Studio 02: Feminist Approaches Dissertation Studios 2020–21

Edwina Attlee

This seminar series will address feminist practices within architecture, history and activism.

Feminist Approaches to Text and Space: This series has been adapted to reflect the changing space and pace of remote teaching but much of the work we do will be collaborative – you will work on small research projects as part of a group, and we will work together as a cohort to analyse texts and interpret documents. In this way we will not be very different from two of the historic projects we will look at together, projects that were conducted before the internet, slowly, and at a physical distance, as well as between and within the ‘rest’ of the participants lives – tucked into spare moments, at the end or start of a day, while a pot simmered or a baby slept. What these piecemeal and distant modes of research, collection and publication tell us before we look into content, is something important about the labour involved in the creation and communication of knowledge. Both projects also paid attention to the everyday lives of women and men, refusing accepted categories of rigour, relevance and acceptability. The seminar series will introduce you to a wide range of approaches to research, preparing and supporting you in the creation of original dissertations.

Seminar outline

1. Feminist Projects: Magazines, buildings, research – collaborative research exercise
2. How do we teach absences?
3. Matrix, Yasmeen Lari, Lina Bo Bardi
4. Remaking the world – How are essays written?
5. History workshop – Computing, embroidery, domestic architecture
6. Bad research – Getting ready for the dissertation

Readings and references

• Discrimination by Design, Leslie Kanes Weisman
• The Spare Rib archive at the British Library
• Where are the Women Architects?, Despina Stratigakos
• "Language", in: Teaching to transgress, bell hooks
• Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Linda Tuhiwai Smith
• "Vessels", Emilia Weber
• "How to Pick a Smart Lock", Miranda Hall
• "Pubs, Pads and Squats", Ben Highmore
• The Subversive Stitch, Rozika Parker
• The Grand Domestic Revolution, Dolores Hayden
• Zeroes and Ones, Sadie Plant
• Rhetorical Spaces, Lorraine Code
• "Doing and Cooking", Luce Giard
• Go to reception and ask for Sara in red felt tip, Holly Pester
• Landscape for a Good Woman, Carolyn Steedman

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Studio image: Anne-Marie Schneider. Banner: Hans Op de Beeck, Staging Silence (3), video still (detail), 2019