Menna Agha

I am a trained architect and an academic. I teach at the School of Architecture and Urbanism in Ottawa, Canada, as Assistant Professor of Design and Spatial Justice. My research is on displacement and spatial claims, focusing on issues of race, gender, and territory, and I try to work across practice and theory, in a manner that centers praxis. 

More specifically, the main topic of my research is Nubian places. Nubian places on Nubian land, but also Nubian places that I’m able to produce, as a Nubian architect, anywhere in the world. Places that are centered in care and emotion, places that are centered around community benefit, places that are centered around what my grandmother used to do years ago, and what my foremothers used to do centuries ago. That translates to the study of Nubian histories through a Nubian perspective; having Indigenous and Nubian paradigms centered, but also, practicing, wherever I am, as the Nubian architect that I want to be.

Issues of racial justice have been central to my research because there’s no other way to be, when you’re a Black woman in this field; when you see how we become racialized, how you become a racial subject, and how that informs the way in which your well-being is considered, in your place, in your streets, in the way that you are zoned, in your geographic location. The fact that this awareness comes from personal experience, from seeing how it is for me and for people who look like me, there’s no way that I could think about my research without considering racial justice as an important lens. Cedric Robinson teaches: “There is no capitalism that is not racial capitalism.” If we are fighting against these systems of neoliberalism and capitalism, the whole system is built around racializing, discounting people and extracting their value, in the form of labor, resources, and any other means of extraction. Economic issues and systems of financialization are a quintessential problem for Black people. As such, they must be part of any effort toward racial justice.

In my work, I try to subvert disciplines, subvert their borders, try to take knowledge where knowledge is useful, for me and for the communities that I am trying to serve. The knowledge may be in the field of statistics, or in the social sciences, anthropology, architecture, in the medical sciences - wherever the knowledge is, we seek it. I’m lucky enough to be in a field of architecture that considers itself as an interdisciplinary one, one that deals with the lived experience. So if you’re designing a hospital, you have to speak to medical professionals, if you’re designing a community center, you have to speak to social workers, and so on. There is a lot of leeway for us to be interdisciplinary, which to me, becomes an important resource for subverting the notion of “discipline” in my research.

And on the topic of the importance of transnational work, for us African people and people of African descent, a big tool of coloniality was to isolate us in communities around the world: in displacement villages in Egypt, in plantations on Turtle Island or in Caribbean islands, in secluded communities to which people ran away when escaping the colonizers who took big swaths of land across the African continent, for example... So it is very important for us to find each other, to know, first of all, that our pain is similar. Not just people of African descent, but also Indigenous people across the world - in the North of Europe, or in South America, or across Turtle Island... For Black and Indigenous people, and people of Global Majority, to know that our pain is similar, and that colonizers used very similar tools against all of us. It becomes much more viable - much more doable - for us to dismantle and untangle what has been put upon us by colonial systems when we come together and troubleshoot it with each other.

A future in which we get to decide. A future in which we are not working against, anti, and counter. Where we get to rest a bit, and work for what we want, and what we have imagined ourselves. This, to me, is a big aspiration. I can’t tell a story of the future right now, I can’t tell you the future is going to look like so and so. If you had asked me four years ago, I would have told you that the future is when I go back to our ancestral land and take it. This is still  the future that I am hoping for, and that I am imagining. But for this to happen, I need to see a near future, where I am not working counter, anti, and against, where I am not wasting my time pushing things away. I am instead sitting and contemplating what I want to do in my land, and what it is that my land means to me. And I don’t have to fight academic institutions and state institutions over what “land” means, over how it’s legislated, over how it’s paternalistically “protected,” or over how its environment is defined, and understood, and respected.

The sense of alienation you have in this field, being the only Black person in the room, makes it so that you need that space, you need that construction that you have in your mind, in your imagination, to know that there is elsewhere. There is an elsewhere to where I am now, where I am lonely, alone, the only. Being “the only” is celebrated - ridiculously. When you are the only Black person there, how do you become an active participant in what is happening, what is being created in that board room, in that faculty meeting? You can’t participate meaningfully! The only place where I can meaningfully be an actor is in that place I can imagine. And so, the forms of alienation that we are subject to as Black people ensure that I am not losing sight of the future I imagine for myself.