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October 7, 2025
Talk Series_Session 2_ Historiographical Views of Spaces
From: BABIKER, Abudjana Haider Elwaseela <abudjana@akane.waseda.jp>
Date: 2025/05/21
Dear SSJ-Forum members,
Greetings,
Polis Architecture Institute is pleased to invite you to participate in our second talk of a lecture series titled "Active Agents: Toward a Critical Archaeology of the Architecture Discipline." This initiative aims to facilitate a dialogue in the form of a roundtable discussion between architecture and other related disciplines. This talk series operates under the De-Discipline Program in collaboration with Waseda University (Keigo Kobayashi Lab) and Happy Hours (Institute of Science Tokyo) as a critical historiographical inquiry into the structural foundations of the architectural discipline.
We would like to extend the invitation to you to join our first talk and roundtable discussion titled "Historiographical Views of Spaces Constructed/Destroyed/
TALK INFORMATION:
TITLE:
Historiographical Views of Spaces Constructed/Destroyed/Transformed -- Architectural Power across Nonlinear Time
DESCRIPTION:
Historical investigations in North American/European/Japanese academia commonly rely on documents as primary sources with a linear view of how power changes over time in spaces. However, multiple clusters of inquiry have been unsettling the colonial ideologies underpinning these methods, recently drawing on material traces and interviews to describe genealogies of architectures in narratives of individual, communal, and societal struggles with injustice. Historians reclaiming space from marginalized positions point us towards how material structures expand or foreclose possibilities for life paths, often accumulating harm that persists across years alongside experiences and memories. This presentation introduces research in several of these historiographical clusters, which consider how architectural forms have facilitated impoverishment, militarization, ecological contamination, displacement, and overwriting of people's existence through genocide. Through these perspectives, the discussion will consider recommendations for how architects could navigate these power dynamics and collaboratively transform inhabitants' political futures.
ABOUT THE PRESENTER:
Jason M. ALEXANDER:
PhD Candidate at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Dept. of Sociology; Visiting Research Fellow at Waseda University GSAPS. Jason has a prior background in history and is completing sociological dissertation research in Tokyo on negotiating Burmese-Japanese colonial power relations in transnational contention. photo: file attached
HOST: ABUDJANA BABIKER.
Abudjana Babiker is an architect, researcher, author and curator based in Tokyo. He completed his architecture studies in 2016 at The National Ribat University, Khartoum, and subsequently worked as a teaching assistant in architectural design studios. He joined Waseda University in 2020 for graduate programs.He has actively participated in a number of architecture competitions, architecture/urban research, and transdisciplinary projects and contributed to a number of publications and conferences. He is a founding director of Mittetulundusühing Polis Architecture Institute (PAI), an institute dedicated to liberal art, architecture history and empowerment of architects. His major research interests and activities encompass architectural discourse, ontology of architectural elements & composition, the objects of the city, historiography, production and reproduction through architecture, architectural borders and territories, representation & aesthetics and architecture journalism And his recent interest expands to the llimitations and problematics in architecture.
PRESENTER: Jason M. ALEXANDER.CHAIR: Abudjana Babiker.DATE: June 2, 2025.TIME: 18:00 ~ 20:00LOCATION: Tokyo, Shinjuku, Nishiwaseda Campus, Building 55, First Floor, Innovation Lab.FEES: Free.
CONTACT:
Name: Abudjana Babiker.Email: abudjana@akane.waseda.jp
We look forward to your participation.
Department of Architecture 建築学科
Waseda University 早稲田大学
Approved by ssjmod at 08:42 PM