This seminar investigates discourses and techniques of environmental governance addressed to the so-called "Third World," those seeking to regulate not only economic production but spatial arrangements, social reproduction, and forms of subjectivity in the decades after World War II. It does so by interrogating the intersection and co-constitutive realms of architecture, media, and development aid. To this end, an important task of the course is to ask how to identify, recognize, and attend to the many techno-social forms of designing and managing environments, with their distinctly northern epistemologies and imperial dispositions.

This seminar investigates how feminism and gender theory (from eco-feminism and intersectional feminism to queer and trans theory) can spearhead new methods of research, objects of study, and ways of seeing and analyzing spaces, buildings, and cities, as well as the human alliances within them. We study forms of organizing around women's and LGBTQ+ rights in cities, from the efforts of informal activist groups to those of institution building, and highlight these efforts as main sites for creative, architectural, and urban intervention in challenging heteronormative forms of living and instead providing spaces of care and kinship making.

To distance architecture from the "war machine," architects called for the reintegration of the arts after WW2. The resulting post-war Gesamtkunstwerk accompanied the development of ever larger corporations and corporate architectural practices integrating new kinds of agents into their increasingly complex wholes, from women designers and computing services to global environmental and economic models. By exploring how corporations--Olivetti in Ivrea, Hilton in Havana, JUMEX in Mexico City--operated architecture across all scales and mediums, students in this seminar will uncover the questions post-war integration was designed to answer.

The course offers a comprehensive history of books in China, with reference to relevant developments in Korea and Japan and to parallels in the West, from the advent of actual books in East Asia during the first millennium BCE until the introduction of virtual books at the end of the 20th century. It covers the physical evolution of traditional Chinese books as well as their crucial role in the transmission of text and knowledge throughout China's long and complex history, especially for the period of 9th to 19th century. Visual images and actual specimens are used to reinforce presentations and stimulate discussion.

This class engages with spatial analysis across a range of disciplines and approaches; from architecture, architectural theory and manifestos to continental philosophy, Marxism, Black studies, decolonial writings, and a sample of graphic- and novelistic depictions of built space. We ask whether thinking about built space as a "language" is fundamentally different from "picturing" space or inhabiting space with our bodies, and whether these approaches count as "cognitive mapping." We contemplate the dystopian actualities and utopian possibilities inherent in the built environment and the constructive projects of world building.

The seminar introduces graduate students to central problems, themes, concepts and methodologies in the history of science and neighboring fields. We explore past and recent developments including the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, Actor-Network Theory, the study of practice and experimentation, the role of quantification, the concept of paradigms, gender, sexuality and the body, environmental history of science, the global history of science, and the role of labor and industry, amongst others.