Call for Papers /// Women’s Collective Organizing in Architecture - EAHN Conference, Aarhus, Denmark, June 17-21 2026

Women’s Collective Organizing in Architecture: From the Grassroots to the Global, 1960-2020

EAHN European Architectural History Network, 9th Biennial Conference

Aarhus, Denmark

June 17-21 2026

Chairs and Contact Details:

Karen Burns, University of Melbourne: karen.burns@unimelb.edu.au 

Lori Brown, Syracuse University: lbrown04@syr.edu 

Over the last 190 years collective organising has been a strategic tool for marginalised and under-represented groups. The final decades of the long twentieth century, marked by ‘cleavages, conflicts and confrontations’, produced a dense cluster of social movements and distinctive forms of collective, activist organising. The global women’s movement was the largest of these social mobilisations.

This panel calls for papers that investigate how women organised collectively in architecture to enact demands for professional equity, new knowledge and social justice in the period 1960-2020. By focussing on campaigns, actions and networks, this panel aims to expand new areas for women’s history in architecture. It seeks to move beyond histories of individual figures and their buildings produced in the context of private firms or state bureaucracies. It aims to situate women in architecture as social actors in civil society in pursuit of emancipation and transformation.

Drawing attention to architecture’s activist past, we aim to situate women’s collective organising within a diverse set of geographies and histories. Early feminist or women’s collectives such as Matrix (London, 1980) and the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture (US, 1974) are well established in the historical record, but other lesser-known examples include the First Women’s Collective (Iran, 1974) and Thyra (Copenhagen, 1979). How does the inclusion of overlooked collectives alter the received historiography of the influence, origins and growth of the intersecting women’s movement and architecture? What social and political forces and conditions specific to the profession and civil society have driven the rise of new collectives over the last decade, for example Counterspace, Johannesburg (founded 2015) and professional women’s organisations such as Women in Architecture and Design (founded Ahmedabad, 2016)?

Frequently shut out of the ‘great man, great monument’ model of mainstream architectural history, how does an examination of women’s collective organising raise the visibility of other kinds of architectural labour and innovation: such as collective activist pedagogy – ‘What’s ‘race doing in a nice field like the built environment?’, UCL, 2020 or ‘Contesting the Canon’ by the Feminist Art and Architecture Collective, founded US, 2018, or the mobilisation of research as an activist tool in older media forms such as Women in American Architecture (1977) and Making Space (1984) or in new digital platforms (Parlour, Australia, 2012 and FAME, London, 2018). How does this new work decentre the discipline’s objects of knowledge by centring experience, everyday lives and lived moments of sexism and racism?

Conferences and their ensuing publications have offered important temporary mobilisations of collective exchange, support, and new knowledge (for example Desiring Practices, London, 1993; Alterities, Paris, 1999; An Emancipated Place, Mumbai, 2000; Architecture and Feminisms, Stockholm, 2016). These published anthologies contain multiple voices and have proven to be a key format for women’s knowledge, but traditional print media has limited circulation and requires capital. How has digital media democratised the space of global collective information, such as that provided by una día / una arquitecta (Uruguay, Spain, Argentina, founded 2016) with its daily profile of woman architects and its formation of a counter-archive? In recognition of broader knowledge shifts, other platforms such as #WIKD (US, 2015) have co-located digital and physical spaces in events designed to expand the lists of women on Wikipedia.

Attention to women’s collective identity, protest and empowerment also invites us to ask how intersectionality and solidarity work. What kinds of labour and care are required to hold together campaigns and coalitions? What happens when they fall apart? Are these the unrecorded, difficult histories of women in architecture?

By using the temporal frame of the long twentieth century, we hope to establish persistent genealogies in women’s organising. We encourage a broad range of papers, from those that provide historically situated case studies to those that develop new methods for studying women’s collective action, agency and identity.

Abstracts

Abstracts are invited for the Women’s Collective Organizing in Architecture: From the Grassroots to the Global, 1960-2020 round table by September 19, 2025. Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted directly to the chairs, along with the applicant’s name, email address, professional affiliation, address, telephone number and a short curriculum vitae (maximum one page).

Round Tables (2 hours)

Round tables will consist of five to ten participants and an extended time for dialogue, debate and discussion among chair(s) and public. Each discussant will have 5-10 minutes to present a position. Abstracts for round table debates should summarize the position to be taken in the discussion.

Papers may not have been previously published, nor presented in public. Only one submission per author will be accepted. No participant may serve both as a chair of a session or round table and as a speaker or discussant in another session or round table. Members of the EAHN board may submit proposals to sessions or roundtables.

All abstracts will be held in confidence during the selection process. 

Session and round table chairs will notify all authors of the acceptance or rejection of their proposals, along with comments, by 21 November 2025. Chairs reserve the right to recommend revisions to abstracts to better align them with the session or round table program. Accepted speakers must submit their revised abstracts to the chairs by 19 December 2025.

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