Presenters: Melih Kamaoğlu and Yichang Sun

Location: 22 Gordon Street

Melih Kamaoğlu will discuss the idea of evolution in digital architecture and the possibility of uniting different ontologies in this field, while Yichang Sun will present her research on the socio-spatial history of Nanjing, China.

Presenters: Writing Club led

Location: Online

Details: Each month on the first Monday, BSA PhD students informally host an online ( optional in-person) working session on their writing. There is no structure to these, but ideally you come each time with a goal of completing a certain amount or piece of writing.

Presenters: Nat Chard

Location: 22 Gorson Street, Room 5.04

Details: Nat will discuss a range of work searching for methods and media to study and represent conditions of indeterminacy in architecture.

Presenters: Penelope Haralambidou

Details: City of Ladies is a cross-disciplinary research project, which aims to introduce and promote the work of medieval author Christine de Pizan to an architectural audience for the first time. In her celebrated text, The Book of the City of Ladies, 1405, Christine describes the construction of an imaginary city, a female utopia built and inhabited by women. Her work has been seen as a proto-feminist manifesto, conflating the act of building with collecting stories of notable female figures from fiction and history and erecting a thesis against misogyny. Our research builds upon existing scholarship on the relationship between image and text in Christine’s work. It proposes an innovative, design-led analysis of the architectural and urban allegory in her text and a spatial remodelling of the accompanying illuminations. Performing history and theory through design, the research aims to establish Christine as the first speculative female architect and to project the powerful message of her allegorical city into the future.

Presenters: Tumpa FELLOWS, Improvised Architectural Responses to the Changing Climate; Making, Sharing and Communicating Design Processes in Rural Bangladesh Patricia RODRIGUES, After the Future: Architecture and the Military Regime in Brazil Diana SALAZAR, Co-Producing an Environmental History of La Guajira: Building Solidarity through Decolonising Narratives Jhono BENNETT, A Post-Post Positional Praxis: Locating Ideas of Repair in a Southern city Professor Murray Fraser - Moderator

Details: The term ‘decolonising’ is a vibrant strand within post-colonialist theory primarily associated with South American scholars such as Anibal Quijano and Walter Mignolo, since becoming widespread due to its adoption by various anti-racist movements around the world ­– for instance by the Kenyan novelist/playwright/literary scholar, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Yet what does it mean within the framework of architectural research, and how might it also alter research methods in our field?

This WIP+ research seminar will explore the idea of ‘decolonising’ along with an invited respondent, Professor Nnamdi Elleh, who is head of the architectural school at the University of the Witwatersrand. To help discuss the theoretical and methodological issues involved, four current PhD candidates in the Bartlett School of Architecture will be presenting their research work:

Each of the four PhD candidates will give a short talk for around 15-20 minutes, and this will be followed by a Q&A session about their research with Professor Elleh and those in the audience.

Presenters: David Roberts

Details: The Practice of Taking a Position Towards the World: Collective Manifesto Workshop

A PhD is a joyful painful opportunity to be, as my supervisor Jane Rendell put it, ‘critical of what we do and open to change.’ In this workshop we will create a space for mutual support, care and solidarity to articulate your own values and imagine the practitioner you seek to become.

We do so by debating, drafting, and declaring a manifesto for your PhD. I propose the act of drafting a manifesto involves both acts of working through and working towards principle and situation, providing us with the space to explicate and exclaim the transformative potential of our work.

By interrogating historic manifestos, individually rewriting and remaining them, first as individuals then as a collective, we will negotiate and nurture concepts and approaches essential to developing ethical built environment practice: from positionality and situatedness; to reflexivity and relationality. To explicate these terms, I call upon the work of D. Soyini Madison, Felicity Scott, Farhana Sultana and Penny Weiss alongside the Bartlett Ethics Commission led by Jane Rendell.

Presenters: Various Students

Details: This session will be a short format roundtable where participants will share their current progress on the PhD. This will primarily be students in their first year and will host a discussion around the upgrade and early stage research processes.

Location: Bartlett School of Architecture Exhibition Space

Danielle Ovalle Costal & Rían Kearney

Details: Danielle Ovalle Costal and Rían Kearney will present "Designing Queer Methods," discussing their creative research on making and visual work in relation to queer methodologies.

