism, to the subsequent and ongoing struggles for independence, freedom and justice.

The topics cover:
• Session 1: The Architectural Grasp
• Session 2: Militarised Spaces of Empire
• Session 3: Networks of Trade and Industry
• Session 4: Objectives of Empire
• Session 5: Infrastructures of Life and Land
• Session 6: Postcolonialism and its Heritage

Our series of optional walking tours around London will take place on Sunday May 14th 2023, when the role of architecture in constructing coloniality can be explored first-hand.

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PROGRAMME

Pre-conference keynote-lecture:
THURSDAY, May 11th, 2023, 18.00-19.00 pm
Drinks reception in the foyer of the Bartlett School of Architecture

19.00-20.30 pm
Nnamdi Elleh: Decolonizing Decolonisation: Ideological Continuity and Discontinuity in Colonial and Postcolonial Imaginations of Modernity

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DAY 1: FRIDAY, May 12th, 2023

9:30-10.00 Opening Remarks by Dr Eva Branscome

10.00-12.30 Session 1: The ARCHITECTURAL GRASP

Murray Fraser: Ireland as an experimental ground for British architecture

Amy Orner: “Yon Empress of the North”: Edinburgh’s New Town as a city of Empire

Karan Rane: Colonial inspirations, regional development: The case of Baroda state, British India

Soon-Tzu Speechley + Julie Willis: Professional entanglements: British colonial networks of architecture

Albert Brenchat-Aguilar + Ato Jackson: Fictional functional reports: Inhabiting the gaps at KNUST’s Faculty of Architecture, 1963–2023

12.30-14.00 Lunch Break

14.00-16.00 Session 2: MILITARIZED SPACES OF EMPIRE

Jasmine Chan + Patrick Chiu + Patrick Hwan: Tai Ping Shan’s spatial injustice: Colonial Hong Kong during the 1894 bubonic plague

Mira Rai Waits: The police building as image: Station architecture in British Colonial India

Anwar Jaber: Colonial legacy and state building in Palestine: Architectural investigation

Karin Elliott: Legacies of violence and trauma: Covert surveillance during Belfast’s “Troubles” and Kenya’s “Mau Mau Uprising”

16.00-16.30 Tea Break

16.30-18.30 Session 3: NETWORKS OF TRADE AND INDUSTRY

Mrudula Mane + Pushkar Sohoni: Military ports and trading forts of Konkan: Geospatial analysis of architectural evidence of European expansionism from the 16th to 18th Centuries

Matthew Wells: Telegraphy and financial sovereignty at the India Office

Michele Tenzon: The architecture of industrial crops production and extraction: Lever Brothers’ intercolonial and trans-imperial networks of industrialisation in Africa

Tao Dufour: Guyana landscapes: Sugar, infrastructure, and labour in the spatial formation of (post)colonial subjectivity

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DAY 2: SATURDAY, May 13th, 2023

10.00-12.30 Session 4: OBJECTIVES OF EMPIRE

Alex Bremner: A crimson thread? The cumulative effects of race, nation and empire in British architectural discourse, c.1850-1920

Vimalin Rujivacharakul: Buildings and blueprints: Knowledge, power and colonization

Sonali Dhanpal: A King, a Queen, and a statue in-between: Stabilizing colonial instability in Bangalore

Émélie Desrochers-Turgeon: Fields architecture: The central farm and the production of colonial knowledge in Canada, 1889–1939

Nushelle De Silva: From the National Gallery to the world: Museum climate as British Standard

12.30-13.30 Lunch Break

13.30-16.00 Session 5: INFRASTRUCTURES OF LIFE AND LAND

Victoria Perry: A bittersweet heritage: Slavery, architecture and the British landscape

Tania Sengupta: Schooling the Mufassal: Educational space in small-town Bengal, Colonial India

Camilla Allen + Luca Csepely-Knorr: Developing capable women: Coloniality, landscape and post-war reconstruction in Britain and abroad

Alistair Cartwright: Ecologies of vulnerability: Post-cyclone reconstruction in Mauritius, 1945

Bijou Harding: The “Bod Ose” + Krio architecture story telling the history of a tribe

16.00-16.30 Tea Break

16.30-19.00 Session 6: POSTCOLONIALISM AND ITS HERITAGE

Mark Crinson: “Not in the usual sense”: Anthony D King and the origins of critical colonial architectural history

Ola Uduku: The traces of imperialism in Nigerian architecture

Anna Bishop + Niall Finneran: Building a “Little England”: Architectural legacies and postcolonial conversions in a case study from Barbados

Sean Ketteringham: The Georgian isles: Angus Acworth’s heritage legislation in Jamaica and England

Alan Chandler + Caroline Watkinson: Coloniality and the Politicisation of Literary Heritage Conservation

19.00-19.10 Break

19:10-19.30 Conference summation by Dr Neal Shasore

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DAY 3: SUNDAY, May 14th, 2023
10.00- 12.00 Walking Tours

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Organiser:
Eva Branscome, contact: e.branscomeucl.ac.uk

Location:
The Bartlett School of Architecture
22 Gordon Street
London
WC1H 0QB
United Kingdom

Full programme:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/architecture/sites/bartlett_architecture/files/sahgb-ucl-lsaconference-programme.pdf

Registration is now open:
https://www.sahgb.org.uk/constructing-coloniality-sahgb-conference2023