Anooradha Siddiqi (Associate Professor, Architecture, Barnard College) examines artistic practice in the making of an intellectual commons. The talk will consider the process of curating and constructing Dadaab Commons at the GoDown Arts Centre in Nairobi in 2025, an exhibitionary outgrowth of years of deep research and community practice rooted in East Africa.

Entangling artistic and scholarly inquiry, works in the exhibition take object lessons from the Dadaab refugee camps to understand migration, settlement, land politics, and environmental futures—in East Africa, Afro-Asia, and beyond. How do we think collectively with people living their lives in refugee camps? How do we move our work away from common extraction and toward common futures? What do we learn, when we look closely at a refugee camp? How does an architecture of migration give way to structures for a commons? Extending core questions in the book Architecture of Migration (Duke University Press), this talk asks how methodologies for historical scholarship may be brought to bear urgently on questions of how we may live together through shared artistic experience.