‘Home’ has been used as a boundary-forming device to identify, homogenize, normalize, and exclude. Composed of family and nation, and attendant notions of their sanctity, ‘home’ is no longer open to reinterpretation and reconfiguration; it is pressured as a lived space. Insurgent Domesticities brings into focus the insurgent environments, objects, and practices that make up the maintenance, creation, labor, and intimacies of home. This collective conversation investigates the more processual aspects of domesticity to interrogate the politics of ‘home’ through histories of solidarity, disobedience, stealth, and militancy, from the scale of the clothesline to that of the state.
This discussion is presented in conjunction with our Settlement Symposium on March 28, 2025. (Separate event: more info here)
Learn more about the Insurgent Domesticities working group and access teaching tools here.
Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. This event will be recorded. By being present, you consent to the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.
Speakers
Ana Gisele Ozaki is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Architectural History at the University of Pennsylvania. Ozaki's research investigates the complex ways racial ideologies have interfered with architectural understandings of climate and the environment within the African diaspora, mainly within the Black Atlantic. Centered on Brazil's construction of an architectural ideal for the rest of the tropics, her book project developed from her dissertation, "The Brazilian Atlantic: New 'Brazils,' Plantation Architecture, Race, and Climate in Brazil and Africa, 1910-1974," examines the country's connections to West and Southern Africa, specifically Nigeria, Angola, and Mozambique, albeit often mediated by Europe.
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is an architectural historian and Assistant Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, and author of Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press), on the spatial politics, ecologies, iconography, visual rhetoric, and long colonial traditions of the UNHCR-administered camps at Dadaab, Kenya. She is the author of Minnette De Silva: Intersections (Mack Books), and her book manuscript Ecologies of the Past: The Inhabitations and Designs of Anil and Minnette de Silva analyzes the politics of heritage environments through the work of Sri Lankan architect Minnette de Silva and art historian Anil de Silva-Vigier.
Barbara Penner is a Professor in the Architectural Humanities at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. She is presently the Co-Director of the MA Architectural History, one of the oldest and most prestigious postgraduate architectural history programs in the UK, and supervises numerous PhD students. She was formerly BSA's Director of Research and REF lead (2016-21). She has recently completed a Leverhulme Major Fellowship (2021-3).
Hollyamber Kennedy is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Northwestern University. She researches and teaches modern architectural and landscape history, with an emphasis on heritage politics and the material and environmental legacies of colonial building cultures and land practices. Focusing on transregional links between sub-Saharan Africa and Central and Eastern Europe, her work investigates the ways in which architecture and infrastructure facilitated imperial governance and reshaped agrarian modernities through rural modernization projects across the 19th and 20th centuries.
Iulia Statica is Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture and Landscape at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her research explores the legacies of socialist built environments in Eastern Europe, focused on gendered experiences of spatial infrastructures including mass housing and urban landscapes. Her current work investigates processes of feminised migration from the Global East and their affective and infrastructural effect on domesticity and postsocialist/postcolonial spatial practices. She employs documentary film in her research; her film My Socialist Home premiered in London in 2021. She is the author of Urban Phantasmagorias: Domesticity, Production and the Politics of Modernity in Communist Bucharest.
Lilian Chee is an Associate Professor of Architectural Design and Visual Cultures at the Department of Architecture in the National University of Singapore, where she co-leads the Research by Design Cluster, and serves as Assistant Dean at the College of Design and Engineering. Her recent work includes Architecture and Affect (2023), Art in Public Space (2022), and Remote Practices (2022), as well as documentaries To Work At Home (forthcoming, 2025), Objects for Thriving (2022,) and 03-FLATS (2014). She led the Social Sciences Research Council-funded Foundations for Home-based Work(2021-24) and conducted a limited study on dementia, care, and public housing (2023-24). She writes on affect, architectural representation, domesticity, and works creatively across the intersections of architecture and visual cultures.
Madiha Tahir is a Postdoctoral Associate and Assistant Professor of American Studies at Yale University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of technology and war with interest and expertise in digital war, surveillance, militarism, and empire and technology studies from below. Her work intersects the anthropology of war with insights from the fields of postcolonial, South Asian, and Black Studies literatures to reframe our understanding of technology, war, and US imperialism.
Neferti Xina M. Tadiar is Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College. She is the author of Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (2009), and Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004), which was awarded the Philippine National Book Award in Cultural Criticism for 2005. She is also co-editor of Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation (with Angela Y. Davis).
Rishav Kumar Thakur is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. He studies articulations of, and claims around, identity and belonging in Assam, India. In doing so, his work aims to understand patterns of violence, dissent, and queer imaginations of community in the region.
S.E. Eisterer is an Assistant Professor at the Princeton University School of Architecture.
With Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt, Joanna Joseph, and Meriam Soltan from Columbia Books on Architecture and the City.
Image: House garden in Fishtown, Philadelphia
Photo: Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi
Presentations by these two working groups are organized by the Society of Fellows and the Heyman Center for Humanities and co-sponsored by the Barnard Center for Research on Women, the Barnard Department of Africana Studies, the Barnard Department of Art History, the Barnard Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the Barnard and Columbia Department of Architecture, the Center for Comparative Media, the Center for Palestine Studies, the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, the Center for the Study of Social Difference Insurgent Domesticities Working Group, the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, the Ifriqiyya Colloquium, the Institute of African Studies, the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, the Institute for Research in African American Studies, the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender, and the South Asia Institute.