← Back to Projects
Roundtable | Space and Heritage: On the Generativity of Environing Worlds
22 November 2022
22 November 2022
The Richard Eden Suite, Clare Hall, University of Cambridge
Still image from 'the tent' (2019) by kannan arunasalam
A roundtable discussion on the theme of a special issue of the journal Future Anterior – ‘Space and Heritage: On the Generativity of Environing Worlds’ – guest edited by Tao DuFour. The event is organized by Tao DuFour as part of his term as Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall Cambridge, and is hosted jointly by Clare Hall and the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge.
In his manuscript fragments on perception, the philosopher Edmund Husserl would speak of a certain thickening of temporal experience as an acquisition, that is, as a kind of “heritage” (Erbe) that takes the form of embodied habitus that is inherent to the lived experience of space. This special issue of Future Anterior takes this phenomenological insight as a guiding clue, and inquires into the relation of this intimate sense of heritage as the embodied becoming of the subject, to some of its wider, more normative and critical senses in heritage studies. This issue is dedicated to the theme of heritage, viewed in terms of its implicit sense as a mode of lived experience that is embodied, and in this way spatial. Approaching the question of heritage from this perspective can contribute to wider critical examinations of the concept of heritage, such as those explored in the recently published volume, Heritage Futures, that contains rich and multidisciplinary comparative research on cultural and natural heritage practices (Harrison et. al. 2020). In suggesting that heritage is a mode of lived experience, the issue emphasizes questions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in exploring the meaning of heritage; and in proposing that such experience is spatial, it foregrounds questions of embodiment and lived-bodily experience. This turn to questions of embodied spatiality and intersubjectivity is also a “generative” turn, which functions to open certain possibilities for critique and renewal of the theme of heritage that this special issue wishes to explore.
For in-person attendance please register via Eventbrite.
For online attendance please contact info.lue@cornell.edu.
Please see the full text of the call for papers here: Space and Heritage.
4:00 p.m. Introduction by Tao DuFour
4:05 p.m. Panel 1
Andreas Pantazatos
Anthony Steinbock (remote)
Ola Uduku (remote)
Leslie Hewitt (remote)
Tania Sengupta
Respondents
Maximilian Sternberg
Tao DuFour
5:05 p.m. BREAK
5:15 p.m. Panel 2
Jean Khalfa
Natalie Melas (remote)
Łukasz Stanek (remote)
Iulia Statica
Sophie Loidolt
Respondents
Irit Katz
Felipe Hernández
6:15 p.m. Q&A
6:45 p.m. Reception
Tao DuFour is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at Cornell University and is a Visiting Fellow in Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge. DuFour’s work investigates questions of embodied spatial experience, intersubjective and intergenerational understandings of architecture, landscape, and territory, and the ways in which these both constitute and are embedded in the historicity of environments. He is the author of Husserl and Spatiality, published in 2022 by Routledge.
Dr Felipe Hernández is an Architect and Director of the Centre for Latin America Studies in the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge (CLAS). Felipe teaches architectural and Urban Design, while giving courses and seminars in the Theory and History of Architecture and Urbanism. Felipe has worked, and published, extensively on Latin America and other areas in the Developing World, including Africa and Southeast Asia.
Leslie Hewitt is an Associate Professor of Art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. She studied at the Cooper Union, the Yale University School of Art, and at New York University, where she was a Clark Fellow in the Africana and Visual Culture Studies programs. She was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and the recipient of the 2008 Art Matters research grant to the Netherlands.
Irit Katz is a Lecturer in Architecture and Urban Studies in the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge. Katz focuses on the socio-political and cultural aspects of architecture and urbanism. Her work examines the dynamic relations between the built environment and the changing human condition, covering a range of historical and contemporary areas and geographical contexts. She has held academic positions at the University of Pennsylvania, the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and the University of Sheffield.
