CFP - On the Edge of Legibility: Architecture and its Peripheries (deadline extended)

[Matthew Heins]

I've been asked to spread the news that the deadline to submit abstracts for the doctoral student symposium "On the Edge of Legibility: Architecture and its Peripheries" (at Columbia University in April) has been extended to December 30.

The CFP is copied below or can be seen at https://www.arch.columbia.edu/programs/5-ph-d-in-architecture/symposia (the submittal link is also there).

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In 1930, the Croatian art historian Ljubo Karaman theorized the “freedom of the periphery” as a highly dynamic space of syncretism and geopolitical interrelation. Karaman and his theories, though, have themselves remained peripheral to the Anglo-American academy, whose discourse on peripherality has been shaped largely by world-systems theories. In Immanuel Wallerstein’s 1974 The Modern World-System, for example, the globe is partitioned according to unidirectional exchanges between a core and periphery, and cultural hegemony is merely contingent on economic domination. Poet and thinker Édouard Glissant would reject such a reduction two decades later. Challenging the West’s empirical imperative to render the world legible and transparent, Glissant called for our “right to opacity,” wherein knowledges are entangled, irreducible, confluent, and relativized. Considering opacity as a precondition for cultural freedom, how can architectural historians engage the periphery on its own terms and with its own methods?

While easily conceived economically and geographically, we propose a lingering in the periphery, putting pressure on capitalist temporality and liberal epistemologies. While architectural historiography has treated the peripheral in diverse ways, what themes, events, sites, and actors remain at the edge of its discourse? How can architectural history imbricate itself in questions of the temporal and knowable? Recent turns to indigenous knowledge and post-secular reevaluations of modernity are starting points for re-interrogating the periphery. Aware of our position within the American academy, our ambition for this symposium is to foster dialogue on how we can attend to, uphold, research, study, and understand each other opaquely.

We invite proposals from doctoral students across disciplines that investigate and reflect on the histories of the built environment within, but not limited to, three arenas:

• Geographic peripheries: geographies lying out of reach of or resisting extractive capitalism; mountains, oceans, forests, deserts, Arctic and Antarctic, caves; de-monolithization and de-homogenization of traditional cores and peripheries.
• Temporal peripheries: differing models of time; reconsiderations of periodizations, ages, and styles “outside” of the modern (e.g. “Early-Modern,” “Prehistoric,” etc.); the unwinding of capitalist teleology; and the overall fragility of modernity when confronted with the deeper archaeological time of human inhabitation.
• Epistemic peripheries: indigenous knowledge systems; post-secular approaches to modernity; embodied, craft, and technical knowhow; actors, events, theories, and methods that have remained peripheral to Anglo-American scholarship.

Dates: April 2-3, 2026
Keynote Speaker: Ijlal Muzaffar
Location: Avery 114, Columbia University, New York. In-Person.
Organizer: Students in the Ph.D. Program in Architecture, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation