Esra Akcan / Professor at Cornell University: "Resettler Nationalism, Enforced Mass Migrations and the Right to Heal "

This lecture is part of the Fall 2025 Architecture Lecture Series.

"Resettler Nationalism, Enforced Mass Migrations and the Right to Heal"

Lecture by Esra Akcan
Fellow at Stanford University
Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Cornell University

About the lecture:

In this lecture, Esra Akcan will introduce her book Architecture and the Right to Heal: Resettler Nationalism in the Aftermath of Conflict and Disaster (Duke University Press, 2025). This book explores architecture’s role in healing societies after conflicts and disasters by discussing buildings and spaces in relation to transitional justice and energy transition. It locates spaces of political and ecological harm and makes a call to repurpose them as healing spaces where violence and violations are confronted, and accountability and reparations are instituted. By discussing healing as a matter of rights and a holistic notion of justice to be achieved retroactively, the book critically examines the causes of and opportunistic responses to crises, and at the same time demonstrates architecture’s creative potential for meaningful restitutions. As chapters proceed from individual to communal to planetary healing, they also demonstrate that sudden shocks have deep roots in intertwined history, for which the book suggests the concept of resettler nationalism to explain the ex-Ottoman lands during the long twentieth century, and to provide a layered global history as a necessary correction to binary and exclusionary accounts. This lecture will specifically exemplify healing after partitions and enforced mass migrations during nation-state formations, and focus on the Greek-Turkish Exchange of Populations Treaty as an episode of resettler nationalism. This partition between Europe and Anatolia was not only the irreversible dividing of Christians and Muslims, but also served as a model for U.N.’s future compulsory population transfers.

About the lecturer:

Currently a fellow at Stanford University, Esra Akcan is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Architecture, and board member at the Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University. Akcan’s research on modern and contemporary architecture and urbanism foregrounds the intertwined histories of Europe, West Asia and Northeast Africa, and offers new ways to understand architecture’s role in global, social and environmental justice. Recipient of multiple awards and fellowships, she has written extensively on critical and postcolonial theory, racism, immigration, reparations and transitional justice, architectural photography, translation, neoliberalism, and global history. She is the author of Landfill Istanbul (2004); Çeviride Modern Olan (2009); Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey and the Modern House (2012); Turkey: Modern Architectures in History (2012, with Sibel Bozdoğan); Open Architecture: Migration, Citizenship and the Urban Renewal of Berlin-Kreuzberg by IBA-1984/87 (2018); Abolish Human Bans: Intertwined Histories of Architecture (2022), Architecture and the Right to Heal (2025) and co-editor of Art and Architecture of Migration and Discrimination (2023, with Iftikhar Dadi). 

AIA CES Learning Units:
AIA Members and Registered Architects will receive 1 LU for attending this event.