Jean Khalfa is a College Senior Lecturer in French and the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. He specializes in the history of philosophy, modern literature (in particular contemporary poetry and writing in French from North Africa and the Caribbean), aesthetics, and anthropology. He has recently published articles on Pascal, Rousseau, Deleuze, Sartre, Fanon, Césaire, St John Perse, Glissant, Michaux, Cavaillès, Maccheroni, Roche, on typographic forms and on the relationship between contemporary poetry and the image.
Sophie Loidolt is a Professor of Philosophy and Chair of Practical Philosophy in the Institute of Philosophy at TU Darmstadt. Her work centers on issues in the fields of phenomenology, political and legal philosophy, and ethics, as well as transcendental philosophy and philosophy of mind. She has recently published a book on Hannah Arendt’s phenomenology of plurality and currently works on the normativity and typology of public experiences.
Natalie Melas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. Her interests range across Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean literature and thought, modern Greek, modern French and modern English poetry, comparison, modernism and colonialism, modern reconfigurations of antiquity, Homer, Césaire, Cavafy, philosophies of time, decadence, barbarism, alexandrianism, comparative modernities, world literature in world history, postcolonial or decolonial studies, aesthetics and politics, critical theory.
Andreas Pantazatos is an Assistant Professor in Heritage Studies in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge. He locates his research in the context of critical heritage studies and applied philosophy, focusing on ethics and its application in heritage practice and management. He is particularly interested in how the context of heritage process and multiple stakeholders’ engagement shapes our understanding our ethical obligations to heritage for local, global and marginalised communities.
Dr. Tania Sengupta is Associate Professor and Director of Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Her work focuses on historical landscapes and legacies of colonialism, alternative epistemologies and questions of equity or inequity that stem from all of these. She is recipient of the RIBA President’s Medal for Research 2019, Co-editor of the Architecture Beyond Europe journal, and Co-curator of the curricular resource ‘Race’ and Space: what is ‘race’ doing in a nice field like the built environment?
Łukasz Stanek is a Professor of Architecture with tenure at Taubman College. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Maria Sibylla Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa, University of Ghana. He is a historian of architecture, planning, and urbanism. His scholarship seeks to understand worldwide urbanization processes since World War II beyond their reduction to the consequences of the colonial encounter with Western Europe and the impact of Western-dominated “globalization.”
Iulia Statica is a Lecturer in Urban Design at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture, architectural historian, and theorist. Between 2019-21 she was the Marie Curie Research Fellow at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London where she developed a research project titled Gender, Infrastructure and the Production of Domesticity in the Postsocialist City. She employs documentary film as an integral aspect of both research and practice.
Anthony Steinbock is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Stony Brook University. He specializes in phenomenology, contemporary German and French philosophy, philosophy of religion, social ontology, and aesthetics. His published books include: Knowing by Heart: Loving as Participation and Critique (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021), It’s Not about the Gift: From Givenness to Loving (Rowman & Littlefield Int., 2018), Limit-Phenomena and Phenomenology in Husserl (Rowman & Littlefield Int., 2017), Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart (Northwestern, 2014; 2015 Symposium Book Award), Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience (Indiana, 2007/2009; 2009Edward Goodwin Ballard Book Prize in Phenomenology), Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl (Northwestern, 1995).
Maximilian Sternberg is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge. Max Sternberg is part of the history and theory of architecture team. Currently he is exploring appropriations of the past in modern architecture, and specifically images of the Middle Ages in Modernism. In relation to this, he is studying how modern architecture imagines the sacred.
Ola Uduku is the Roscoe Chair and Head of the Liverpool School of Architecture at the University of Liverpool. Prior to that, she was a Research Professor in Architecture at the Manchester School of Architecture (2017–2021). From 2011 to 2017, she has been Reader in Architecture and Dean for Africa at Edinburgh University. Her research specialties are in modern architecture in West Africa, the history of educational architecture in Africa, and contemporary issues related to social infrastructure provision for minority communities in the "West" and "South."