Toward Unsettling:
A Syllabus Project
Colonization is embedded deep within built and educational structures and is continually furthered through the attempted dispossession and erasure of Indigenous lands and Peoples. This syllabus, as an infrastructure of education, can be used as a tool to restructure current processes within the design disciplines to reflect the multiplicity of voices seeking to disrupt colonial action. It is an opportunity to construct new frameworks of collaborative, inclusive design and research with an emphasis on Indigenous Knowledge and resilience.
This syllabus was initiated through the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s (CCA) Masters Students Program (MSP). The program took place during the summer of 2020, a time defined by public, vocal allyship for Black and Indigenous lives that prompted widespread institutional revision. It is formatted as a collaborative and open-ended resource that encourages understanding, unlearning, and unsettling within the design disciplines. It calls for a reassessment of current pedagogies and practices through readings, stories, and media that both highlight the ongoing effects of settler colonialism on lands and bodies and identify how design and academia remain complicit. This syllabus is a step toward creating and sustaining forms of settler accountability.
This project is intended to be collaborative and inclusive. While many of the initial materials within the syllabus and index locate themselves across Inuit Nunangat, submissions may expand beyond this scope. Indigenous voices will be prioritized, as the presence of Indigenous perspectives within this work is central to its existence. While we recognize that this work will never be complete, we encourage submissions to make the project as inclusive, expansive, and critical as it can be.
Situating
There are three components to the project: this syllabus, a supplementary index of short writings and media, and a contextual article published through the CCA.
Toward Unsettling was approached through a specific thematic prompt of the swimming pools of Nunavut. The lessons learned from researching these infrastructures serve as the basis for the syllabus’ six frames:1 To Unsettle, To Review, To Uncover, To Saturate, To Translate, and To Listen. Each frame proposes a lens through which to critically assess how design and research are conducted, to question the narratives and understandings that history has enabled, and to strive toward inclusive futures.
Through Nunavut’s swimming pools, the supplementary index explores the overlaps between social, physical, environmental, and cultural relations to build a case for a multifaceted understanding of unfamiliar sites. As evidence to ground each of the syllabus’ six frames, these writings are the beginning of a growing index meant to express both knowledge and lived experience. We invite you to help grow this database beyond the swimming pools of Nunavut through the submission of your own writings, further readings, and relevant sources.
Toward Unsettling provides a platform to engage in retrospection and revision of architectural pedagogy, scholarship, and practice. As the first in the three-part series “In the Postcolony,” this project is the start of a conversation that will take place in the coming years through different voices, perspectives, and approaches. The project has the potential to collect years of content directed at long-term, meaningful change across various geographic and time scales, with a primary focus on how to conduct and conceive of architectural research. A workshop will be held in the spring of 2021 to assess how this project has evolved; at which time it will be left in the hands of the 2021 MSP participants.
1 The notion of syllabus frames is borrowed from: Huda Tayob and Suzanne Hall, Race, space and architecture: towards an open-access curriculum. (London: London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Sociology, 2019).
How to Submit
If you would like to add a resource to the syllabus, or a written or visual entry to the index, please complete this form. We encourage students, designers, activists, and historians to submit materials or resources—you may submit multiple contributions.
This project is intended to be collaborative and inclusive. While many of the initial materials within the syllabus and index locate themselves across Inuit Nunangat, submissions may expand beyond this scope. The aim of the project is to express a multitude of voices, from various global contexts, with a goal of encouraging critical reflections and equitable practices with transnational relevance.
Six Frames
To Unsettle considers notions of unlearning biases that are present in education, institutions, and the individual. It is the recognition of land beyond notions of ownership and the ways that design can be complicit in colonial narratives.
To Review highlights a need to look outside of the prevailing historical canon and common practices of representation to be inclusive of multiple voices and perspectives.
To Uncover speaks to the invisible politics of infrastructure and architecture, the ways in which they have created and continue to create social hierarchies, and their potential to shape understandings of the world.
To Saturate explores water as both a material and a metaphor, suggesting broader approaches to the built world that move away from the separation of buildings, environments, and bodies.
