Machines

“What is Settler Colonialism?”
Event 2: Machines
Friday, November 17, 2023
12:00pm–2:00pm, Avery 504
Join in person or on zoom

In light of the climate at our university and in recognition of our school’s past initiatives, students across the PhD programs at GSAPP, and with the support of the Post-Conflict Cities Lab and Masaha, decided to put together a series of teach-ins that offer a space to discuss, openly and critically, the manifold intersections between settler colonialism and design. ‘What is Settler-Colonialism?’ brings together young scholars into weekly conversations that work through questions on the politics of space, the valences of technology and the composite relations at play in settlement.

Ali Musleh, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow, Columbia University

Ali Musleh is the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University. He is a political theorist who studies settler colonial warfare, arms and automation.

Caitlin Blanchfield, Visiting Faculty, Cornell University

Caitlin Blanchfield is a historian of architecture and landscape whose work examines the infrastructures of settler colonialism and material practices of resistance. Her research addresses the role of modernist land management and design practices in projects of dispossession and colonization in North America and across the reaches of U.S. empire, as well as the anticolonial architectures that unsettle them. Blanchfield is a Ph.D. candidate in architectural history and theory at Columbia University, where she is completing her dissertation, “Contesting Landscapes: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Resistance, and the Architecture of Big Science.” Other work includes collaborative investigations into the impacts of border infrastructures on Indigenous lands and multimedia projects on the management of architectural value.

Blanchfield is a founding editor of the Avery Review, a digital journal of critical essays on architecture, her coauthored book Modern Management Methods: Architecture, Historical Value, and the Electromagnetic Image was published by Columbia University Press in 2019. Her work has been supported by the New York State Council for the Arts, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. She holds an M.S. in Critical Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture from Columbia University and a B.A. in history from Oberlin College.

Additional events in the series are:

• Event 1: Politics / Space
  Friday, November 10, 10:30am
  
• Event 3: Settlement / Camp
  Friday, December 1, 12pm
  
• Event 4: Refusal
  Friday, December 8, 12pm