Mapping Borderlands

Lecture by Nora Akawi, Columbia GSAPP Adjunct Assistant Professor and Director of Studio-X Amman.

Nora Akawi (MSCCCP 2011) is an architect, curator, and researcher working in New York and Amman. She joined Columbia University’s GSAPP in 2012 as director of Studio-X Amman, a platform for public discussions and collective study of architecture in the Arab region operating out of Columbia’s Global Center in Amman.

Since 2014, she has been teaching graduate history/theory and visualization courses on borderlands, forced displacements, and counter-narratives at Columbia GSAPP. She also joined the urban design faculty in 2017, teaching the Water Urbanism studio on water infrastructures and inequalities along the Jordan valley.

Nora is also an executive committee member of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University, and serves on the steering committee of the Sijal Institute for Arabic Language and Culture. She has co-edited, together with Amale Andraos and Caitlin Blanchfield, the book The Arab City: Architecture and Representation (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2016).

She completed her professional degree in architecture in Jerusalem (B.Arch 2009). In 2011, she received her MS in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture from Columbia University’s GSAPP, where she received the CCCP Thesis Award. Her thesis investigates the role of the archive in the formation of alternative political and spatial imaginaries in Palestine.