Decolonizing Architecture Advanced Studies

Decolonizing Architecture Advanced Studies is a series of postmaster courses, public seminars, field studies, publications, and discursive exhibitions that together form a platform for education and research at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. The courses are led by Alessandro Petti, Professor in Architecture and Social Justice and Marie-Louise Richards, lecturer in Architecture, with contributions by guests, among them Walter Mignolo, Joar Nango, Rahel Shawl, Ana Naomi de Sousa, Luca Capuano, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Madina Tlostanova, Eyal Weizman, Emilio Distretti, Mia Fuller, Stefan Jonsson, Shahram Khosravi, Peter Lang, Santiago Mostyn, Corina Oprea and Mekonnen Tesfahuney.

The web platform hosts individual, and collective on-going research projects developed within the framework of the course, Decolonizing Architecture. During the course participants are invited to search and share concepts that emerge from lived experiences and grounded in communities and sites. These concepts, anchored in practice, form a common vocabulary that create the theoretical reference for actions, interventions and guiding principles for research projects. This pedagogical approach is exemplified in the book “Permanent temporariness”, where seventeen site specific research projects are activated by fourteen different concepts: Al masha/Common, Borders, Camp, Confession, Decolonization, Exile, Heritage, Madafeh/Hospitality, Mujawaara/Neighboring, Participant, Profanation, Representation, Returns, Tawtin/Normalization.