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

Chair: Alice Santiago Faria (CHAM, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa)

Part I: 16 April, 4:15 pm | Room C115

Static Resistance: The Material Politics of Communication Technologies in India’s Anti-Colonial Struggle

Bharti Chhibber (University of Delhi)

This paper explores how the material infrastructures of colonial communication-printing presses, radio towers, telegraph wires, microphones, and static interference became central to the architecture of resistance during India’s anti-colonial struggle. Focusing on the period from the 1930s to 1947, it examines how both the mobility and immobility of these nonhuman agents shaped the contours of rebellion, surveillance, and subversion.

Underground newspapers using printed presses smuggled through forest paths, attics, or urban basements embodied a mobile resistance that traversed colonial checkpoints. Similarly, Subhas Chandra Bose’s use of repurposed radio transmitters and the establishment of the Azad Hind Radio in Germany and Japan transformed the broadcast tower into a weapon of anti-colonial struggle. Wires, microphones, and signals became active participants in the political landscape, enabling the voice of freedom to transcend spatial boundaries.

At the same time, censorship, signal jamming, and equipment seizures exposed the fragility of both imperial and independence struggle communication networks. These breakdowns were not merely technical but spatial, restructuring built environments into ephemeral sites of struggle. Jungle encampments, temporary transmitters in refugee shelters, and printing stations in prison cells all became politicized micro-architectures shaped by nonhuman functionality.

By foregrounding the agency of communication materials through an Actor-Network Theory lens, this paper reveals how resistance was co-produced by human actors and nonhuman tools. It reframes anti-colonial media not just as content, but as assemblages of moving parts-ink, wires, static, and iron presses that animated the decolonial imagination and destabilized imperial space.

Keywords: anti-colonial resistance; built environment; colonial communication; mobility/immobility; nonhuman agency

Railway Materialities: Exploring the Non-human Agency in (Re)shaping Space in Colonial Bombay

Shraddha Bhatawadekar (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)

This paper explores the role of railways in shaping the space in colonial Bombay. Bombay (now renamed Mumbai) was the first city in India where the railways were introduced on 16th April 1853. The railways physically transformed the urban character of Bombay—they restructured the existing layouts and created new spatial alignments. They were also instrumental in shaping patterns of everyday mobilities. However, given the colonial context in which the railways were established in India, they also initiated differentiations, hindering access or inviting resistance. While the paper talks about these larger dynamics of railways and space (un)making, it presents a case study of erstwhile Victoria Terminus (now renamed Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus), to show how various inanimate elements of the site—iron shed, trains and locomotives, clocks and indicators constructed the space and encounters in the colonial context. By foregrounding the non-human agency, the paper highlights how the ‘thingness’ of things (Heidegger 1949) contributed to creating new environments. The power of objects to interact and influence (Kopytoff 1986, Gell 1998, Hodder 2012) also brings to light the notion of affect—how objects can evoke meanings. The adoption/reappropriation of objects also altered the relationships between colonisers and colonised, thereby negotiating imperial hegemonies. This paper stems from the author’s broader research on redefining a railway station as a place constituted through the entanglements between people, objects, places, and practices. Using a dialogical approach, it shows how “meaningfulness arises out of encounter and dialogue among multiple subjects, some of whom are human…” (Harrison 2013). It highlights the place as hybrid, performative, and shaped through negotiations of numerous human and non-human actors and their meaning-making. This research thus offers new perspectives to study architectural railway history and the complexities of colonial dynamism, hitherto under-explored.

Keywords: railways; colonial Bombay; urban (im)mobilities; non-human agency; affect

Walking with Ruins: Nonhuman Agency and Mobilities in Postcolonial Imbros

Aysegül Dinccag Kahveci (Universität der Künste)

This paper explores the colonial and postcolonial afterlives of the North Aegean island of Imbros (Gökçeada, Turkey) through an ethnographic walk with Barba Nikos, an elderly Greek Imbriot, across the ruins of his long-abandoned village. Once a Greek-majority island with a continuous cultural presence since antiquity, Imbros was ceded to Turkish sovereignty under the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). Despite the treaty’s promise of local autonomy, the island soon became the site of sustained state-led policies that systematically dismantled the indigenous Greek presence: schools were closed, over 90% of agrarian land was expropriated, an open prison was established in the 1960s, and state-orchestrated settlement projects brought Anatolian populations into emptied villages. These measures forced the gradual displacement of the Imbriot population into a scattered transnational diaspora, while the built environment was left to collapse into a landscape of ruins. Since the early 2000s, however, members of this diaspora have begun returning, individually or in small groups, to revisit or attempt to reinhabit their ancestral villages. It is within this fragile return that my research situates itself.

