Emerging from DocTalks’ participation in our 2023 Toolkit for Today seminar on Collectivity, these sessions bring together the cohort of students who participated in our Doctoral Research Residency Program in the summer of last year. Four groups across two sessions centre questions related to how architectural historical inquiry can be undertaken in common through dialogue and mutual support. By surfacing encounters with the CCA collection, they collaboratively intertwine their experiences of interrogating archive-driven research.

Representation/Coloniality
Ariel Richards, Lu Zhang, Chenchen Yan
Respondent: Magdalena Miłosz, Parks Canada

How to decentre canons and colonial archives and redefine archival work as a collaboration? This panel argues that to read canonical representation and colonial archives against the grain, we need to reconceptualize archival work as collaborative processes constituted not only by the author, but also by different voices and agents, including those who participated in the collecting, cataloguing, organizing, circulating, and interpreting of the materials.

Political Economy
Alejandro Saldaña Perales, Duy Mac, Romain David
Respondent: Shivani Shedde, Princeton University

In assessing the environment where architecture unfolds, one identifies how deeply it is intertwined with political and economic systems. Few disciplines are more at the nexus of politics and economy than architecture and urban planning. How can architectural archives inform or challenge categories of political economy? Through the lens of collective authorship, we aim to explore the variety of methods opened by this question. How do notions of collaboration help us better understand what kind of archival materials and documents should we look at? Against this heterogeneity, what counts as evidence?

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