Panel 20: Nonhuman Mobilities and Immobilities in the Colonial Built Environment (EN)

Chair:

This panel aims to critically explore the role of nonhuman agency in the shaping of colonial built environments with a focus on mobilities and immobilities. Drawing on approaches from new material and ecological history, STS studies and Actor-Network Theory explorations on architecture (among others: Law 2008, Latour and Yaneva 2008, Yaneva 2008, 2019, Kärrholm 2014, Riello 2016, Dincer 2020, Trigg 2024), this panel seeks to investigate how nonhumans (materials, animals, etc.) actively participated in the making - and unmaking - of colonial spaces. How do nonhuman-centred methodologies offer new insights into the built environment dimensions of colonialism? What happens when we recenter the agency off of humans/persons in historical accounts of the built environment?

Nonhuman movement and immobility are understood as dynamic processes through which power, resistance, and transformation were negotiated within (trans)imperial frameworks. Rather than conceptualising nonhumans as passive or merely extractable bodies, this panel foregrounds their capacity to shape built environment (architectural, urban, landscape, etc.) forms and practices. How do the circulation, obstacles, or local adaptation of nonhumans connect distant sites, shaping shared yet unequal, colonial materialities?

Proposals that examine, among other possible themes, how specific nonhuman actors engaged in architectural production; how their mobilities and immobilities contributed to or resisted imperial ambitions; the transformation of mobilities and immobilities or their impacts across long chronological scopes; diverse colonial and transcolonial contexts; focus on specify sources (like visual sources or periodical colonial press); are very welcomed. By situating nonhuman agency at the heart of colonial histories, this panel aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on the entanglements between nonhumans and imperial power.

Keywords: Nonhumans; Built Environment; Colonial; Transcolonial