Each summer the CCA holds Toolkit for Today, a week of seminars, workshops, and public events that invites scholars to open their toolboxes and share their methods with the participants of our Doctoral Students Program.

This summer we investigate how researchers should approach absences in the archive created by colonial erasure, racism, and other practices of documentary decision making that determine what should and shouldn’t be preserved. This becomes particularly urgent for architectural historians and theorists who must navigate various archival media which depend on uneven relationships of power between designers, users, and their sited documentary traces.

From 9 to 11 July, we invite the public to join us for conversations with researchers that address the tools they use to read formal, institutionalized collections in light of these archival absences, and offer strategies to imagine the construction of alternative archives that privilege feminist, anti-colonial, and situated practices of documentation and preservation.