Relaunching the UCL Africa Research Centre with Dr Thandi Loewenson

12 November 2024, 4:00 pm–6:00 pm

The Africa Research Centre is delighted to welcome UCL alumna, Dr Thandi Loewenson.

Event Information

Open to: All
Availability: Yes
Organiser: Institute of Advanced Studies

instituteofadvancedstudies@ucl.ac.uk
Location: IAS Common Ground

G11, ground floor, South Wing

UCL, Gower St, London

WC1E 6BT

United Kingdom

Dr Thandi Loewenson will be speaking at this event, which is to celebrate the relaunch of the UCL Africa Research Centre.

Thandi's talk will be followed by a small drinks reception. More details to follow soon.

All welcome but please register to attend: https://arc-relaunch.eventbrite.co.uk

The Africa Research Centre aspires to contribute to advancing knowledge of the peoples, societies and cultures of Africa and the African Diaspora. It aims to be a platform for discussions of relevant issues related to the interests and wellbeing of Africans and those in the diasporic population.

About the Speaker

Dr Thandi Loewenson

Thandi Loewenson is an architectural designer/researcher who mobilises design, fiction and performance to stoke embers of emancipatory political thought and fires of collective action, and to feel for the contours of other, possible worlds. Using fiction as a design tool and tactic, and operating in the overlapping realms of the weird, the tender, the earthly and the airborne, Thandi engages in projects which provoke questioning of the status-quo, whilst working with communities, policy makers, unions, artists and architects towards acting on those provocations.

Thandi holds a PhD in Architectural Design from The Bartlett, UCL, through which she developed a form of architectural practice – weird and tender – to excavate and contest the extractive agendas driving the urban development of Lusaka. Central to this research was a live project, investigating how insertions of the other worldly and the downright weird – inspired by the Zambian Space Program – could support the City Council and the Chunga Waste Recycler’s Association to produce a ‘Weird-Tender’ recognizing them as partners of the state.

Thandi is a Senior Tutor at the Royal College of Art. She is a co-foundress of the architectural collective BREAK//LINE – an ‘act of creative solidarity’ which ‘resists definition with intent’ – formed at The Bartlett in 2018 to oppose the trespass of capital, the indifference towards inequality and the myriad frontiers of oppression present in architectural education and practice today. Thandi is also a contributor to EQUINET, the Regional Network on Equity in Health in East and Southern Africa, a co-foundress of the Fiction, Feeling, Frame research collective at the Royal College of Art, and a co-curator, with Huda Tayob and Suzi Hall, of the open-access curriculum project Race, Space & Architecture.

Relaunching the UCL Africa Research Centre with Dr Thandi Loewenson

Event Information

Open to

Availability

Organiser

Location

About the Speaker

Dr Thandi Loewenson