We are pleased to invite you to our second edition of Spring Encounters!
As the first edition was a great way to network, exchange ideas, learn and reflect upon our praxis and research, this year we want to continue opening spaces for ECRs and HDRs to share their experiences.
Spring Encounters is a space for HDRs and ECRs to network through a series of informal presentations led by a panel where HDRs can present and discuss their research with a broader audience. It is an HDR-led event for HDR candidates, hosted by Siteworks, in collaboration with Monash Arts, Design and Architecture (MADA) and facilitated by Monash Graduate Association (MGA).
Spring Encounters aims to break through disciplinary and institutional silos to encourage dialogue and the exchange of ideas. Every fortnight there will be an informal panel discussion focused on a theme that crosses disciplines - different backgrounds are not only welcomed but central to these debates. Through our call for abstracts (see below), two HDR candidates per panel will be selected to present their work. Sessions will run from 7th September to 2nd November, oriented around the themes of:
07 September: Economising the Economy
Chaired by Nicolas Guerra Tao (APR/Monash University) and Rachel Iampolski (APR/RMIT University), with an ECR guest Declan Martin
There is a need to reframe the economy within our society to address the rise of job informality, deindustrialization, and decarbonization. This session invites a space that explores alternative economic models which rethinks our economy in a post-capitalist world and considers their implications on the material and social fabric of our cities. In particular, we wish to explore the future of manufacturing activities and industrial land in our cities, and how we might redeem space for a shared and collective production within our existing economic system.
Deadline: August 24, 2022
21 September: ethics and Ethics: knock before you enter
Chaired by Ana Lara Heyns (APR/Monash University) and Zheng Chin (APR/Monash University), with an ECR guest Lisa de Kleyn
There is a growing separation between the institutional desire for ethics as a form of risk assessment and researchers' personal values and belief systems that hold us accountable and responsible for our research. In her PhD dissertation “Please Knock before you enter” Karen Martin addresses this tension through the regulation of Outsiders in Indigenous communities, Bewaka Country et al. suggest reframing our human-centric ethics towards more than human worlds. We invite people to explore how personal values and paradigms are addressed in contemporary PhD research, to engage with the gaps of ethical bureaucracies carried out by the institutions that affect our research, and how we might overcome them.
Deadline: September 1st, 2022
05 October: Co-creativities in Action: participation, collaboration, and co-design
Chaired by Rachel Iampolski (APR/RMIT University) and Zheng Chin (APR/Monash University), with an ECR guest Redento Recio
The role of designers, architects and planners within decision-making processes requires further critical engagement with the politics of participatory processes. Many argue that collective frameworks and co-constituted practices give rise to radical changes in the uneven development of urban transformation, but how much do we still not understand about the messiness of these processes and the nature of collectives as an active form of creation? We invite a moment to explore lessons from collective action engagements that can help reposition the professional ethos of designers, architects, planners and urbanists for the XXI century.
Deadline: September 14th, 2022
19 October: A River with a City problem
Chaired by Alexandre Faustino (APR/RMIT University) and Ana Lara-Heyns (APR/Monash University), with an ECR guest Michaela Prescott
Margaret Cook’s provocative title “A river with a city problem” opens space to decentralise anthropocentric rationalities that subject water to human needs by draining, taming, and domesticating its fluid manifestations. Through pluralistic ways of knowing water, we develop a sensitivity to the social construction and politics of floods, water scarcity, dams, drained rivers, water sensitive designs, and other hydrosocial challenges. We invite others to sit with new possibilities of conceptualising, seeing, caring for and governing water bodies, exploring how rivers and other water bodies as living entities - i.e. legal personification - can change our current western frameworks of water management and environmental preservation.
Deadline: October 05th, 2022
02 November: Rewilding Geographies: for still possible futures
Chaired by Alexandre Faustino (APR/RMIT University) and Nicolas Guerra Tao (APR/Monash University), with guest Rebecca Olive.
The wild emerges as beings cast out from the civilised spaces dominated by western-European settlements. Cities mark our collective imagination as a materialised civilisation, but many contest the feralness of industrial capitalism and its destructive pathway of planetary urbanism. Here, debates see cities as opportunities for wildlife existence and rewilding as a strategy that rebalances the environmental degradation perpetrated in urban spaces. As enquiries about the place of wilding in urbanised geographies mature, we invite our wild selves to: (i) explore how we might understand and reposition wild in policy, design, planning and architecture; (ii) speak to the intersections that might exist between rewilding and queer ecologies as strategies to challenge domestication of territories and creatures; and (iii) enquire how can rewilding be a framework for climate action.
Deadline: October 16th, 2022
Abstract’s submissions and HDR presentations
The call for HDRs to submit their abstracts depends on the session they are interested on. Please check above. If you wish to participate as a presenter, please submit here a short abstract (250 words) describing the work you would like to present and inform us which session is your work most related to. The sessions welcome research in different stages of development, from conceptual ideas to more refined/final products. Each of the HDRs presenting in each session will have 15 minutes to talk and all discussions will be made at the end of the presentations. All HDR presentations are planned to be in person.
Presenters will be notified 7 days before each session.
The place
All sessions were scheduled to happen in person, from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm. This year we have the honour to host Spring Encounters at our residence space in Siteworks: 33 Saxon Street, Brunswick VIC, 3056)
Refreshments will be provided upon registration through our Eventbrite booking page. The audience should also RSVP and comply with the Siteworks COVID Safety Plan.