Why I Give Papers at Conferences
For Julia (1953-2020)
Earlier this year my colleague Zeynep Kezer asked me to contribute a few helpful words about networking to a session of ‘PGR Fridays’, a regular session she runs for postgraduate students in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University where we both work. I was knee-deep in preparations for the Production Studies International Conference 2024, the final event of a 4-year research project Translating Ferro/Transforming Knowledges (TF/TK) and wrote the first draft of what follows very quickly, late at night. Although I didn’t feel well placed to come up with advice about how to network, it was a real joy to remember and trace the stories of how the two most meaningful networks in my career developed (not to mention some of my most sustaining friendships). The setting was informal; a small group of interested students. I passed around some of the publications mentioned in the text and we talked together about our experiences.
First Story: From Conference Alterities (Paris, 1999) to re-publishing Matrix’s classic Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment
In 1999, I was in my second year of a part-time MA on Critical Theory and Architecture at Nottingham University. A fabulous new lecturer had just started teaching – Jane Rendell - and she was running a new seminar series based on the recently published book Gender/Space/Architecture she had co-edited with Barbara Penner and Iain Borden. The series was thrilling – I had long been passionate about feminism but had met almost no-one in architecture who cared about it. For the seminar I wrote an essay called ‘Crossing into the Line’ which was about the materiality of the drawn line through the lens of feminist theory. It was inspired by Catherine Ingraham’s work – the title came from a phrase in one of her essays. One day, Jane told us about a conference coming up in Paris – Conference Alterities – which was all about feminist theory and space and organised by Doina Petrescu. Jane suggested we submit papers as a group. I think at that stage I’d only presented one paper before - at a Design History Society conference at Nottingham Trent University. It had gone pretty badly.
Together we did it – Jane, myself and two other students on the MA, Andrea Wheeler and Helen Stratford, all set off for Paris. The conference was incredible – brilliant women (and some men) giving papers and making performances, including some of my heroes, Anne Thorne and Julia Dwyer from Matrix, Jennifer Bloomer and Catherine Ingraham herself, who, it turned out, was in the front row when I gave my paper. I’ve never been so nervous and had to take my shoes off – a trick I use sometimes to literally ground myself. But afterwards, the thrills came thick and fast, my first ever seafood platter, Catherine Ingraham congratulated me, a friend told me he heard another hero – Sadie Plant – say my paper was the best in the conference, and I got an invitation to go to the Czech Republic. The absolute highlight was a lunch, when all of us from the UK got together, because we were all – like me – looking for other women to connect with about our research and passions. We said we would meet up once we were back home. Julia Dwyer (yes, of Matrix Feminist Architecture Collective, and one of the most supportive mentors I’ve ever known) was the one who got in touch.
We first met up in a London architect’s office at the regular monthly session of a group Julia was involved with who called themselves WAFER (Women Architects For Equal Representation). Someone made food for everyone, and a few others gave presentations and led the discussion. A lot of the talk was about how bad it was being a woman architect. When I said, ‘but couldn’t we all share the work we do instead of complaining,’ the group said, ‘OK, you run the next meeting.’ Another attendee offered to help – Teresa Hoskyns. We came up with a question, ‘what does a feminist architecture look like?’, my dad helped me make a ton of potato salad, and we invited a few people to make presentations. At the meeting Teresa piped up, ‘we need to do something bigger.’ Her boyfriend had a circus tent and she wanted to do a whole series of nomadic feminist events!
So, a bunch of women met in a café in Islington to plan ‘something bigger’. Teresa, myself and Julia and Helen from that first conference in Paris including artist Brigid McLeer, a few others Jane already knew, and another ex-Matrix member Jos Boys. For a few months we kept talking about the circus event, and then someone said, ‘hold on, why don’t we just show each other our own work?’ We gave ourselves a name Taking Place (a more proactive play on the title of Matrix’s 1984 publication ‘Making Space’, it was based on an article Teresa had written) and organised our first event called (rather grandly) Taking Place 1 – around ten or twelve of us over a whole weekend in a little building where I worked then at University of East London. Inspired by food artist Miche Fabre Lewin, we shared meals, made a tablecloth where we recorded thoughts and activities – features of many of our activities together over the years.
A screenshot of the home page of Taking Place.
We’re up to Taking Place XI now – very modest – giving an annual award to design students in honour of Julia – who died in 2020. We did many things together (never in the circus tent); a conference with 100 delegates who all brought food for our lunch together while Miche organised a team to cook in the front window; a three-day feminist school of architecture; lots of collective presentations often around meals; and one very long project ‘The Other Side of Waiting.’ We spent five years raising money and installing artworks in a mother and baby unit in Homerton Hospital (in Hackney, London). My own contribution ‘This Is For You’ was about the very premature birth of my child Skye (now 19!) – and installed in the special care unit where Skye was looked after for three months.
