MEDIATING MATTER(S): The Agora III International Symposium
September 5, 2025
MEDIATING MATTER(S) Architecture and Bodily Affects organized by Carleton Research | Practice of Teaching | Collaborative (CRIPTIC)
October 23-24, 2025
Everyone is invited to the two-day symposium, MEDIATING MATTER(S), hosted by the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism (ASAU).
The public event is free and will take place on Thursday and Friday, October 23-24, 2025. It comprises three keynote lectures, 17 paper presentations, and an exhibition.
Registration is required for in person or online attendance.
You can register here: https://www.criptic.org/agora-3
Download the symposium’s poster for sharing with your contacts at this link.
MEDIATING MATTER(S) will explore the relationships between matter and bodies within architectural practice and discourse, challenging conventional views. It is organized around the question: How does the mediation of matter(s) through architecture and by architects (broadly understood) normalize certain modes of being while undermining others.
This event brings together three keynote speakers and 17 contributors from 16 countries, offering diverse perspectives to the symposium themes. They explore how the “orderly arranging of materials and bodies,” as defined by Achille Mbembe in Brutalism (Duke University Press 2024: XII), produced by architecture, affirms the discipline’s legacies of exclusion and how bodies that fall beyond dominant norms of the human disrupt these configurations through non-normative entanglements with matter.
Participants will explore acts of Architecture and Bodily Affects in Algeria, Angola, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Jamaica, Mexico, Portugal, Switzerland, Turkey, Vietnam, the United States, the Middle East, and North Africa..
The symposium features keynote lectures by:
Dr. Samia Henni
McGill University
Dr. Henni is a historian of the built, destroyed, and imagined environments and an assistant professor at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture at McGill University. She is the author of the multi-award-winning books: Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria, and Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara.
Dr. María González Pendás
Cornell University
Dr. González Pendás is an architectural historian of modernity and coloniality of the Spanish transatlantic world and assistant professor at Cornell AAP, whose research explores the intersections of aesthetics, technologies, ideologies, and power through the built environment. Other projects have investigated relations of labour and race in Mexico and the coloniality of concrete technologies and innovation across the South Atlantic.
Dr. Aya Nassar
Durham University
Dr. Nassar is an interdisciplinary scholar working between politics, urban and political geography, and Middle East studies. She is an assistant professor at the Department of Geography at Durham University. Her research focuses on memory, archiving, (geo)poetics of space, infrastructure, and affective and material aspects of cities.
The international symposium is part of the CR|PT|C Agora Symposia & Exhibit series at the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism, Carleton University.
On Thursday, October 23, the exhibition, “Performing Colonial Toxicity”, by Samia Henni will open in the Lightroom Gallery at the Architecture Building at Carleton University. The exhibition will be open to the public for three weeks. It is organized by Associate Professor Menna Agha with the support of Kyle Bustin, the school’s exhibitions coordinator.
The exhibition is part of a larger research project by Dr. Henni. Her award-winning book on the same subject: Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara, was published in 2024 by If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam; Framer Framed, Amsterdam; edition fink, Zurich. The publication was recognized by the 2024 Best Dutch Book Design and the 2025 Most Beautiful Swiss Book awards.
The event is generously supported by professional and academic institutions, including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Connection Grant (SSHRC Connection), the Ottawa Regional Society of Architects (ORSA), the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC), the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism (ASAU, the Faculty of Engineering and Design, Carleton University), and the Carleton Immersive Media Studio (CIMS).
Dr. Federica Goffi (C R | P T | Chair), Dr. Menna Agha, (C R | P T | Faculty Advisor and exhibition organizer), and ASAU PhD Students Ahmed Elsherif and Ushma Thakrar (C R | P T | Coordinators) co-host the event.
At the symposium, the forthcoming book (Un)Common Precedents in Architectural Design edited by Federica Goffi, Isabel Potworowski, and Kristin Washco, will be presented.
The edited volume calls for an attentive examination of the uncommon that inspires architectural creativity, prompting a re-examination of both common and marginalized precedents.
The publication resulted from the C R | P T | C international symposium AGORA II that was held at the ASAU in September 2023 by Professor of Architecture Federica Goffi, PhD, and ASAU PhD graduates Dr. Isabel Potworowski (University of Cincinnati) and Dr. Kristin Washco (Virginia Tech).
About the Carleton Research | Practice of Teaching | Collaborative
C R | P T | Collaborative is chaired by Dr. Federica Goffi. The collaborative is formed by PhD candidates, PhD students, post-professional master’s students, and faculty of the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Founded in 2019, the Collaborative pursues research in the humanities with a diverse research agenda that reflects the interests of the collaborators through the practice of teaching in academic settings in architecture.
C R | P T | C activities include research, publications, symposia, workshops, performances, podcasts, and exhibits.
C R | P T | C works | transmediate between the written word and epistemic constructions. Follow C R | P T | C on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook