Thesis Reviews for final year students were conducted online and Zoom links shared on social media and relayed live on YouTube. While this allowed invited discussants from different parts of the country and the world to participate, it also opened up pedagogical discussions to a diverse public like never before.While Zoom recorded an audience of 231 participants, YouTube had a visitation of over 2000 in 3 days.
While the immediate physicalcontext shrunk, the world came closer. We were now talking to peers from across the world in webinars, online juries,online workshops, biennale walk-throughs, etc. on ideas of space, justice, life, and living.
In the frame above we see along with students and faculty at SEA, the two invited reviewers Bijoy Ramchandran from Bangalore, Andrea Pinochet from Hong Kong University speaking from her home in Oslo and an unknown figure right in the center of the screen Kardo Norradin Karim,
This may open up ideas of new kinds of peer learning communities and collectives in the future, and new agile forms of institutions that refuse to congeal
and limit one’s imagination like most present institutional structures do.
On searches on facebook we find that he is a lecturer at Salahaddin University in Erbil in Iraq and has a PhD in Landscape Architecture from the same university.
SMUDGING BOUNDARIES
SEA City, a Fortnightly lecture series, which were a local affair at the school, open to public has a small budget that invited mostly scholars and practitioners from Mumbai and a few from the country, The event was attended by people from the city but many were deterred by traffic jams in Mumbai and the audience had slowly started petering off. Recently before the pandemic we had started relaying the event live on Facebook. This saw a few more people. But the audience never exceeded 20 - 25 people from outside the school. With the pandemic and the complete semester going online, we started a new series on South Asian Architecture and Urbanism hoping to challenge the narrow parochial nationalistic boundaries around which architectural discourse tends to revolve through questions around ‘identity’. In the frame is Kazi Ashraf an architect and theorist from the Bengal Institute and a chat by an audience member Salma Begum, informing the audience of an online archive the the work of Mazhrul Islam