Dr. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi
Architecture of Migration
Lent 2024
Tuesday, 12 March 2024
Abstract
In this talk, we are joined by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, who will be speaking about her recent book Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (2024). She traces how the refugee camp’s aesthetic and material landscapes—even if born out of emergency—reveal histories, futures, politics, and rhetorics. She identifies forces of colonial and humanitarian settlement, tracing spatial and racial politics in the Dadaab refugee camps established in 1991 on the Kenya-Somalia border—at once a dense setting that manifests decades of architectural, planning, and design initiatives and a much older constructed environment that reflects its own ways of knowing.
Bio
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi (she/her) was born in Chennai, India, and specializes in histories of architecture, modernity, and migration, centering African and South Asian questions of historicity and archives, heritage politics, and feminist and colonial practices. Her scholarship aims to foreground histories of marginalized people and figures and promote practices of collaboration and support, especially concerning the lives and narratives of communities that have been systematically excluded or silenced. Thinking through objects, buildings, and landscapes, her work examines intellectual histories and diverse forms of esthetic practice and cultural production.