Andrew Herscher

Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2020
6 pm - 7:30 pm
Hayes Hall 403, UB South Campus

The concept of settler colonialism has recently emerged as a name for a distinctive form of colonialsim that develops in places where settlers permenantly reside and assert sovereignty. While ongoing settler colonialism in the United States is centered in indigenous thought and contemporary urban activsm alike, architecture in the U.S. has only tentatively explored its deep relationship to settler colonial conditions and processes. How could architecture negotiate the settler colonial present and even understand that present as calling for a decolonized future? 

AIA continuing education credits pending

Professor Herscher's work endeavors to bring the study of architecture and cities to bear on struggles for rights, justice, and democracy across a range of global sites. In his scholarship he explores the architecture of political violence, migration and displacement, and self-determination and resistance. His books include Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict  (Standford University Press, 2010), The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2012), Displacements: Architecture and Refugee (Sternberg Press, 2017), and, with Daniel Bertrand Monk, The Global Shelter Imaginary, (forthcoming). He has also co-funded a series of militant urban research collaboratives including the We the People of Detroit Community Research Collective, Detroit Resists, and the Settler Colonial City Project. He is currently Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, where he also co-directs the interdisciplinary faculty/ granduate seminar "Decolonizing Pedagogies".