Study Architecture 
ProPEL Call for Submissions
The Halifax, 2025 Teachers Conference focuses on rethinking the role of the designer, imagining new interdisciplinary interactions, and clarifying the social, political, and technological motivations for architectural pedagogy.
With this call, the joint conference of the North American and European associations for architectural education solicits scholarly presentations for the conference and proceedings. The conference addresses practitioners, academics, and citizens in general with an interest in exploring the present and future societal role of architectural education and invites participants to submit papers or posters.
The conference invites practitioners, academics, and designers to submit papers or posters reflecting on Conflict : Resolution in the following tracks:
Design Against Violence
Architecture is entangled in warfare. While architects for the past century concerned themselves with postwar reconstruction, educators today increasingly grapple with the spatialization of violence itself, in its many forms. How can design tools mitigate urbicide and domicide? How can educators navigate the geopolitical scale? In what new ways can architecture recover cultural memory and forge solidarities?
Designs of Mobility
Humanitarian shelters, refugee camps, urban interventions for newcomers–complex sites of migration have filtered into architecture’s purview. In addition to the acute conflicts of displacement, there are also “slower” conflicts of inequality that challenge our understanding of community and require interdisciplinary thinking. How can architecture be activated in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other institutional contexts? Can architectural education rearticulate the “borders” that divide states and communities? How does the figure of the migrant reshape design values?
Environmental Redesign
Since the 1970s, environmental activism has filtered into architectural discourse. Today, architectural education must demonstrate awareness of contested terrains of land and resource use, and highlight the need to repair our damaged planet–forests, oceans, mines, ecosystems, microhabitats–across multiple scales. How do we design for energy justice? How can schools of architecture be rewired through Indigenous ways of knowing and undo the legacies of environmental racism? What new pathways for environmental remediation can architectural education offer?
Designs in Public
Architects use design to navigate conflicts in their own communities and reshape the public realm in their cities. They are also increasingly concerned with the legal conflicts around property, land, densification, and other developer-led initiatives. How can architectural educators partner with community groups to rethink disability legislation, food insecurity, homelessness, and infrastructural access? How do we design for dissent and rebuild democracy? How can architects recover public space?
Redesigning Our Institutions
Institutions are reluctant to change, and pedagogical conflicts are often necessary for curricular innovation. Contemporary issues such as inclusion in the discipline, research ethics, and artificial intelligence are reshaping the classroom and the university. What new models of collaboration are emerging, and how is the instructor/student relationship being reconsidered? What are the “fundamentals” of architecture today, and what are the debates about them? How can design education sensitively engage conflict and crisis?
Making as Design
Experiments in emergent materials and design-build initiatives tackle social and environmental conflict from the bottom up. Moreover, the values of maintenance and renovation are increasingly leveraged against demolition and speculation. How can small acts of architectural innovation address conflict and produce change? What are the politics of assembly? How can craft, digital craft, architectural labor, and knowledge transfer among makers reaffirm human agency?
Submissions Requirements
Submission Deadline: October 16, 2024
Call for Papers
Selection of scholarly presentations will be based on double-blind peer review of extended abstracts (1,500 word limit) accompanied by optional images. Authors of accepted abstracts who present their work at the conference are then invited to submit a full paper for a second peer review for inclusion in a conference proceedings. It is expected that feedback from the abstract review and conference presentation will inform the final paper.
- Abstracts must not exceed 1,500-words and include no more than five optional images.
- Abstracts must be prepared for anonymous review (remove author/contributor names and affiliation identification).
- Authors may present no more than two papers or posters at the conference. No individual may be listed as co-author on more than two submissions.
- Submissions must report on recently completed work and cannot have been previously published or presented in public, except to a regional audience.
- Submissions must be written in English
PAPER & POSTER PRESENTATIONS
Following the blind peer-review process, the conference scientific committee make final acceptance decisions. All authors will be notified of the status of their submission and will receive comments from their reviewers. Final acceptance of abstracts translates to presentation at the conference. Sessions will be composed of accepted authors, allowing for both scholarly and applied research to mutually demonstrate impact. Each session will have a moderator, who will coordinate with authors regarding session guidelines as well as the general expectations for the session in advance. Accepted authors will have approximately 10-minutes to present in a session at the conference. Conference organizers reserve the right to withhold a paper from the program if the author fails to comply with guidelines, including deadlines and requests for submission of materials.
Accepted abstracts will be invited to expand on their research and submit a full paper or poster, post-conference, to be included in the conference proceedings. Full Papers are to be 2500-4000 words with optional 1-5 images. Full Posters may be up to 1000 words with 5-10 images. Authors accepted to present at the conference will be required to complete a copyright transfer form and agree to present the research at the conference before it is published. It is ACSA policy that accepted authors must pay full conference registration in order to be included in the conference presentation and proceedings. Once the conference proceedings is published, each submission will be included in the Proceedings Index.
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Questions
Michelle Sturges
Conferences Manager
202-785-2324
msturges@acsa-arch.org
Eric W. Ellis
Senior Director of Operations and Programs
202-785-2324
eellis@acsa-arch.org