Fig 1. Julia Dwyer introducing Taking Place 8, Interstitial Breakfast, at Architecture and Feminisms, KTH, Stockholm, 2015 (Photo: Sue Ridge)
Fig 2. Table settings at Taking Place 8, Interstitial Breakfast, at Architecture and Feminisms, KTH, Stockholm, 2015 (Photo: Sue Ridge)
“Give that paper, even if you are nervous. You don’t know where it will take you and to whom.”
There’s no space to map all the incredible people I met and the long-lasting connections I made through Taking Place, so I’ll finish this tale with one strand of the story.
It was when ex-Matrix members Sue Francis and then Julia became seriously ill that some former members realised the urgency of making some kind of archive of the practice. Men seem much better and more forward-thinking about doing this than women. For Jos Boys who got the collection process going it was a matter of retrieving whatever materials members happened to have kept. There was also an idea to reprint Making Space, and somehow, I got involved, perhaps because I’d proposed to Newcastle University that we give an honorary degree to the four founder members of Matrix who – it turned out – had all studied there and met during the 1970s (Sue Francis, Fran Bradshaw, Anne Thorne, Barbara McFarlane). Fran Bradshaw and I started looking for a publisher and talking about how the book should be. We finally got a contract with Verso, and together with the feminist architectural historian Karen Burns I was lucky enough to research and co-write the new introduction. The book launched in 2022, and then what a year! With all the archive materials Jos had collected, she had collaborated with curator Jon Astbury to put on an exhibition about Matrix at the Barbican (How We Live Now, London, 2021), we brought it to Newcastle Contemporary Art with the Farrell Centre (Newcastle, 2022) and Anne Thorne and Fran got their honorary degrees!
Fig 3a. Anne Thorne and Fran Bradshaw at How We Live Now: Making Spaces in the North East with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative, Newcastle Contemporary Art, 2023 (Photo: Katie Lloyd Thomas)
Fig 3b. Workshop with Fran Bradshaw, Jos Boys and Newcastle University architecture students at How We Live Now: Making Spaces in the North East with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative, Newcastle Contemporary Art, 2023 (Photo: Katie Lloyd Thomas)
What is the moral of this tale? Give that paper, even if you are nervous. You don’t know where it will take you and to whom – and don’t be afraid to start very small, slow and informal.
Second Story: From a staff research seminar at the Bartlett School of Architecture (London, 2010) to a major AHRC funded project translating the work of Sérgio Ferro and catalysing the new field of Production Studies
In 2010 I had just finished my PhD and I was doing a bunch of hourly paid roles at the Bartlett School of Architecture covering for a full-time academic who was on sabbatical. In her role as Research Director Jane Rendell (yes Jane again!) was trying to fold precarious staff like me into the research culture of the school. She asked if I’d like to present for 10 minutes at their monthly research seminar. So, nervous once again and feeling rather out of place amongst the grand full-time colleagues, I talked about my PhD research on architectural specifications. I’d published a bit on the material but had only found people in the industry researching specifications, and I’d done the PhD in a philosophy department which was very stimulating but a bit isolating especially since by then Skye was a toddler and I was pretty much a full-time mum. Afterwards a PhD student Nick Beech came up to me to chat. He was looking at demolition contracts in his work, saw some resonances, and liked that we both had young children. We met up for a coffee and got very excited about the paperwork of architecture. Why was no-one interested in its roles and effects? He told me there was one other PhD student Tilo Amhoff who’d written his dissertation about John Soane’s specifications. Wow! The first architectural humanities researcher I’d met who shared this niche research interest with me. So, the three of us started meeting. Between us we could think of a few people who might talk about paperwork and technical literature, and Jane was offering small pots of money for putting on one day symposiums. They were usually called ‘Architecture And…’ but Tilo came up with a brilliant title ‘Further Reading Required’ (FRR). We chose a date in February 2011 when Antoine Picon was in London so he could give the keynote and had about 20 presenters over the day. To our great surprise the event was very well attended – 120 people or so. It seemed architectural paperwork had (as one presenter put it) ‘a head of steam.’
