Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is an assistant professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press, 2023). The book conceptualizes architectures of migration and the problematics of settlement through the object lesson of the UNHCR-administered camps at Dadaab, Kenya. Its analysis of spatial politics, visual rhetoric, and a long history of land and architecture offers an epistemological vantage point within African and Islamic worlds where migratory ways of life hold great meaning. Siddiqi is writing a book titled A Modern Architecture of the Past, which examines a history of politics and practices around what has come to be called “heritage” through the work and intellectual career of architect and scholar Minnette de Silva. One of the first women in the world to establish a professional architectural practice as sole principal, her feminisms, environmentalisms, artistic and archival practices, and attention to labor and shared forms of making provide a singular reflection on twentieth-century histories, landscapes, and discourses, against backdrops of empire, radical economic change, and militarization and armed conflict.