Architecture + Human Rights

This seminar will investigate contemporary trajectories of architecturalresearch and practice that intersect with questions of human rights, notions of democraticpublic space, and spatial politics. We will ask what role the discipline plays (or mightplay) in current debates over questions of political representation, defense, theorganization of territory, surveillance, warfare, political conflict, and cultural heritage aswell as in questions of citizenship, diaspora, humanitarian intervention, and justice.These questions mark out a profoundly fascinating and highly complicated field of study,and there is a growing body of important literature pertaining to them. The seminar willprovide a forum for considering aspects of this literature and practices associated with it,as well as for identifying new lines of research and further critical prospects for thediscipline of architecture.