And now we go to Paris – again! It’s only writing this that I’ve realised that the city has been the site of these key moments in my research trajectory! Nick persuaded me to go the Construction History Congress there in 2012. These are massive events with hundreds of papers organised over a week. I must admit my paper (on specifications) was a damp squib, and Nick and I spent a lot of time complaining how rarely politics was mentioned by the construction historians. For example, a fascinating paper about the mechanics of erecting an obelisk in Rome completely passed over the fact that a whole chunk of housing and shops were demolished to make enough space to lever the monument into place. In the last session of the conference, I heard about the achievements of Hitler’s chief engineer – with not a peep about the regime. But the final paper by a Brazilian PhD student Felipe Contier blew me away. It was about Artigas’ concrete architecture through the lens of building labour. When I talked to him afterwards his colleague (who I found out later was Ana Paula Koury) kept tapping him on the shoulder, ‘tell her about Sérgio Ferro’. They suggested I join them for lunch, so I went to find Nick. In fact, he’d met another Brazilian researcher Silke Kapp – also complaining about the lack of politics – and she’d asked him to join at the same small cafe. We drank beer, ate some steak and frites, laughed a lot and there I heard all about Sérgio Ferro, whose work connected design, including practices like specification, to the exploitation of construction labour. We exchanged contact details. I was hooked. At Felipe’s suggestion I ordered Dessin/Chantier, the only one of Ferro’s books published in French – because nothing had been translated into English. I struggled through it, the scales falling from eyes, but wishing I could read it in a language I properly understood!
Fig 4a. Sérgio Ferro with Katie Lloyd Thomas and Cecília Lenzi at the Production Studies International Conference, Newcastle, 2024 (Photo: Carlos Martins)
By then I had started as a lecturer at Newcastle University, and was finally in a place with a vibrant research culture which supported me. Tilo, Nick and I had hatched a new plan for a major international conference about the processes and practices of architecture which we called Industries of Architecture (IOA). It was held in November 2014 at Newcastle University as part of the series organised by AHRA (Architectural Humanities Research Association). We invited Sérgio Ferro as a keynote – a major undertaking which involved an entourage of people, including quite a few of the Brazilians we’d met in Paris. Two weeks before the conference he had a health issue and was unable to come. In his place, I read his paper with the Portuguese version projected behind me. His arguments both shocked and captivated the audience and were the talking point of the conference. With Silke Kapp and another Brazilian delegate João de Almeida Lopes, we started talking about translating Ferro’s work into English. In December Silke got in touch. She was examining a PhD in France and asked if I wanted to join her to meet Ferro to discuss translating his work. I persuaded our school’s research committee to give me some money for the trip in between a massive teaching schedule. Ferro was welcoming and warm, and enthusiastic about our plans. Thank goodness I went!
I’m going to fast forward now – it would take another five years for Silke, João and myself to put a funding application together for the translations project. And because everyone told us translations would never get funded on their own, the project grew in scope and became about using Ferro’s work as a catalyst for developing the field of Production Studies. In summer 2020 - in the middle of lockdown – we learned our joint bid had been successful. Funding for the four-year project was from the AHRC in the UK and FAPESP in São Paulo State, Brazil, and totalled around £1 million.
Fig 4b. Sérgio Ferro and Christine Wall at the Production Studies International Conference, Newcastle, 2024 (Photo: Sylvia Fisch)
Finally, for this project, Sérgio Ferro joined us in Newcastle to give his keynote at the Production Studies International Conference (March, 2024) and to launch Architecture from Below, the first of three translations of his work we are publishing with MACK over the next two years. The project has been a roller-coaster and through it I’ve met and worked with some truly brilliant scholars, practitioners, and activists, internationally as well as in my own university and locally in the city. When I look at the conference program I see the names of people who were at that first FRR event, and more who were part of IOA. Nick and Tilo have had key roles in TF/TK, along with former PhD students as well as many new participants from India, China, South Africa, the US and Europe who responded to our Call for Papers. It is extraordinary to reflect back on that research seminar at the Bartlett only 14 years ago when I knew almost no-one who shared my interests in the production of architecture. I didn’t know what I was doing was ‘networking’ but that’s as good a name as any for the change.
Fig 4c. Lara Melotti introducing the Production Pedagogies lunch at the Production Studies International Conference, Newcastle, 2024 (Photo: José Figueira)
What is the moral of this story – go to conferences in Paris of course! But seriously – if you feel isolated in your research find whatever little pots of money you can to bring people together. Don’t wait for them to find you. Even gathering a couple of like-minded people around your interests and commitments can give you extra confidence to invite a few more to join. The process of planning and developing events and projects can be as much where the intellectual work happens and new relationships are formed, as the events themselves. It's a lot of work, but also so much stimulation and joy.
Citation
Katie Lloyd-Thomas, “Why I Give Papers at Conferences,” PLATFORM, August 26, 2024.
