CONVERSATIONS AND REFLECTIONS
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We spoke to some of the most exciting scholars and practitioners about mapping, space, power, coloniality and the African continent/diaspora.

Claudia Gastrow is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg and an Iso Lomso Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies. Her work studies the intersection of politics, urbanism and the built environment in southern and Lusophone Africa, with a specific focus on questions of urban planning, architecture, and place-making. During her fellowship she will be a visiting scholar with the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative under the guidance of Professor Bruno Carvalho.

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Léopold Lambert is the editor-in-chief of The Funambulist. He is a trained architect, as well as the author of three books that examine the inherent violence of architecture on bodies, and its political instrumentalization at various scales and in various geographical contexts. He is the author of Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence (dpr-barcelona, 2012), Topie Impitoyable: The Corporeal Politics of the Cloth, the Wall, and the Street (punctum, 2016) and Politics of Bulldozer: The Palestinian Ruin as an Israeli Project (B2, 2016). His new book is called States of Emergency: A Spatial History of the French Colonial Continuum (Premiers Matins de Novembre, 2021).

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︎ TheFunambulist_
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Marc Miller has degrees in Art History, Fine Arts, Architecture, and Landscape Architecture. His research focuses on representations of landscape in popular culture, synthesizing these lessons learned in culture, politics, making, craft, and scale. At the core of all of this research is the idea that landscape architectural ideation and imagery must shift to look towards problem-solving for the future instead of repeating design processes from the past to remain relevant. The goal is to teach students how to be critical of the past and responsive to their futures using speculative thinking and design fiction.

To that end, Miller explores contemporary forms of media to communicate design problems to broad audiences. He focuses primarily on television and similar serial-based narratives. He is also interested in other mediums that enable worldbuilding to construct conversations and ideas about future landscapes.

Saloojee is an Associate Professor at Carleton’s Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism in Ottawa. Beyond his personal research and teaching, Saloojee is creating new platforms for students to engage in critically important studio work surrounding equity, justice, contested territories, radical acts of joy Saloojee is also a co-director of the Carleton Urban Research Lab and cross-appointed faculty at the university’s Institute for African Studies. Born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, he has taught in Canada, Europe, and the US. He completed his B.Arch. and post-professional M.Arch. (Theory and Culture), at Carleton University and completed his doctoral work at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.

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My research and teaching are informed by an interest in the ways in which states and communities interact in place. So for example, how are government policies and programs implemented or translated into everyday experiences; how do community members use, narrate and shape their environments; and in turn how do those actions and stories influence new government policies and programs. I focus this general interest through questions around citizenship and immigration, and environmental justice and urban health.These interests also reflect my interdisciplinary training centred around social planning and community development with stops in political science, biology and geography.

Suzanne Hall is an interdisciplinary urban scholar and her work connects the asymmetries of global migration and urban marginalisation. From the grounded perspective of peripheral street economies, she explores the racialised frameworks of citizenship and economic inequality and their everyday contestations. By moving between globe, state and street, she engages with the margins as a capricious space in which social sorting, cultural intermixtures and claims to difference are forged. Her work pays attention to how wide geographies shape our knowledge of the urban condition, and is invested in the ethnographic possibilities of seeing political economies through the everyday.

︎ @SuzanneHall12