Category: subalternity

  • [CALL FOR ABSTRACTS] Displacing the Drafting Board: Women, Labor, and the Construction Site

    [CALL FOR ABSTRACTS] Displacing the Drafting Board: Women, Labor, and the Construction Site

    Panel

    Displacing the Drafting Board: Women, Labor, and the Construction Site

    Event: Society of Architectural Historians 2027 Annual International Conference
    Chairs: Ana Vaz Milheiro, Francesca Vita
    Date: 14 – 18 April 2026

    Location: Chicago, Illinois

    Summary

    Architectural historiography has addressed women’s agency in architecture through two predominant, yet often isolated, approaches. On the one hand, it has relied on biographical methodologies that highlight leading figures as designers and decision-makers who stood out in the conception of buildings and infrastructure, following the pioneering work of Susana Torre (1977). On the other hand, scholars have sought to recognize the collective role of women as part of the labor force, often categorized as unskilled workers within contexts of precarity (Jha, 2020; Melsens, 2024 Milheiro, 2025). Based on this dual approach, this session focuses on the construction site as the central stage for expanding women’s role in architecture, metaphorically shifting the drafting board to the place where the project is actual built. The aim of this session is to interrogate the physical and social dimension of architectural construction not merely as a site for project execution, but as an ecosystem where diverse forms of female agency also existed. We are looking for papers that intersect biographical histories of women – ranging from designers, work yard supervisor, craftswoman, and others who possessed technical or vocational training and earned wages (Kleinöder, 2022) – with construction sites. By investigating these professional and labor trajectories within the construction site, this session seeks to question: In what ways did the physical presence of women on-site alter construction dynamics and the material culture of architecture? How did gender shape technical authority across different geographical and chronological contexts, with particular emphasis on the 18th, 19th, 20th century?

    By combining archival material and oral history, this session seeks to expand the historiographical canon by recognizing the construction site as a space of social negotiation where intellectual and manual labor meet, thereby revealing the complexity of women’s participation in the materialization of the built environment.

    Click here to submit your proposal

  • Colonial Construction Practices in Portuguese News (1960s–1970s)

    Colonial Construction Practices in Portuguese News (1960s–1970s)

    Communication

    Colonial Construction Practices in Portuguese News (1960s–1970s)

    Event: International Symposium Construction History & Film
    Authors: Beatriz Serrazina
    Date: 19 – 20 February 2026

    Location: CIUL, Lisbon, Portugal

    Two workers using trowels to plaster a brick wall [Construção civil em Benguela, 1968, RTP Arquivos]
    Team assembling moulds on a viaduct along the Cubal variant construction [Construção do caminho de ferro do Cubal, 1973, RTP Arquivos]

    Summary

    This presentation examines a selection of short documentary films from the archives of RTP (Rádio e Televisão de Portugal), originally broadcasted on the Noticiário Nacional [National News] programme in Portugal in the 1960s and 1970s. Produced during the country’s late colonial period, these black-and-white films – between two to five minutes long – documented construction work in several territories in Africa under Portuguese rule. They covered a variety of contexts, typologies and scales: sanitation projects in Beira, Mozambique, building sites in Luanda, Angola, road construction in São Tomé, railways and bridges, and the monumental hydroelectric dams of Gove, Cambambe, and Cabora Bassa. Unlike written records, which mostly emphasised technical plans and quantitative aspects such as costs or completion deadlines, the moving images reveal the practical, hands-on dimensions of construction and public works, from materials to the coexistence of manual and mechanical work. They capture how infrastructures were assembled, how tools and machinery were handled by workers – frequently absent from technical reports –, and how labour was organised on site. The paper argues that these archival films constitute an invaluable visual archive for rethinking the history of construction and architecture within the context of empire, intersecting multiple dimensions of labour, technology, and material power.

  • Gendered work in former Portuguese colonial Africa: Mass labor and public works

    Gendered work in former Portuguese colonial Africa: Mass labor and public works

    Journal Article

    Gendered work in former Portuguese colonial Africa: Mass labor and public works 

    Journal: The Journal Modern Craft, 18
    Author: Ana Vaz Milheiro

    Author: 2025

    “Ilha do Fogo. Girl carrying boulders to the water abstraction at Praia do Ladrao beach. Salary: 3$00 daily.” Antonio de Almeida (1948).
    “Santiago. Women working to repair a street in Praia, next to two bullies…” Antonio de Almeida (1948).

    Summary

    References to the existence of women in Portuguese Colonial Public Works can be found on payrolls since the turn of the nineteenth century. Their work was subordinated to men’s work and they consistently earned lower wages. After World War II, their presence in quarries, or dealing with small pavement repairs, would endure in economically precarious geographies. One of these locations was Cape Verde, where positions for carpenters, bricklayers, and construction helpers were left vacant after the emigration of men. This situation was not very different from that in rural Portugal, where women, mostly illiterate, also constituted a cheap workforce. Examining gendered labor in colonial Cape Verde, this article analyzes the complex coexistence of subalternity, race, and extreme poverty in an understudied context. Women workers were generally associated with unskilled labor and high demands on a large scale. In light of their apparent invisibility in colonial records, this paper considers whether and how the characteristics of this group impacted design projects. It also explores whether working in Public Works meant the emancipation of women who were heads of single-parent families or only represented the perpetuation of inequality.

    Click here to access the article.

  • Colonial labour housing: a ‘propaganda’ tool?

    Colonial labour housing: a ‘propaganda’ tool?

    Communication

    Colonial labour housing:

    a ‘propaganda’ tool?

    Event: European Architectural History Network. 8th International Conference
    Authors: Beatriz Serrazina
    Date: 19 – 23 June 2026

    Location: National Technical University of Athens, Greece

    Union Minière, Lubumbashi Camp, Katanga, 1928[AGR, Sibeka, 530]
    Tipo de aldeia indígena Diamang, 1942 [DCV-UC/AD]

    Summary

    Colonial space was often produced for and supported by mineral extraction. Yet, none of the extractive businesses set up in Africa throughout the first half of the 20th century could run without workforce. By requiring the engagement of thousands of African people, private companies responsible for housing their labourers. Since both enterprises and governments believed disruption within the intimacy of household could serve multiple ends, villages became critical spaces for simultaneously running industrial areas and carrying out a “modernising” mission envisioned by European powers. In 1961, the director of a mining company’s labour service, operating in north-eastern Angola, wrote a few telling words: “The advantages of a well-built brick house are well known. Adding to labour productivity and stability, we must highlight the propaganda factor. What a valuable propaganda tool a permanent house is!”

    By following transformations in labour housing typologies over time, and while acknowledging strong inter-imperial networks connecting private corporations across Central Africa, mainly between Angola and Belgian Congo, this presentation aims to question the domestic space as a core arena for shaping, enduring and contesting colonialism. It will unpack house planning, design and materials, from the first “propaganda villages” in the 1930s to the later “modern neighbourhoods” built in the 1960s. Companies repeatedly tried to work with “models” and “types” of houses to create “legible” landscapes and “modern” communities – but reports show that reality on the ground was often messier than intended. Despite colonial imaginaries, “modern” houses run along native domesticities, thus shaping an intricate landscape.

    The overall goal is to understand how and to what extent transformations in housing have resulted from and been fuelled by different agents and agendas: the demands and know-how of local communities, the requests of international and inter-imperial organisations, the possibilities of growing scientific and technological research, alongside companies’ productivity drives.