MEDIATING MATTER(S): The Agora III International Symposium

Thursday, October 23 at 9:30 am to Friday, October 24, 2025 at 6:00 pm

In-person event
Architecture Building, Carleton University
1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6

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October 23, 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.
October 24, 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

See the program and abstracts here.

MEDIATING MATTER(S) Architecture and Bodily Aﬀects organized by Carleton Research | Practice of Teaching | Collaborative (CRIPTIC)

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.

See full event details here.