Centre for Research Architecture Research Projects
Read more about the research projects being pursued by our staff.
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War Inna Babylon
Forensic Architecture Guest Professors Stafford and Kamara Scott, co-founders of Tottenham Rights, will deliver a four-part public lecture series over the 2022-23 academic year delving into the racist state-designed attacks on Black communities since their arrival.
This lecture series, which is accompanied by four workshop sessions open to all students, inaugurates a new annual Guest Professorship hosted by Forensic Architecture and the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths. Guest Professors Scott will utilise a multi-layered approach curated by Tottenham Right to examine the context of present day manifestations of racism and conflict between "the community" and the state through the actions of the state and the community's responses and defences.
Photograph: Robert Croma, 1985 Broadwater Farm riots of 1985.
Forensic Architecture
Forensic Architecture undertakes advanced spatial and media investigations into cases of human rights violations, with and on behalf of communities affected by political violence, human rights organisations, international prosecutors, environmental justice groups, and media organisations.
Learning from Ice
Is a multi-year research project that explores the many different knowledge practices mediated by ice, from the study of past climates using ice cores to the lived experiences of local communities in the North who are experiencing the cummulative effiects of climate change. While it is primarily focused on cryospheric environments shaped by fieldwork at various glacier sites, it also investigates the politics of cold and the role of temperature in the production of human right violations. Led by Dr. Susan Schppli
Border Forensics
Is an agency that mobilises innovative methods of spatial and visual analysis to investigate practices of border violence, wherever it occurs. Working collaboratively with migrant communities and non-governmental groups, the agency aims to promote and defend the dignity and rights of migrants and to foster mobility justice. Led by Dr. Lorenzo Pezzani, Affiliated Researcher and former staff member in the Centre for Research Architecture (2017-22).
Michel Feher: The Age of Appreciation 2013-15
Neoliberalism has defined a brave new capitalist world in which financial markets preside over the allocation of resources. Investors not only reap an exorbitant rent from the production of others, they are also invested with the power to decide what is worth producing.
This lecture series argues that the rule of investors proves as transformative of personal motivation and conduct as of corporate management and statecraft. Just as with previous shifts in governing practices, a new representation of human potential and human frailties—a distinctively neoliberal perspective on the human condition—is implicated in the financial turn of capitalism. .
Investee Activism Workshop: 2013-15
The purpose of this workshop (run over the duration of Michel Feher's time at Goldsmiths as Visiting Professor) was to delineate the domain of “investee activism”: identifying the specific mode of social antagonism defined by each financial market—stakeholder activism in the stock market, borrower activism in the bond market, collateral guarantor activism in the derivatives market—surveying the existing cases of social movements predicated on the investor vs. investee nexus, especially in the wake of the real estate and banking crises of 2008 and speculating on the potential development of such activism.
Learning from Stuart Hall: Exhibition 2014
CRA PhD students created an exhibition that explored the intellectual, activist, and pedagogical contributions of Stuart Hall. Along the ground-floor corridor, the students questioned what it means to name a building after a person.
On the lower-ground floor, the exhibition interrogates the “Research Excellence Framework” which quantifies and evaluates academic outputs, assesses their impacts and ranks the university. These schematised metrics are counter-posed by a broad range of materials drawn from Stuart Hall’s influential career as a founder of cultural studies, teacher, writer, publisher, and activist to raise questions about the nature of the “new academic”.