Banafsheh Mohammadi

Assistant Professor

Availability:

Education:

PhD, History of Art, Design and Visual Culture
MEng, Architecture
BEng, Architecture

Bio

Dr. Banafsheh Mohammadi is an architect, historian and theorist of the built environment, living on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territories. She came from ᐊᒥᐢᑲᐧᒋᕀᐋᐧᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ (amiskwaciy-wâskahikan, colonially known as Edmonton) where she learned from and with feminist and anticolonial scholars at the University of Alberta. Banafsheh’s work grows from her commitment to the lands and peoples with which she lives (the Turtle Island) and to her homelands and peoples in the Middle East.

Websites:


Research Interests

Banafsheh is interested in mobilizing anticolonial anger to critique architecture, infrastructure, and the built environment. Her interests revolve around unmasking cultural violence in institutions and environments, particularly in ones that appear to be neutral. Her previous research projects have focused on cultural institutions and architectural material across Alberta as indices of petrocolonial violence. Her research has been published in The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and The Journal of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada.

Courses

Course Name Department Course Code Term
Humanities HUMN 101 26/SP

Description

Continuing with the development of modes of literacy and visual/textual analysis initiated in HUMN 100: Academic Core I, this course will prioritize how representation makes meaning, and how art, media, design, and textual practices participate in a broader social and political sphere. Analysis of both visual images/objects and texts from a variety of historical periods, from the 16th century to the present day, will be emphasized through shared case studies (from Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the Americas), keywords, and themes. Throughout, an integrated approach to the humanities will be prioritized, involving the development of critical thinking, writing skills, and class participation and engagement. Combining weekly lectures and smaller breakout seminar sessions for art, design and media, students will be exposed to the specificities of a Humanities curriculum (drawing from Art Media + Design History, Visual Culture, English, Composition and Rhetoric, and Cultural and Media Studies), and to the conceptual and practical skills necessary for further courses in Critical + Cultural Studies, as well as their subsequent studies as a whole. As students persist in building the skill set necessary for critical and contextual inquiry, emphasis will be placed on processes of visual perception, the cultural meaning of images and objects, and their many intersections with knowledge, power, and technology. Throughout, students will be encouraged to situate their own practice in relation to a broader history of representation, in order to articulate their own perspective on what it means to participate in cultural production.

Pre-requisites

No prerequisites.

Art History AHIS 410 26/SP

Description

This course is an examination of specified topics or issues that affects experiences of being human and art-making in a global context.

Each section of this course runs with a different topic. See here.

Pre-requisites

No prerequisites.

Humanities HUMN 307 26/SP

Description

Mounting concerns about a variety of environmental issues, from pollution to global warming to the extinction of species, have begun to inform the practices in art, design and media. Those concerns imply forms of action being taken about those issues. But what ethical assumptions underlie various actions. Is it a concern for human well-being? For animals? For all life? Or, even more broadly, for ecosystems? In other words, which things count ethically? The primary goal of this course is to prepare students to understand and to critically evaluate various ethical perspectives on human beings' interactions with nature and these perspectives' applications to environmental issues. An important secondary goal is to provide students with tools to integrate those perspectives into their practice as cultural workers.

Pre-requisites

No prerequisites.