Journal of Architectural Education explores Infidelities in issue co-edited by faculty members Ozayr Saloojee and Menna Agha
February 9, 2023
Associate Professor Ozayr Saloojee and Assistant Professor Menna Agha, with two other scholars, are co-editing the next issue of the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE) on the theme of Infidelities.
“As Muslim people of colour working at the margins of architecture, art, and social practice, we have always felt like infidels since we are not loyal to the discipline and its institutions, but neither are we loyal to the multiple belongings of ourselves,” they write in the call for proposals.
“Yet, infidelity is neither refusal, criticality nor counter politics,” say the editors. “It is a fertile ground that emerges through a certain discomfort with institutional power, social and moral codes, and rules that attempt to regulate behaviors. It has the potential to create transversal relations across difference.
“If you feel such discomfort, we are looking to build affirmative agencies with you, wherever you may be.”
Their fellow theme editors are Aya Musmar, assistant professor of architecture and feminism at the University of Petra in Amman, Jordan, and Nishat Awan, a lecturer at Urban Lab at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.
Dr. Awan will deliver a lecture, Architectures of Displacement, at the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism on Friday, March 17, at 1:00 p.m. in the Pit at the Architecture Building. The talk is part of the school’s 2023 Open Forum Lecture Series.
Collage by Nishat Awan and Ozayr Saloojee with images from editors.
The editors invite submissions, including essays, designs, narratives, and images (un-mappings, modified film stills, text/picture chimeras, visual elegies, laments, ghazals, war cries, love songs, and drumbeats) “that can build affirmative agencies across our diverse positionalities and locations.”
The submission deadline is July 31, 2023.
“We are interested in thinking with infidelities as relations capable of producing other architectures and dreaming of new institutions that see disloyalty and inaccuracy as ethical modes of engagement,” they write.
“How might we produce infidel methodologies that not only question how, but who and what gets to be regarded as the poor copy? Why are certain traditions of thinking not allowed entry into the hallowed grounds of architectural theory?
“Beyond the fictions of mainstream architectural production and pedagogy, what other worlds does an epistemology of infidelity open up for design?”
Accepted articles will be published in issue 78.1 (Spring 2023).
The Journal of Architectural Education is a biannual peer-reviewed academic journal published by Routledge/Taylor & Francis on behalf of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.
JAE has been the primary venue for research and commentary on architectural education since it was founded in 1947.