Join us for a presentation by author, Anooradha Siddiqi.

Environments associated with migration are often seen as provisional, lacking both history and architecture. As Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi demonstrates in Architecture of Migration, a refugee camp’s aesthetic and material landscapes—even if born out of emergency—reveal histories, futures, politics, and rhetorics. She identifies forces of colonial and humanitarian settlement, tracing spatial and racial politics in the Dadaab refugee camps established in 1991 on the Kenya-Somalia border—at once a dense setting that manifests decades of architectural, planning, and design initiatives and a much older constructed environment that reflects its own ways of knowing. She moves beyond ahistorical representations of camps and their inhabitants by constructing a material and visual archive of Dadaab, finding long migratory traditions in the architecture, spatial practices, landscapes, and iconography of refugees and humanitarians. Countering conceptualizations of refugee camps as sites of border transgression, criminality, and placelessness, Siddiqi instead theorizes them as complex settlements, ecologies, and material archives created through histories of partition, sedentarization, domesticity, and migration.

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is an architectural historian at Barnard College, Columbia University, and author of Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press, Theory in Forms, 2024), on the spatial politics, visual rhetoric, ecologies, and long colonial traditions of the UNHCR-administered camps at Dadaab, Kenya. Siddiqi is the co-editor of Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration and Spatial Violence. Her book manuscript Ecologies of the Past: The Inhabitations and Designs of Anil and Minnette de Silva analyzes the politics of heritage environments through the work of Sri Lankan architect Minnette de Silva and art historian Anil de Silva-Vigier.

Jacquelin Kataneksza is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility. She holds a PhD in Public and Urban Policy from The Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environment and a master’s degree in international Affairs from the Julien J. Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs in New York. Her research focuses on the mobile and often provisional ways that people living in precarious contexts mediate daily life, often across country borders. She has most recently published in Cities: The International Journal of Urban Planning and Policy.

Her public scholarship has appeared on Disembodied Territories, Africa is a Country, Stranger’s Guide and Mobilization Lab. Dr. Kataneksza has commentated on Zimbabwean politics on Al Jazeera, This is Hell Radio and Cape Talk Radio. She has also previously consulted on affordable urban housing projects for UN-HABITAT and international development policy in various offices of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA).