Building on last year’s inaugural Architecture as Public Concern Fellowship theme, “Who is the work for?”, our 2024 call centres the question “Where does the work land?”

This year’s fellowship aims to support research projects that foreground how communities can be invited as participants in the questions we craft as researchers and examine the politics and places of these communities at ground-level—observing sites where assumptions about institutional privilege, colonial survival, and structural racism often coalesce. Following Olúfẹ́mi O Táíwò’s recent call in Reconsidering Reparations to engage with reparation as a “construction project,” the 2024 Architecture as Public Concern Fellowship prioritizes research practices that are intimately and sometimes unconsciously tied to land-based paradigms of enclosure, refusal, extraction, and repair, ones which demand critique, renewal, and revaluation.

As a practice of restitution, whether financial or affective, restitution captures a fraught moment of exchange that cannot fully account for the social structures and historical trajectories to which it responds. Táíwò’s work provides points of orientation to understanding how embedded racial capitalism has become in everyday social formations in the Global North. Its effects are deeply enmeshed with the structures of exclusion being created through the environmental impacts of the climate crisis. Research projects may surface layers of uneven consequence, contentious histories, and suppressed human agency to provide depth, dimensionality, and a positionality of care to the communities they work with and for. This could mean using the fellowship to create concrete forms of community engagement for a historical project that might not otherwise have had this opportunity.

As with last year’s call, we invite provocations to revisit the wide range of scholarship conducted at the CCA and specifically to engage with “In the Hurricane, On the Land,” the newly launched Mellon-CCA Multidisciplinary Research Program, given its concerns for building new land-based methods of inquiry.

Network members can use the fellowship funds (CAD 3,500) to advance new or existing projects that draw parallels between research on the built environment and community accountability practices. These projects can be in any format (exhibitions, books, reports, etc.), address any period or geography, and be situated across several institutional and/or para-institutional contexts. The aim of the fellowship is to be expansive and inclusive in defining how communities can be invited into the process of architectural research as a public and urgently relevant concern. Community organizations, representatives, and individuals can partner with CCA Research Network members.

Projects could address topics and questions such as:

•Reparation as a question of land return

•Reparation as a historiographical lens

•Community-based methods

•Land-back and Indigenous Sovereignty

•Spaces of Restorative and Transitional Justice

Application packages, from individual and/teams, should include:

•A project proposal (max 500 words) that directly addresses questions of community accountability, and a list of partners (if applicable)

•CVs for all project team members (only one member of the team needs to be a member of the CCA Research Network)

Candidates are invited to apply online through the CCA application portal.

Deadline: 30 September at midnight (HNE)

The 2024 Selection Committee includes the CCA Research Network Steering Committee (Arièle Dionne-Krosnick, Georgios Eftaxiopoulos, Nokubekezela Mchnu, Sara Stevens et Huda Tayob) and Rafico Ruiz, Associate Director, Research, CCA.


For questions regarding the program, please contact studium@cca.qc.ca.

For updates on CCA research programs, please subscribe to the CCA newsletter.