To Translate looks at the ability of built form to transport the histories, knowledge, and things of the peoples that move along them. It re-examines linear historical narratives as continuous and protean flows of culture.
To Listen examines the decision-making process in architecture and urban design. It seeks to define a process of relationship building where design practices can foster long-term, meaningful dialogue through the realization of a project.
To Unsettle
The process of unsettling is twofold: it is the unlearning of embedded cultural and racial biases, and the undoing of their presence within the individual and the institution. Colonization has brought with it a presupposition of power with ongoing effects on lands and bodies, with opportunities for change and reparations largely evaded. To Unsettle is to recognize individual responsibility and to promote institutional accountability, with a willingness to move forward, regardless of missteps. Unsettling is not clear or straightforward, it requires the constant reevaluation of current systems to identify and dismantle the mechanisms that put them in place. This process is—and should be—deeply uncomfortable for the settler and the practice of architecture.
Keywords: decolonization, settler-colonial
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To Review
Architectural history is taught based on “the survey,” a sequence of narratives that examine a topic using a singular and conclusive voice. Whereas, in the practice of architecture, it is a site that is surveyed through mapping and measurement. Both the surveys of history and site are means to draw borders around narrative and land—To Review calls for a recalibration of how history and site are conceived. The ground on which buildings rest, the reasons for their construction, and their various uses during their lifetimes necessitate a reframing of how they are taught—for they contain overlapping boundaries with a multiplicity of authors, each with a unique perspective.
Keywords: canon, cartography, border, histories
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To Uncover
Uncovering is a process of recognizing the underlying powers that shape built and social forms and exposing the infrastructures, laws, and norms that shape everyday life. The power relations enacted by infrastructures are often hidden from view, but their capacities to shape understandings, delineate access, and further political agendas are palpable. While these physical and invisible networks often have violent and exploitative origins, they also have the capacity to offer autonomous futures. To Uncover is to peel back the layered histories of space and place, to question the complicity of infrastructure and built form, and to recognize that design decisions are never neutral.
Keywords: infrastructure, extraction, power, politics
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To Saturate
Saturating signifies a learning both about and through the environment. It is a recognition of the cycles that constitute the world and the reciprocal relationships that exist between atmosphere, building, and body. Subsumed in a respect for water’s physical existence, saturation is a shift toward intersectional, ecological, and embodied design approaches. It establishes wetness as a framework to transcend boundaries and to propose new forms of immersion in space, practice, and self.
Keywords: reciprocity, hydro-logics, boundary, body, atmosphere
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To Translate
Translation is both the mutual sharing of knowledge and the reframing of that knowledge in a contemporary milieu by applying new materials, tools, and ideas to traditional ways of life. It is found in the movement of people—travelling along built infrastructures—who displace information, services, matter, histories, and cultures. To design with translation in mind is to avoid reducing identity to a static time or place and to understand culture as something that is constantly adapting and shifting. An inability to acknowledge how cultures have been transformed and hybridized through translation is to risk fetishizing the past, misrepresenting the present, and proposing a restricted future.
Keywords: diaspora, adaptation, transculturalism
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To Listen
Too often decisions are made before words are spoken. To Listen is to enter into a long-term, transparent, and genuine dialogue that should extend beyond human actors and actively listens to those who continue to be spoken for, to, and over. Moving toward a new kind of listening is to enter into a conversation about how the design profession conducts itself in the decision-making process as well as the frameworks put in place to be receptive in community engagement. The building process should begin by building relationships, striving for deeper understandings, and keeping all parties involved in decisions from start to finish—listening, talking, and listening again.
Keywords: research methodology, community engagement
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Supplementary Syllabus Projects/Reading Lists
There are currently many syllabus, curriculum, and reading list projects in circulation intended to critically assess the role of design. The resources listed below were instrumental in the creation of this project and offer a vast collection of resources and perspectives to help expand collective understandings of profoundly important topics. If you are currently working on a similar project, or know of others, you are invited to add them using this form.
(see also http://racespacearchitecture.org/index.html)