A research fellowship for the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s Master’s Students Program, alongside Alexandra Pereira-Edwards and Misca Birklein-Lagassé. It was the first in a three-year thematic cycle entitled In the Postcolony, which examined how architecture and urbanism continue to respond to the long echoes of colonial practices.
At the outset of the fellowship, the three of us worked specifically to interrogate the impacts of an otherwise invisible, colonial infrastructure: swimming pools in Nunavut. Our initial research led to a series of short writings, paired with found archival images, that probed the complex social, political, and environmental impacts this typology has on the territory’s local, predominantly Inuit, communities.
However, as our research continued, our team began to feel uneasy with the implications of “designing a solution” for a community we were unfamiliar with and in a place we had never been. Instead, we looked back at the institution that facilitated the research project and used the quiet saliency of arctic swimming pools as a metaphor for settler-colonial pedagogy.
The final contribution was an open-access syllabus, organized around six key ‘frames’, aimed at unsettling settler-colonial knowledge in architectural education and research. It offered a list of critical counter-texts open to contribution by the public, translated into Inuktitut, and accessible to low-bandwidth internet connections.
At the outset of the fellowship, the three of us worked specifically to interrogate the impacts of an otherwise invisible, colonial infrastructure: swimming pools in Nunavut. Our initial research led to a series of short writings, paired with found archival images, that probed the complex social, political, and environmental impacts this typology has on the territory’s local, predominantly Inuit, communities.
However, as our research continued, our team began to feel uneasy with the implications of “designing a solution” for a community we were unfamiliar with and in a place we had never been. Instead, we looked back at the institution that facilitated the research project and used the quiet saliency of arctic swimming pools as a metaphor for settler-colonial pedagogy.
The final contribution was an open-access syllabus, organized around six key ‘frames’, aimed at unsettling settler-colonial knowledge in architectural education and research. It offered a list of critical counter-texts open to contribution by the public, translated into Inuktitut, and accessible to low-bandwidth internet connections.