Intersectionality and Digital Humanities in the Teaching of Architectural History: Diversity in the Dissemination of Knowledge

Taking as its starting point the increasing importance of the role of digital curators within institutions holding architectural archives, the article aims to elaborate tools coming from intersectional theory and practice in order to produce an understanding of how women and black men are represented in teaching architectural history in an ensemble of emblematic schools of architecture. More specifically, the paper, through the elaboration of concepts and tools coming from the theory of intersectionality, examine how aspects concerning gender and race can be taken into account when establishing a curriculum of teaching architectural history. It is based on the hypothesis that visualisation strategies can show the evolution of the role of women and black people in architectural discourse. Drawing upon Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work, and on the impact of the theory of intersectionality on digital humanities and digital labour studies, the project aims to shape a method of digital curation able to conjointly address issues of race, gender, class, ability, sexuality, or other categories of difference while interpreting the primary sources. Particular emphasis is placed on the fact that the intersectional perspective is the endeavour to interrogate its own positionality and the very processes of knowledge production, the project also explores how visualisation strategies can show the evolution of the role of women and black people in architectural discourse. A seminal text by Crenshaw, which is of great significance for the project, is her article entitled “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color”, published in Stanford Law Review in 1991. In this article, Crenshaw argued that “both women and people of color” are marginalized by “discourses that are shaped to respond to one [identity] or the other” (Crenshaw 1991), rather than both. Most recently, the theory of intersectionality was introduced into the digital humanities in order to address issues regarding gender and race conjointly. As far as the field of architecture is con-cerned, the question of race is becoming more present in ongoing debates, as is evidenced by the recently published book Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (2020), edited by Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II and Mabel O. Wilson, and projects such as the Black Architects Archive (BAA) by Jay Cephas, whose aim was to collect and display the work of Black architects across history in an effort to bring to light underrepresented practitioners in architecture. The same is valid for the question of gender, as appears through the organisation of events including the symposium “The Fielding Architecture: Feminist Practices for a Decolonised Pedagogy”, which took place at the University of Brighton in June 2019, and the emergence of collectives such as Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative, which in its manifest published in the Harvard Design Magazine describes itself as “a transnational coalition of feminists, awake to […] [their] positioning as “Others” within the patriarchy; awake to […] [their] exclusion from unmarked norm(s), awake to [their] […] emergence from a history of subjugation, subordination, and colonization” (FAAC 2018). Starting out from the hypothesis that it is becoming increasingly necessary to address these issues conjointly in the ongoing architectural debates, the paper presents certain methods of teaching architectural history that intend to bring the aforementioned aspects together. An important benefit of tackling gender and race issues simultaneously is the capacity to “address the structural parameters that are set up when a homogeneous group has been at the center and don’t automatically engen-der understanding across forms of difference”, as Moya Bailey has argued (Bailey 2020). Another noteworthy characteristic of the intersectional perspective is the endeavour to interrogate its own posi-tionality and the very processes of knowledge production. Selective References Bailey, Moya, “All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave”, in Barbara Bordalejo, Roopika Risam, eds., Intersectionality in Digital Humanities (Amsterdam: Arc Humanities Press, 2020) 9-12. Bilge, Sirma, “Intersectionality undone: Saving intersectionality from feminist intersectionality studies”, Du Bois Review, 10(2) (2013): 405-424. Carastathis, Anna, Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2016). 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