___Society of Architectural Historians’ 79th Annual International Conference. CDMX 2026.
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Grateful to chair PS48: Counter-Narratives: Architectural Histories from/with the Caribbean. The room was packed and the energy felt so inspiring; an unforgettable conversation. Special thanks to the amazing speakers: Fernando Lara, Peter Minosh, Elizabeth Álvarez, Andrew Scheinman, Omayra Rivera, Angeliz Encarnación, and Malcolm Rio.
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__here is a small part of my introduction:
This session begins with a simple yet urgent premise: that the Caribbean has been persistently marginalized within architectural history-not only as a geographic region but also as a site of knowledge production.
Rather than approaching the Caribbean as an isolated assemblage of islands, positioned between the Americas and Europe, this session understands it as an expansive archipelago of relations—a space constituted through diasporas, movements, material exchanges, and atmospheres that exceed singular or bounded frameworks.
To examine architectural histories from and with the Caribbean is not simply to expand the canon by adding new case studies. It is to engage a different way of reading, writing, and assembling history.
It requires confronting the legacies of colonialism embedded in landscapes shaped by displacement, extraction, and erasure, while also attending to practices of resistance and reclamation.
Across the papers in this session, the Caribbean emerges not only as a site of inquiry, but as a methodological ground—one that challenges dominant historiographic frameworks and calls for approaches capable of holding contradiction, fragmentation, and relationality.
In this sense, counter-narratives are not understood here as alternative stories that sit alongside dominant histories, but as critical practices-ways of reading contrapuntally, exposing ruptures, and foregrounding imaginaries that exceed institutional frameworks such as syllabi, archives, and architectural discourse.
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#counternarratives #histories #theories #from/with #caribbean
@fernandoluizlara @omayrariveracrespo @rio.archi @sah1365 @latinamerica_sah
: thank you to Gabi, Paula, and Suzi for the photos/video.
