The third Architecture as Public Concern Lecture supports the CCA Research Network, an entity bringing together alumni from almost four decades of research programs at the CCA. This annual lecture explores the theme of the 2025 Architecture as Public Concern Fellowship, which asks, how can we build relation? It also aligns with the ambition of the CCA Research Network to continue the conversations our Fellows began during their residencies at the CCA, and to collectively chart the issues related to the global built environment that are at the forefront of our work.

Participants in any of our Research programs since the founding of the CCA are automatically enrolled in the CCA Research Network. The annual Architecture as Public Concern Lecture takes place online and is open to the public.

This third lecture is a dialogue between Nishat Awan, Shahana Rajani, and Dima Srouji, with each bringing their unique perspectives on how relation can be created and maintained through practices of counter-mapping, media that render visible, and tactics of unearthing. Together, they foreground how architecture holds the power and responsibility to create unique modalities of relation: between groups of people, between human and nonhuman worlds, between built forms and ecologies, and between multiple localities that are connected through networks of abundance and collectivity.

The event opens with Awan, Rajani, and Srouji sharing their current research projects, followed by a conversation moderated by current CCA Research Network Steering Committee Members Arièle Dionne-Krosnick, Nokubekezela Mchnu, Anooradha Siddiqi, Pelin Tan, and Huda Tayob.

Please register to attend online.

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88983850989

Nishat Awan is an architect whose work focuses on the intersection of geopolitics and space, including questions related to diasporas, migration, and borders. Her research and practice bring together digital, ethnographic, and field-based approaches in often contested geographies. She is the author of Diasporic Agencies (Routledge, 2016), co-author of Spatial Agency (Routledge, 2011), and co-editor of Trans-Local-Act (aaa-peprav, 2011). Her work has been exhibited at Nieuwe Instituut, Istanbul Biennale, Busan Museum of Modern Art, and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, among others. She is Professor of Architecture and Visual Culture at UCL Urban Laboratory, UK.

Shahana Rajani is an artist exploring the visualities, landscapes, and infrastructures of development, militarization, and ecological resistance in Pakistan. Community-based and collaborative approaches to research are central to her practice. Working across moving image, installation, and printed matter, she engages with dissident histories, lineages, and practices of representation and relation. She is a co-founder of Karachi LaJamia (with Zahra Malkani), an experimental project devoted to seeking and sharing eco-pedagogies that emerge from struggles around land and water in the city.

Dima Srouji is a Palestinian architect and visual artist exploring cultural heritage as a space for potential collective repair. She was the Jameel Fellow at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2022–2023 and is currently leading the studio Underground Palestine in MA City Design at the Royal College of Art in London.