Situated Humanities

Through humanities research, we apply critical perspectives to address the dynamic forces that shape architecture, landscape and urban space. Our diverse theoretical approaches include postcolonial and postsocialist studies, historiography and environmental futures.

Black and white photo of streets flooded in Buenos Aires in 1967 — The 1967 flood in Buenos Aires. Courtesy of Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno, Argentina / Archivo Crónica.

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How can humanities-inspired research inform histories and futures of architecture, landscape, interiors and urban space? This cluster deploys and bridges conventional humanities (literature, history, musicology); critical approaches (postcolonial, postsocialist, feminist, sociological and politics research); and transdisciplinary fields (architectural, environmental and medical humanities, STS, creative design praxis).

In the Situated Humanities cluster we contribute world-leading outputs combining history, storytelling, archival studies, design and creative practice, film and ethnography, that address both theoretical and practical research agendas. We draw collectively and individually upon our experience across continents and cultures to examine locations from South Yorkshire, to transnational, European and global South contexts. We work across the breadth of the built environment at different spatial, material and temporal scales with attention to issues of gender, equality, health, environment and climate.

Our activities

Our work with histories and historiography interrogates mainstream history, reinterprets archival materials and recovers marginalized voices. This includes oral histories, ethnography, and archival work, as well as translation across languages, disciplines and forms of knowledge, as seen in Adriana Massidda’s ‘�ĜWater Blew Up Everything”: An Urban History of Climate Disasters in Buenos Aires Informal Settlements’. The critical contribution of our research is grounded in feminist, antiracist and de-colonial theory, foregrounding values of gendered care and agency, as seen in Emma Cheatle’s ‘Lying in the Dark Room’ health and hospital research, Isabelle Doucet’s research on women in architecture after 1968 and on women as role models in the historiography of architecture, and Yasmina El Chami’s research on covert US imperialism in the Eastern Mediterranean.

We employ creative methods, speculative research and research through design. Autotheory and autofiction allow reflexive engagements with experience and identity, while filmmaking, drawing, and photography serve as tools for situated and embodied inquiry, as in Iulia Statica’s ‘Landscapes of Care’ research project. We examine intersections between humans, non-humans, and built and natural landscapes, for example Camilla Allen’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’ 2026 Festival of the Mind collaboration with Heavy Water Collective.

Our trans-disciplinary work involves counter-mapping, environmental linguistics, and relational approaches to design, interspecies music, storytelling and immaterial architecture. Contesting disciplinary boundaries and dominant paradigms, we interweave these fields to generate new ways of knowing, imagining and relating within and beyond the fields of architecture, landscape and urbanism, as seeen in the project ‘MineLives: Transecting longue durée histories and WEF nexus thinking in Southern Africa’ (Hannah le Roux and Fransje Hooimeijer), and through Renata Tyszczuk’s Climate Assemblies.

Alongside books and journal articles, we expand the understanding and value of situated humanities through conferences, seminars and reading/writing groups, including the group’s co-hosting of the Symposium of Urban Design History and Theory (SUDHT) 2027, ‘Beyond Repair’. This event extends our situation in the post-industrial and post-mining context of South Yorkshire to international comparative work with Rust Belts and extractivism globally.