Join us for a discussion of the book Architecture of Migration (2023) with author Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, in collaboration with Bhakti Shringarpure from the Radical Books Collective.

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is an art and architectural historian of Africa and South Asia, an associate professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, and a visiting scholar at the Harvard University Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Her historical research on architecture, craft, settlement, land, and experiences of migration and territorial partition draws from two monographs, Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press, 2026 Society of Architectural Historians Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award, 2025 African Studies Association Best Book Prize Honorable Mention) and Ecologies of the Past (in progress).

Bhakti Shringarpure is a Paris-based writer who has worked in overlapping professions of publishing, academia, digital media and film for the past two decades.  She is the author of numerous books including, Leila Aboulela: Writing as Refuge (2026, Routledge) Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital (2019, Routledge) and co-author of India’s Imperial Formations: Cultural Perspectives (2024, Bloomsbury).  Bhakti co-founded Warscapes magazine in 2011 and it has since transitioned into the Radical Books Collective, an initiative that builds community through conversations, events and podcasts on culture and politics. She currently hosts and produces Radical Futures, an interviews-based podcast that invites writers, artists and scholars to discuss decolonization and liberation.

Architecture of Migration asks readers to enter a Black consciousness of the aesthetic and material landscapes of a refugee camp, exposing the politics, rhetorics, histories, and futures of emergency environments. Thinking in situ and in theory with the Dadaab refugee camps, established in lands crossing Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia by the Kenyan government and UNHCR in 1991, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi examines a centuries-long history and an architectural afterlife of colonization, partition, sedentarization, and ongoing imperial war in the form it takes on the ground: a migrant environment and constructed ecology that expresses a futurity, an avant-garde.  Countering conceptualizations of refugee camps as sites of border transgression, criminality, and placelessness, as well as the marginalization of the African Muslim by the security state in Kenya and beyond, Architecture of Migration moves beyond ahistorical representations of camps and their inhabitants by constructing a material, visual, and oral history archive of Dadaab, tracing spatial and racial politics in ongoing colonial and humanitarian settlement, and finding longer, meaningful migratory traditions in the architecture, spatial practices, landscapes, and iconography of refugees and humanitarian workers.