Session two:
Archival (In)tangibilities
Keynote:
Nubian womanhood as method
Dr. Menna Agha (Carleton University)
This is a stumbling attempt to make sense of what archives mean to our Nubian bodies, tracing how Nubian womanhood itself becomes a non-custodial archival method after a century of displacement. It dwells in the ongoing negotiation between official records, frayed documents, sacred objects and the stories we carry intimately within us. Through this lens, the archive of a lost land emerges on our bodies over and over again.
Menna Agha is a Nubian Architect and researcher. She is an Associate Professor of Design and Spatial Justice and the founding Director of the Architecture Action Lab at the School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University. She is cross-appointed at Carleton University’s Institute for African Studies. Menna holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of Antwerp and a Master of Arts in Gender and Design from Köln International School of Design. In 2019/2020, she was the Spatial Justice Fellow and a visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon. Menna is a third-generation displaced Nubian woman, a legacy that infuses her research interests in race, gender, space, and territory.
Graduate student lightning talks
Waiting in the Record
Eda Bozkurt (Ph.D candidate, Architecture)
Urban renewal is commonly narrated as a technical solution to informality and urban decline, yet it also operates as a powerful system of recording; classifying space, projecting futures, and legitimizing displacement. My work examines how architecture functions simultaneously as an instrument of record and a site where records are contested. Focusing on Ankara’s New Mamak district, one of Turkey’s longest-running state-led urban renewal projects, the project approaches displacement not as a singular event, but as an extended condition of waiting, uncertainty, and partial erasure.
Here, architecture is understood as a lived and representational field through which modernity is imagined, administered, and made visible. Architectural renderings, planning graphics, and construction photographs advance an aesthetic argument in which spatial order and visual coherence stand in for social improvement, normalizing disruption while projecting a resolved future. Against these official records, this work centers resident-produced photographs created through participatory photography and everyday image-making. These images document thresholds, material traces, and routines that persist within spaces already coded for removal.
Rather than treating photographs as passive documentation, this work reads them as active records: situated forms of knowledge that register lived time, memory, and spatial negotiation. By foregrounding photography as a record-making practice embedded in architecture, the project reframes urban renewal as a struggle over evidentiary authority and asks how architectural space itself can operate as a counter-archive; one that insists on the unresolved present and preserves forms of knowledge at risk of disappearance.
Eda Bozkurt is a Ph.D. candidate in Architecture at the University of Michigan. Her research examines the socio-spatial consequences of state-led urban renewal in Turkey, with a focus on how displacement reshapes everyday life, memory, and belonging in gecekondu neighborhoods. Grounded in architectural history, critical spatial theory, urban humanities, and feminist epistemologies, her work centers resident knowledge as a crucial site of interpretation. Through participatory methods such as Photovoice, oral histories, and visual analysis, she examines how architectural representation and everyday image-making mediate experiences of urban transformation and displacement.
Constructing Virtual Records of Memory
Natalie Leonard (Ph.D candidate, Architecture)
Records occupy a curated physical, virtual, or visceral space along a temporal dimension: a written page; a digital photograph; an oral history. Within architecture, virtual environments have been used for speculation, for simulation, and for assessment. In partnership with Dr. Jess Francis-Levin, Dr. Richard Gonzalez, and the Institute for Social Research’s VR Lab, this research posits the following question: for adults with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD), how might virtual environments comprise a record of memory?
This research utilizes multi-user virtual reality to construct a record of memory as a form of virtual reminiscence therapy: a process involving “the discussion of memories and past experiences with other people using tangible prompts such as photographs or music to evoke memories and stimulate conversation” (Woods et al., 2018). Through this research, we aim to assess: (1) how representations of memory within virtual reality can promote social connection, and (2) the feasibility and acceptability of utilizing virtual reality within this specific community population. Findings from this study may have significant implications for the use of virtual reality in community-engaged design practices; especially for communities wherein physical records are made unreliable or inaccessible.
This research was supported, in part, by the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health under award number K01AG083120; (PI: Francis-Levin).
Natalie Leonard (they/she/he) is an architecture Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan, an adjunct professor of architecture at Lawrence Tech, and a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research. Their research foregrounds the use of simulation to develop innovative research methods and investigate a range of interdisciplinary design problems, spanning from caregiving to music performance. Within their teaching, they emphasize community-engaged learning practices that examine inequities within the profession and introduce students to participatory approaches. They served as an elected officer of The Architecture Lobby (TAL) from 2022-2024 and are a co-founder of the organization’s Architecture Beyond Capitalism School. Additionally, their labor organizing efforts with TAL were featured at the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture. Within the southeast Michigan queer community, they care about getting folks outdoors: hosting events through Queer in Nature and Common Cycle.