Building the nation and constructing class: the architecture of education in Ghana

Summary
In this talk, Kuukuwa puts forward the construction of social class hierarchies as an ironic and unexpected outcome of the post-independence nation-building in Ghana under the nation’s socialist president, Kwame Nkrumah. It is drawn from her ongoing book project ‘The Architecture of Education’, which is an account of the making of and belonging in modern Ghana told through the lens of sociopolitical and physical architecture of schools and foregrounding numerous overlooked and diminished actors, sources, and accounts.

Bio
Kuukuwa Manful is a trained architect and researcher who creates, studies, teaches, and documents the history, theories, and politics of architecture in Africa. She is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan. She curates adansisɛm - a Ghanaian architecture documentation collective; runs sociarchi - an architecture non-profit; and is president of Docomomo Accra. Her current projects include a book about ‘The Architecture of Education in Ghana’ and a study of the ‘Formalisation and Unformalisation of Architecture in West Africa’ using a collection of endangered archives that she has recently digitised.