A collaborative public forum in which scholars from different institutional and disciplinary practices share their work and experiences in doing research that attempts to be independent of structures of power that have dominated their field, including, but not limited to, colonial centres, political hegemonies, racial inequities, and nationalist narratives. This will include presentations by representatives of three MoHoA regional partnerships from East, South and West Africa: Swahilipot Heritage Hub, University of Cape Town and Direction du patrimoine culturel du Sénégal.
Shahid Vawda currently is researcher at the History Workshop at the University of Witwatersrand and a Research Associate at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town. He was the first Archie Mafeje Chair in Critical Humanities at the University of Cape Town 2017-2021 and has degrees from the universities of Durban-Westville, Queens (Belfast) and KwaZulu-Natal. He has held positions as Head of Anthropology at the Universities of Durban-Westville and Witwatersrand, and was the Head of the School of Social Science at the University of Witwatersrand, and Head of the School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics. He has been on the boards and panels of UNESCO related to culture, and heritage, the United Nations Office of the Special Advisor on Africa. His current major research projects are Re-Centering Afro-Asia and Modern Heritage of Africa.
Ievgenia Gubkina is a Ukrainian architectural and urban historian, currently based in The Bartlett School of Architecture as a visiting researcher. Her work specialises in architecture and urban planning of the 20th century in Ukraine, and a multidisciplinary approach to heritage studies. She is the author of the books Slavutych: Architectural Guide (2015) and Soviet Modernism. Brutalism. Post-Modernism. Buildings and Structures in Ukraine 1955–1991 (2019). In 2020–2021 she curated the Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Architecture, a multimedia online project that worked with architecture, history, criticism, cinema, and visual arts.
Emily Mann is Associate Professor of Architectural History, Race and Spatial Justice at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Working within the world-renowned Survey of London, her research centres on the relationship between visual culture and European expansion in the world through the growth of trading networks and territorial settlements, c.1550 to c.1800. While investigating historical processes and production, she is concerned with postcolonial/decolonial approaches and attitudes to empire’s material legacy
Edward Denison is Professor of Architecture and Global Modernities, Director of the MA Architecture and Historic Urban Environments and co-founder of MoHoA. His research is motivated by historiographical inequity and sustainability. With over 20 published books, his most recent outputs include his Inaugural Professorial Lecture End Time – Reflections on Design, Modernities and the Anthropocene and The Value of Others: Modern Heritage and Historiographic Inequity