The walk with Barba Nikos through the ruinscape becomes more than an ethnographic encounter with an insider’s return: it offers a lens to examine the entanglements of human and nonhuman mobilities and immobilities in a Proustian landscape—one that is not a passive backdrop but an active interlocutor in remembering colonial displacement and imagining postcolonial futures. The ruins of Imbros are not merely inert reminders of absence but active participants in shaping memoryscapes. Following mobilities theory (Sheller & Urry 2006; Cresswell 2010) and Actor-Network approaches to material agency (Latour & Yaneva 2008; Yaneva 2019), this paper foregrounds the ways in which nonhumans move, resist movement, or compel new forms of mobility. The analysis unfolds across three registers, each drawn from observations during the walk with Barba Nikos.

First, path-making and the lived negotiation of obstacles. Barba’s movement through the collapsed lanes of his native village was constantly shaped by material resistances: walls fallen across pathways, dense vegetation reclaiming houses, and shifting ground destabilised by erosion. His bodily navigation was a dialogue with the nonhuman: stones demanded detours, brambles required effort to part, uneven terrain slowed his steps. These immobilities did not merely obstruct movement; they actively shaped the contours of memory. Each obstacle recalled an absence while simultaneously invoking fragments of lived experience, and each detour traced a path once traversed with ease. In this way, ruins do not simply testify to the past—they orchestrate memory through their material resistances and affordances.

Second, storytelling and the collective memory of ruination. Barba’s narratives wove immobile structures into a mobile collective memory. A cracked facade conjured the closure of the Greek school; a collapsed house recalled the forced exodus of a family. In these moments, the ruins’ material immobility was mobilised through discourse, travelling across generations and geographies within the Imbrian diaspora. Nonhuman actors thus facilitated the circulation of memory: their persistence made remembering possible, while their decay called forth the urgency of narration.

Third, ruination as a dynamic, more-than-human process. The ruins themselves are not static leftovers but dynamic assemblages: walls crack and fall; fig trees take root in courtyards; goats graze among collapsed stones; seasonal rains accelerate erosion. These processes align with what Tim Edensor (2005) calls the “vitality of ruins,” where decay becomes generative rather than simply destructive. In Imbros, ruination materialises colonial violence: houses immobilised by absence are nonetheless transformed by ecological processes that resist total erasure, preserving an alternative archive of displacement.

By foregrounding these empirical observations, the paper contributes to debates on nonhuman mobilities and immobilities in colonial built environments. It argues that the postcolonial landscape of Imbros materialises both the immobilities imposed by state violence and the mobilities of ruins, soils, plants, animals, and atmospheres that unpredictably rework those histories. The strength of the presentation lies in its weaving of close ethnographic detail—a single walk with a returnee—together with a broader theoretical reflection on the agency of ruins. By bringing together human memory and nonhuman persistence, it demonstrates how colonial power is inscribed in the built environment yet unsettled by the ongoing vitality of material and ecological processes.

Keywords: heritage; ruins; more-than-human landscape; Proustian landscape; Imbros

Part II: 16 April, 6:00 pm | Room C115

Concrete Colonialism: Material Power and Non-human Agency in Angola and Mozambique

Beatriz Serrazina & Francesca Vita (Dinâmia’CET-ISCTE)

This paper explores the role of concrete as a central nonhuman actor in the construction of the Mabubas Dam (Angola, 1948–1956) and the Cahora Bassa Dam (Mozambique, 1969–1974), two of the most ambitious infrastructural projects undertaken during Portuguese colonial rule in Africa. Far from being a passive material, concrete actively shaped the colonial built environment through its circulation, adaptation, and resistance. Drawing on colonial engineering reports and construction site photographs, the paper argues that the mobilities and immobilities of concrete – its extraction, transport, building techniques, and structural limitations – impacted colonial ambitions, dictating where and how power could be spatially imposed by whom or what. The dams were not just technical achievements, but also symbols of colonial modernity, progress and imperial permanence. Yet their construction depended on the successful movement and response of concrete across challenging landscapes, labour regimes, and other non-human agents, such as rivers. In both Angola and Mozambique, concrete had to be localised and moulded – to climatic conditions, terrain, and available raw materials – demonstrating its active role in shaping every stage of the building process from conception to construction. These processes reveal how concrete connected colonial building sites through standardised technologies, not just as a medium but also as a co-author of form and temporality, while also producing uneven landscapes of extraction and labour exploitation. This paper places material infrastructure at the centre of (trans)colonial negotiations, emphasising the agency of concrete within a shared imperial framework. It discusses how the materiality and limitations of concrete reflected and enacted various dynamics of power, construction skills and design practices throughout the Portuguese empire in Africa. In doing so, it aims to contribute to ongoing discussions on non-human actors in architectural history.