Presenters: Stamatis Zografos

Details: Stamatis will share insights on pursuing a PhD, including the challenges around motivation, self-discipline, and support networks. He emphasises questions around personal growth and provides valuable insights for those considering or currently undertaking a PhD.

Location: Online

Presenters: Various Students

Location: PhD Studio

Details: This session will be a short format roundtable where participants will share their current progress on the PhD. This will primarily be students in their first year and will host a discussion around the upgrade and early stage research processes.

Presenters: Katharine Reeve (former Editorial Director and Senior Commissioning Editor at Oxford University Press)

Location: Room 2.08 @ 22 Gordon Street

Details: Please bring a draft piece of writing (2-300 words) to share and your bio.

Katharine Reeve (former Editorial Director and Senior Commissioning Editor at Oxford University Press) will continue the discussion and workshop on writing and editing for doctoral researchers.

Presenters: Brent Carnell

Location: BSA, PhD Studio 2.17

Details: This session will see Director of Education and Associate Professor (Teaching), Dr Brent Carnell, talk through his path from PhD student in The Bartlett School of Architecture to full-time academic position. Brent is happy to share his not-so-straightforward path to full-time academic career and talk through the teaching track at UCL.

Katharine Reeve (former Editorial Director and Senior Commissioning Editor at Oxford University Press) will continue discussion and workshop on writing and editing for doctoral researchers.

22 Gordon Street

Professor Murray Fraser will explore the background to and nature of design-based and practice-based research in the field of architecture. While also discussing the commonalities and differences between them in relation to a few selected samples.

Room 6.02, 22 Gordon Street

Cross-Doc-Social is a collaborative London based architectural doctoral network between the AA, RCA and UCL. The collaboration is seen as a means of connecting between the various institutions in order to share critical peer-experience, learning insights and niche/bespoke/unique architectural methods/approaches to research.

The first iteration of exchanges, Round 1, will take place through a series of informal exchanges hosted by the different institutions. These will supplement a more formal set of exchange moments in the form of seminar, conference or symposiums that will take place once a term.

Talk and workshop with Katharine Reeve: former Editorial Director and Senior Commissioning Editor at Oxford University Press

A discussion and workshop on drawing as an instrument of knowledge and how it can be used as method by Professor Sophia Psarra, Director of the History & Theory PhD stream.

Room 5.04, 22 Gordon Street

A Creative Workshop with Professor Jane Rendell

A presentation and discussion with Thomas Parker and Thomas Pearce on Photogrammetry for architectural doctoral work.

A final close off session to wrap up Season 1: Pilot!

A discussion and working session with Kerry-Jo Reilly from UCL Writing Lab.

A presentation and discussion with Sepehr Zhand and Alberto Fernandez on Coding and Machine learning for architectural doctoral work.

A presentation and discussion from Mark Garcia, Alberto Fernandez and Alex Lăcătușu on their work around the theme of Methods and Methodologies of their streams through architectural doctoral work.

A feedback, presentation, discussion on abstract writing with Kerry-Jo Reilly from UCL Writing Lab.

A presentation and discussion from Stelios Giamarelos and Nathan Telemaque on publishing doctoral work during and after the dissertation.

A presentation and discussion on Archival and Field Work from Olivier Bellfamme, Kerri Culhane and Danielle Hewitt.

A discussion and working session with the Commissioning Editor from UCL Press with Kerry-Jo Reilly from UCL Writing Lab.

An introduction, tip sharing and discussion on citation and note taking software for architectural doctoral research.

A presentation of work and discussion on the challenges and concerns around navigating positionality and ‘ethics’ in doctoral research with Petra Seitz, Naomi Gibson and Jhono Bennett.

A presentation of work and discussion on research question development for doctoral research with Ram Shergill, Saptarshi Sanyal and Omar Abolnaga.

An open workshop to co-develop the writing collab structure with Kerry-Jo Reilly from UCL Writing Lab.

A cross-cohort introduction workshop session to share personal lessons and experiences of the BSA PhD programme.