Architectures of Solidarity
Roundtable 1 | 09.00-10.15
Moderators: Ipek Türeli (McGill University) & Anoma Pieris (University of Melbourne)
Speakers: Anna Goodman, Arièle Krosnick, Dhara Patel, and Valentina Rozas-Krause

Constructing South-South Cooperation
Roundtable 2 | 10.30-11.45
Moderators: Peter Scriver (Adelaide University) & Vladimir Kulić (Iowa State University)
Speakers: Priya Jain, Rina Priyani, Mark Olweny, and Anthony Wako

From Nation Building to South-South Worldmaking
Public Lecture | 12.00-13.00
Speakers: Amit Srivastava & Peter Scriver (CAMEA, Adelaide University)


Solidarities in the Indian Ocean Rim brings together scholars examining how architecture and infrastructure became powerful sites of transnational solidarity across the Global South. Through two innovative roundtable sessions, the symposium traces alternative networks of cooperation that emerged across the Indian Ocean world and beyond.

The first session ‘Architectures of Solidarity’ investigates how solidarity is framed, spatialized, and practiced across varied social and political contexts. Through cases ranging from feminist reappropriations of monuments to everyday infrastructures of collective care and alliance-building, the session explores how built environments mediate communal world-making. The second session ‘Constructing South-South Cooperation’ examines how architecture and infrastructure made visible the emergent concepts of non-alignment and Third World solidarity that followed from Cold War rivalry. Through concrete cases of Afro-Asian housing collaborations, Egypt-led Arab networks supporting African Unity, and India-Africa technical cooperation in soil engineering, the session reveals how built projects were simultaneously stages for solidarity, practices of cooperation, and material results of new transnational networks.

Together, these conversations reframe postcolonial development narratives by foregrounding the 'non-aligned' trajectories often obscured by Cold War North-South paradigms. Focusing on the Indian Ocean Rim as a crucial zone of exchange, the symposium reveals how architectural and infrastructural cooperation challenged imperial legacies and created material and symbolic stages for Global South solidarity.