Keywords: dams; concrete; colonial infrastructure; material mobility; construction site

Interspecies Enclosure: The Hayırsızada Dog Massacre and the Making of Human Racial Geographies in Late Ottoman Constantinople

Deanna Cachoian-Schanz (American University of Armenia)

The 1910 Hayırsızada Dog Massacre in late Ottoman Constantinople, in which approx. 80,000 canines were rounded up and exterminated by the state, which has gained urgency among animal rights activists and scholars in Turkey. Yet historical and artistic accounts have overlooked a central point: the dogs’ removal was ontologically linked to the late empire’s reterritorialization of human racial geographies. In this paper, I offer a posthumanist reading of the 2010 Turkish-French(-Armenian) animated short Chienne d’histoire/Hayırsızada (Barking Island) alongside early 20th-century representations in the Istanbul Armenian press. I argue that the massacre was not merely urban modernization but a biopolitical experiment shaping the human/animal divide: a speciation foregrounding the racialized production of the late empire’s improper and expendable “humans,” some of whom, like the dogs, faced expulsion and massacre five years later. When enclosure, social Darwinism, secularization, nationalism, and new disciplinary regimes converged, the segregation of once-cohabiting bodies—separating interspecies kin into distinct kinds—regulated who would properly belong within the new state’s borders. In the context of a deeply proximate human-canine companionship—an intimacy both metaphorical and material—the biologized divide between human and nonhuman animals emerged as a tool for territorial possession. The immobilization of dogs on Hayırsızada, and their erasure from the city, materialized what I call interspecies enclosure: the spatial mattering of companion species into new cartographies on the eve of the Turkish nation-state. This enclosure not only targeted animals but remapped human racial ontologies, modulating the racialization of Armenians and other populations deemed improper or expendable. In doing so, interspecies enclosure unmade the imperial city as a space of cohabitation and remade it as a modern state that reassigned belonging along racial and species lines. Reading the aporia of anthropocentric historiographies and what the cinematic lens fails to see in Turkish and Western accounts, I show how imperial racial geographies were inseparable from nonhuman lifeworlds, and how the Ottoman cityscape became a site where interspecies entanglements were reconfigured into tools of state power.

Keywords: enclosure; companion species; racial geographies; Ottoman racialization; urban im/mobilities

Built by Whales: Heritage, Materials and Landscapes in Colonial Spaces

Nina Vieira & Patrícia Carvalho (CHAM, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa)

Whaling has been practised for centuries in several Portuguese colonial territories. Employing different techniques and technologies, targeting different species and producing different commodities, this practice, shaped by whales’ occurrence, movements and migrations, contributed to the financing of the imperial project, the establishment of trade networks and the construction of coastal areas. Southern right whales and humpback whales were hunted since 1603 within a royal whaling monopoly (Brazil), sperm whales were targeted around Atlantic oceanic islands (Azores and Madeira), humpback whales were decimated on the African islands and coasts (Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, Mozambique), and blue whales were hunted off the coast of Angola in factory ships in the early 20th century. Whales and the practice of killing them and processing their bodies left marks on the landscape that can still be recovered today to explore historical human-whale relationships. In this paper, we aim to map and discuss environments built by whales and the architecture of whaling, looking at archaeological remains of whaling stations and ruins of industrial factories, implements, animal remains, objects and artefacts made of whale bones, whaling vessels, documentaries on whaling labour, toponymy and street names. As we will argue, whales were co-constructors of colonial dynamics and of the landscape in a shared story in time, space and human and nonhuman bodies.

Keywords: whaling; human-whale relationships; material culture; Animal History; Blue Humanities

Moving with/in Wood: Molluscs, Crustaceans & Fungi Unmaking Colonial Pacific Ports

Kate Stevens (University of Waikato)

Colonial ports, wharves and jetties may seem like sterile spaces in the oceanic environment: their construction necessitated the destruction of coastal environments to facilitate the infrastructure of oceanic imperialism. However, port infrastructure also created new ecologies and multispecies assemblages, ones that often work against the grain of colonial control and disrupted dominant narratives of a march towards a global modernity. Endemic and introduced bivalve molluscs (such as shipworms), crustaceans (gribbles, pillbugs), and fungi in the form of dry rot all benefited from the proliferation of submerged wooden structures. From the 19th century onwards, ships, ballast, and timber supplies crisscrossed the Pacific with increasing frequency. In parallel, wood-eating species moved with or into wood around Pacific coasts as colonial and commercial expansion underpinned harbour development in the islands of Oceania. This paper considers the mobility and immobility of these oceanic wood-living and -eating species in the context of port architecture and engineering in the Pacific Ocean, drawing on examples primarily from the British and American empires in Australia, Hawaii, and Fiji. Animal histories have often focused on charismatic, large mammal species, though increasingly scholars have turned to insects, rats and others to explore different narratives of human-environmental relationships. Similarly, wood-eating species in the ocean reveal the limits of the architect, engineer and marine biologist to master the coast and ocean. Molluscs, crustacean and fungi not only co-existed with, but were even themselves architects of destruction in colonial attempts to remake Pacific coastlines.

Keywords: oceanic history; Pacific history; imperial history; infrastructure; multispecies