Expanding the Limits of Intersectional Feminism in Today’s Architecture History

 

Upon the invitation by Anna Sokolina's e-mail (on February 26, 2022) to submit my abstract to an online panel at Architectural Intelligence Symposium AI.22 that will be held on April 19, 2022, here is my submitted abstract to her by e-mail:

Ekincioglu, M., 2022, Expanding the Limits of Intersectional Feminism in Today’s Architecture History. (abstract: 149 words upon her e-mail for max. 150 words).

(https://aiasiliconvalley.org/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=1539710, last accessed on February 26, 2022).

Meral Ekincioglu

Expanding the Limits of Intersectional Feminism in Today’s Architecture History

            Abstract: (149 words) Although theory and analytic framework of intersectionality have recently taken their places in scholarly discussions on architecture and its history, it has been notoriously slow to dismantle conventional agendas in the field and to extend its lens to recognize immigrant women architects with multiple identities from diverse geographies. Posing this problem, contributions of women architects from Turkey (a secular and Muslim-majority country) to the built environment in the US can be seen as one of the significant cases in the field: From the 1940s to 2000s, their hidden challenges invite us not only to address a gap in architecture history by voicing their silent attacks on barriers at the intersection of politics of gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, but also to stimulate a provocative discussion on fresh theoretical frameworks, research methods, transformative and inclusive process in international scholarship, archives, academia and profession in relation to immigrant women architects. 

            Bio: Meral Ekincioglu, Ph.D. in architecture, members of the SAH-Women in Architecture Affiliate Group, register committee and the SAH-Historic Interiors Affiliate Group, research committee. (149 words): With academic sponsorship by the MIT-HTC, she has built her expertise on women, politics of gender, intersectional feminism, and intertwined history in postwar architecture at the intersection of the US and modern Turkey. She is the first scholar to uncover career history of pioneering Turkish women architects in multicultural US architecture as one of the significant feminist cases from modern Middle East. With a critical engagement, diverse and inclusive historical documentation practice, its politics and method(s) in architecture is her recent research field. As a nominator for the Aga Khan Awards for Architecture (2022) and an awardee of a SAH-independent scholar fellowship (2018), she was a research fellow at Harvard and Columbia universities for her Ph.D. dissertation studies, certificate holder from the MIT-GCWS, has international conference presentations and scholarly publications. She is a licensed architect in Turkey, obtained her Ph.D., master, bachelor’s degrees in architecture from Istanbul Technical University.