CfP Colonial and Post-Colonial Landscapes: Architecture, Colonialism and Labour

III International Congress

Colonial and Post-Colonial Landscapes: Architecture, Colonialism and Labour

11-13 February 2026

Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon

The Organisation Committee is now accepting abstracts for the 3rd International Congress “Colonial and Post-Colonial Landscapes: Architecture, Colonialism and Labour” in Lisbon, Portugal, February 11–13, 2026.

Please submit an abstract proposal until May 20, 2025 to one of the 18 thematic sessions. Thematic sessions are listed below.

Submission Guidelines:

1. Abstract must be submitted in English (only) to the following link

2. Abstract must be under 300 words.

3. Please indicate the author(s) with e-mail contact and institutional affiliation;

4. Please attach a short CV of the author(s) (max 100 words).

The selection of papers will be communicated on 20 June 2025. Authors with accepted proposals are expected to submit a 3000-word paper by 15 November 2025 to receive comments from the chairs.

Please submit any questions to cpclcongress@gmail.com

List of Sessions

1. The Photographic Dialectic: Labor and Post-colonial Agency

2. Housing architecture for colonial and migrant workers. Control, education and everyday organization

3. Education for Hu/manpower: architecture, planning, and construction

4. Labor, Infrastructure, and the Built Environment: Colonial Legacies and Racialized Work in the U.S

5. The Unseen Hands: Displacement, Erasure, and the Making of the Postcolonial City (1940s-1980s)

6. The Settlers’ Tools Will Never Build the Indigenous’ House: Informal Housing as a By-product of Colonial Labour

7. Laboring Landscapes: Workers’ Agency in Transforming Agricultural Spaces

8. Labour-Worlds: Situated frames and methods for labour and building in colonial South Asia

9. Building Coloniality: Global Landscapes of Architectural Labour

10. Designing the end of the World: Internationalism and construction in late Cold War

11. Her Know How: gender and participation in the production of colonial/ modern spaces

12. Material landscapes of labour exploitation

13. Typology, terms and ideas: Freedom aspirations from late modern experiments and belated colonization

14. Plantations, Labor, Resistance and the Built Environment in the Plantationocene and its afterlives

15. The Labour of Many and The Labour of None: the representation of labour in public art, monuments and memorials, visual art, design and architecture in the postcolonial period

16. Undercommons’ ever-presence: Labour and Resistance in Colonial and Post-Colonial Space

17. Topographies of Forced Labor: (Im)mobility, Disposability, and Liminality

18. Legal entanglements of labor and architecture in Africa