Mediating Matter(s) seeks to unpack, contest, and subvert normative relationships between matter and bodies as they take place within architecture practice and discourse. This call asks: How does the mediation of matter(s) through architecture and by architects (broadly understood) normalize certain modes of being while undermining others? Expanding contemporary discussions on how the scales, movements, animacy, and vibrancy of matter unevenly affect and act on, through, and between diverse bodies as well as how such bodies are objectified, thingified, reduced, and transformed into a labour force, our goal is to engage in a conversation that probes architecture’s complicity in rendering “some beings as more human than others,” and marking all of us who “cohabit in the space of the undercommons,” as "ontologically empty".
The aims of Mediating Matter(s) are twofold: to explore how architecture’s “orderly arranging of materials and bodies” affirm the discipline’s violent legacies of exclusion and how bodies that fall beyond dominant norms of the human disrupt these configurations through non-normative entanglements with matter. This call hopes to bring together work from a broad range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to explore the intersections of architecture and urbanism with critical new materialism and colonial, subaltern, disability, queer, gender, sexuality, Black, and Indigenous studies, and welcomes papers that respond to the following topics:
ON
What are the effects of architecture’s organizing of matter on various bodies? In what ways have architecture’s material flows inscribed colonial, racist, sexist, and ableist legacies on and into the surface and substrata of the earth? How have architecture practices of material sourcing, extraction, construction, and discard reshaped the bodies of those who physically enact these processes? In what ways do constructed differences between the bodies of workers affect and disrupt assemblages of labour and architecture?
THROUGH
How do architectural material and architecturally generated matter unevenly enter and traverse through diverse bodies? How do flows and transformations of particulate matter within and through surfaces and subsurfaces of bodies materialize and/or disrupt the myths of hierarchical differences of being? How does architecture reconfigure atmospheric and environmental matter to support normative modes of being and hinder those praxes that exist outside of its logic? In what ways does architecture facilitate or hinder the flows of (toxic) matter through varying bodies, producing narratives that maintain, reproduce, and/or disrupt dominant onto-epistemologies? How does architecture orchestrate the transformation, depletion, and/or negation of bodies?
BETWEEN
How have architectural assemblages of matter mediated relationships between human and non-human beings? In what ways has architecture directed flows of matter to sever connectivity and affinity between diverse bodies? What solidarities have been formed around matter and working with matter, and what forms of bodily intimacy with matter have disrupted the exclusionary legacies of architecture? In what ways have non-normative modes of relationality or kinship between all those who live in “the undercommons”[7] altered the flows of architecture materiality and matter?
INTO
What have been the roles of architects and architecture media and representation in inventing, accepting, resisting less-than-human labour practices by which some beings have been transformed into workforce? In what ways have representations of architecture communicated with and presumed the existence of a dehumanized and de-skilled labour force? What is the difference between a tool and an instrument, and what transforms a maker into a labourer? Which industries of architecture have relied on labour (de-humanized, de-skilled, or otherwise) and what are the mechanisms and the processes of invisibilization of labour by which it remains undervalued in architecture—as if drawings translated themselves into buildings and the lines that separate design and construction ended within construction drawings, details and specifications?
The event will take place on October 23-24, 2025, with 17 presentations and 3 keynote speakers. The event is free of charge and will take place in the open forum space on the main floor of the architecture building on the Carleton University campus. Interested participants can register on the CRIPTIC event webpage. Online participants will receive instructions on how to follow remotely.